me arts ed

The Arts Connect keynote speaker available for all!

Andrea Peterson, 2008 National Teacher of the Year

At The Arts Connect conference the National Teacher of the Year Andrea Peterson, music educator, gave the keynote speech. She was awesome and I am finally able to offer you this speech to listen to and/or to download. It is posted on iTunes under Maine Department of Education, Visual and Performing Arts Education. Also available is the word document of her speech. Please click here to Andrea’s speech at the iTunes location.

Last Supper Paintings Point to Ungodly Portions

Many of you know that I get material for the meartsed blog from a variety of sources but this one is probably the most unusual. This information is taken from a March 24th health newsletter I receive. An article entitled Last Supper Paintings Point to Ungodly Portions written by Bill Hendrick on March 24th discussed some unusual research. The findings included information on the increase of food portions during the last millennium. And what did they use to document this? If you guessed paintings, you are correct.

The researchers took 52 paintings, including the Last Supper, and analyzed the sizes of the food items in each painting. The study done by Brian Wansink, PhD,  and his borther and co-author, Craig Wansink, professor of religious studies at Virginia Wesleyan College used computers to make these determinations.

In fact, they found that the size of the entrees increased by 66%. You can read the entire article and learn more by clicking here.