Magenta is back to school!

It’s September and the Magenta Band (high school group) of Brightworks started the year off with a bang!The first arc is a short five-week adventure and we are exploring Heart and the symbol - ♡ -we use to represent it. As always, we are approaching this topic from many different viewpoints.The three Magenta collaborators - Jules, Jay and Molly - chose three questions as the lenses through which we will explore ♡ Heart.Jules chose the question: What makes your heart tick? For literacy, everyone is going to read Letters to a Young Poet, which is a set of heartfelt letters from Rainer Maria Rilke to a young student asking questions about art and love and finding one’s passion. This is a launching point for each Magenta student to explore their own Passion Project - students will seek out people who have dedicated their lives to their passions in a way that serves the greater good and will interview these role models in short podcast format.Jay chose the question: What is at the heart of well-being and happiness. Using the Keys to Well-being identified by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, we will be exploring what keeps our metaphorical hearts full and joyful. Jay will lead us on a number of expeditions of the heart, both outdoors and indoors - expect fun, team building, bonding, and exercise!Molly chose the question: How can we know our own hearts? Through these workshops we will connect our STEM learning to the keys to well-being in our Greater Good Center workshops. We will explore the heart as a physical organ in our body, how it works, how we came to know what we know about it and what we still don’t know. We will examine our own hearts as closely as we can, both physically and emotionally. We will draw connections between the heart as the center of our circulatory system, and its connection to the endocrine system and our hormones, and the heart as the metaphorical source of our love and emotions. We will dive into statistics and graphing as our mathematical connection to ♡ Heart as well.This first week we introduced these explorations and started to gel as a group. Students created their group agreements for how they want to work together this year. We started reading Letters to a Young Poet, and discussing our passions. We created first and second iterations of our own stethoscopes in order to use our sense that is the easiest way to explore the hearts hidden in our chests. We also started to explore happiness and humor as we dive into the keys to well-being from the Greater Good Center. It’s been a lot for just the first four days and more fun is still to come!Stay tuned to this blog and to our Instagram account to keep up with our fun adventures in ♡ Heart these next few weeks!