Finals Week is Here!

Finals week is here! 

A whole semester already went by and here I am at the beginning of my last week at SBCC. I didn't have any finals scheduled for today, but I have a lot of work due tomorrow. I also don't have any finals on Wednesday, but I have two on Thursday. Good thing that my Physical Geography LAB and my Enterprise Launch class had final exams last week, so I only have three classes to worry about for my finals week.

As I said, I didn't take any exam today, but I had much work due for my Art History class. In fact, tomorrow, for our finals we are going to meet in class and take a Slide Test, which is a sort of quiz where the professor shows an image on the screen portraying one of pieces of art that we have studied, and then asks four questions about each piece; specifically, things like the name of the work, the artist, the location, the time period, the culture, the style, and so on… After that, each of us had to present their creative response project. What is the creative response project? Well, is is the additional project that all Honors students are expected to realize as an addition to the normal course load. 

We were expected to select one piece of art that we particularly liked, and then use our creativeness to reproduce something about it in an artistic way. For my creative response project, I chose the Colosseum of Rome because of the emotional connection that I have with this monument. First of all, the Colosseum represents Italy, which is my home country. Secondly, I myself went to visit the Colosseum and I was impressed first of all by its size and complexity, and second by the meaning behind its use. 

Imagine assisting to this kind of "entertainment"

In fact, while the Colosseum was built almost 2,000 years ago, it is as high as a 16-story building and as big as a football stadium. It also had a complex structure, including underground allies, animal cages, and cells both for animals and for people, as well as lifting systems to move the beasts and the fighters from the undergrounds to the arena. Also, the spectacles involved costly and complicated projects, including importing animals from Africa, covering the whole theater with huge curtains to protect the audience from the sunlight, and even flooding the whole arena and bringing ships into it (how??) to maneuver them to reproduce ship battles— impressive. 

Naval fight in the Colosseum arena

My project consists of a creative 3-dimensional representation of the Colosseum, featuring a football stadium in the middle of the arena. This is because the Colosseum and modern football stadiums have similar purposes— entertaining the people. And while there are no wild animals on football fields, and football players don't usually end up dying, the underlying reason why we watch these shows is the same one. We appreciate watching human being using skills and violence. Just like a gladiator used his skills to survive, modern football players use their skills to run their plays. And just like gladiators used violence to kill the animals (or each others) so do football players use violence to run their plays—and the greatest hits/tackles make for the greatest entertainment. I also colored the exterior of the colosseum with red because red is my favorite color and also because it is symbolic of the blood shed by all the living creatures (gladiators and animals) that lost their life in the Colosseum’s arena. In fact, according to softschool.com, it is estimated that over 400,000 people and about 1,000,000 animals died in this amphitheater during the four centuries of its activity.

What the Colosseum looks like... 2000 years later!

Working on this project was pretty fun although it did take me the whole afternoon. But this won't be all! After taking the Slides Test, presenting our project, and turning in a 3-page paper that we have to write about our project, we will still have to take the final exam! For this class, our exams are online, so the professor decided we are going to do do all of this other stuff during our final exam meeting time, and then we still had to take the exam. I am sure I will be fine, though. I feel prepared!

To everybody, GOOD LUCK WITH FINALS!

A presto,

- Fede