Harvard Elementary School in Englewood was a teacher’s worst nightmare. Kids ran in and out of classrooms in the middle of class, started fights, and swore at faculty. Principals cycled through without making any impact. In 2007, less than a third of Harvard students passed the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), putting the school in the bottom ranks of Illinois public schools.

Then everything changed. One Friday afternoon in March of 2007, children came home from Harvard bearing notes for their parents. The news was drastic: the school was going to be handed over to a nonprofit organization, the Academy for Urban School Leadership, to be turned around. All the adults at the school—everyone from teachers to janitors—would be replaced, and when the kids returned the following fall it would be to a newly renovated building with an entirely new staff. Read the rest of this entry »

The first thing to notice when walking through the halls of the warehouse that lodges the ReBuilding Exchange is the smell. It’s an unexpected scent to find in the middle of a busy city, in a building sandwiched between two storage centers. It’s the smell of sawdust. The odor is just a clue about what’s behind the doors of the Exchange. Rows of sinks line one wall, doors of all shapes and sizes lean stacked against another, and various cabinets serve as a bulky divider along the center of the room. And, of course, there is a massive amount of wood. Read the rest of this entry »

There will be great changes on the stage of Mandel Hall Friday night. Songs will move across different moods, rhythms, time signatures, and keys, traversing centuries-wide gaps between musical traditions. The Bad Plus is coming to play. The jazz trio of pianist Ethan Iverson, drummer Dave King, and upright bass player Reid Anderson, has made a name for itself as one of the most exciting groups in jazz today. The music is innovative, melodic, accessible, and difficult to classify, which is exactly how the group likes it. Read the rest of this entry »

Like the Iliad or the tale of King Arthur, “The Tale of the Heike” is a vaguely mythologized historical legend that has made a momentous impact on culture and civilization. It is the story of struggle between two clans, the Tairo and Minamoto, for control over Japan. The story is full of battles, temple burning, execution, and romance. It was passed down over the centuries through the oral recitations of blind Buddhist monks, who accompanied their recitals with the music of the biwa, a five-stringed instrument similar to the lute. While some aspects of the performance have changed over the eight centuries that have elapsed since its origin, many of the essential elements—the chant-like vocals and the ancient instrument—linger. The lack of visual performance onstage seems to reflect the original narrators’ blindness: the power of the story is aural. Read the rest of this entry »

In an age of high-tech special effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the state-of-the-art has begun to overshadow the art of moviemaking itself. Although it may seem that most animators have succumbed to the flash and convenience of CGI, Yuri Norstein will not be moved. Making an appearance last week at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center during a rare visit to the United States, the acclaimed Russian animator explained that his opposition to computer graphics extends beyond mere Luddism: “In movies, the complicated thing is to overcome the materiality of the material…I wish to create a different aesthetic of cinema beyond technical effects.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not often one sees college students, professors, elected officials, a medical oncologist, and a detective fiction writer all in the same room, let alone onstage together—but that’s what the audience at the annual Revels play was treated to last Friday and Saturday evenings at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club. “Revels 2010: A Touch of Nature” is part of a dramatic tradition that dates back to 1904, when UofC faculty and staff enacted a loose interpretation of a George Bernard Shaw play entitled “Mrs. Warren’s Professor.” Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt (“Scav Hunt”) is frequently touted as the world’s largest scavenger hunt. The hunt is a four-day long event, famously ridiculous and fun, with teams made up of university affiliates—mainly undergraduates, but with some representation from graduate students and alumni. Last year’s list of 277 items included an El train quartet, an invented “Queens” cocktail, and a blog entry in clay, wood, paper, and electronic forms. And these were a few of the tamer items.

Scav Hunt inspires such devotion and obsession among its participants that it makes sense that it would motivate offshoots. And it has birthed at least one: the brainchild of Sebastian Ellefson (BA’04), Courtney Prokopas (BA’06), and Steven Lucy (BA’06), Finders Keepers is a company that brands itself as “the premier organization for scavenger hunts, road trips team building, and event planning.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Mayer is nervous. Leaning on a metal desk in the one-room office of Fire Escape Films in the basement of the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall, surrounded by cameras, cables, and computers, the young film director and fourth-year college student holds the brim of a tropical print ball cap and stares at the floor, thinking very hard. Mayer and his cast and crew of fifteen have spent eighteen months and thirteen grand turning his screenplay “A Girl Named Clyde” into a feature-length film. The movie is supposed to premiere in about two hours, upstairs, in the theater of the UofC’s Doc Films. Shot in high-definition, the film’s digital file is so big that the Doc Films system may not be able to handle it, and there’s no time to write a DVD. The search is on for a small cord that might be able to connect the film to the Doc system, but Mayer wants a backup plan. In a slight Georgia accent he sighs, “We gotta find ourselves a projector…” Read the rest of this entry »