Fall/Winter 2010 - Pingry School

Her group also visited the Ashmolean
Museum of Art and Archaeology,
Oxford University Press, and Pitt
Rivers Museum. In addition, the
schedule included lectures about
diversity, inclusion, and global perspectives,
all of which are addressed
in Pingry’s Strategic Plan and are
crucial to the library’s collections.
Perhaps most important for the
future of Pingry’s library, Ms. Hymas
learned more about digitization and
the technology that is available for
preserving documents in electronic
formats. The school’s use of technology
will probably be largely based on
teachers’ needs. “I have a heightened
awareness of the importance of the
library in the life of the school. All
of these ideas affirmed in my mind
how a good school library serves its
community. It’s very important for
me to keep my finger on the pulse of
Pingry’s curriculum and the world
scene,” she says.
During a recent trip to Italy with a
group of Pingry Latin students, Latin
teacher Susan Forrester P ’96, ’99
noted the students’ excitement at being
able to read Latin inscriptions on
Roman tombstones. That experience
prompted her desire to travel to Roman
Britain to research Latin inscriptions
(on tombstones, altars, and public
buildings and on objects such as writing
tablets), which are an important
source of historical information.
In London she was especially pleased
to spend time at the British Museum
where the Roman section displays
writing tablets from the Roman fort
at Vindolanda (on Hadrian’s Wall).
Other stops included the Roman
baths at Bath, England, the ruins of
the Roman legionary fort at Caerleon
in Wales, and several other forts
along Hadrian’s Wall.
Using her photographs and other
information gleaned from the trip,
Mrs. Forrester is planning to create
a unit for Latin 3 that examines
inscriptional evidence. “I’m excited
Susan Forrester P ’96, ’99 visiting the Fort at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall.
to show my students important
source material. It’s one thing to see
a picture in a book, but another to
see the real thing. Our students are
fascinated by looking at and reading
original sources,” she says.
Original sources were also important
to French teacher Gail
Castaldo P ’00, who spent her fellowship
in France studying the lives
of French Impressionists. “Students
in French 2 research and make
presentations about Impressionist
painters, but my knowledge of the
Impressionists has come mostly from
reading, museum tours, and lectures.
I wanted to study them more indepth,
and this was a wonderful
opportunity to visit the exact places
where they painted,” she says.
Her first stop was Aix-en-Provence,
the site of Paul Cézanne’s home and
studio and the nearby mountain
range that inspired his most famous
series of paintings (Mont Sainte-
Victoire). From there, she immersed
herself in Arles, where Vincent van
Gogh painted many of his works. In
particular, Mrs. Castaldo visited the
sanitarium, whose surrounding landscape
inspired van Gogh’s paintings
of olive trees, lavender fields, sunflowers,
and wheat.
In Paris, she traveled to the site of
Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon
on the Island of La Grande Jatte and
to the Auguste Rodin Museum, and
Mrs. Castaldo concluded her tour in
Giverny, the famous source of Claude
Monet’s water lilies.
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fall/winter 2010