ABSTRACT
The mission of the Boston Arts Academy is to be a laboratory and a beacon of academic and artistic innovation for any student interested in coming to our school. When we first opened, we thought that this meant teaching through the arts. The original vision, as I understand it, was to incorporate the arts into all of the academic subjects and to try to make every class period an interdisciplinary learning experience. This was, as you may imagine, a very challenging task. For science classes, this meant that sometimes they would study chemistry and tie it back?to learning about pottery glazes. For humanities classes, it meant learning about different cultures through their music and dance as well as researching about them. But for math class, this always felt like a bit of a tug- of- war. There are many, many times where math connects to the arts. There are also times when we really think of math as an art unto itself. But the truth is that most of the places where there is true overlap between math and arts are places where either the math is very simple or very complex. For years, we have asked our Geometry students to imagine an event that will take place on stage in our theater and then use equations of circles to map out the lighting plan for this event. This stage is a place where there is rich interdisciplinary overlap between math and theater. Our hanging spotlights are a real-world version of conic sections and the metal grid that hangs on the ceiling above the theater is a real-world example of Cartesian axes. The students really enjoyed developing their own use for the space.
