“The most important thing is getting the kids to own the art for themselves and tell what they think about it—for them to give their ideas and put their mark on the paper.”

“Identification is important. If a student can look at someone from another culture and see what they are making and think, ‘I did that’ or ‘I’m in the middle of that,’ it can be powerful.”

"Rarely do students have the chance to really look at something and take in all of it – and I felt as though they were able to truly accomplish that task in this case. When I talked to the students later, they said that they had a blast, and that they had never done so much analysis before. In fact, even after the field trip lesson was over, and students had some time to walk around the museum, they found several other pieces from which they could make connections to Hemingway and the novel. That was really a neat thing!"

That challenge, posed recently by a teacher from the Nazareth Academy, seems to present an obvious question: What can high school chemistry students learn from a trip to the art museum? The answer comes from Dr. Tami Lasseter Clare, a scientist working in the Conservation Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and teaching high school chemistry on the side!