I have an idea! With no content relevance and no permission slip home or even a consideration of what is appropriate for a classroom, I'll show a bootleg of this R rated movie and then the uncut version of this one to my class. Any "teacher" who doesn't have red lights and sirens going off in his head when this idea slides in there should not be in the classroom. This guy should have been fired before he resigned.
4 comments:
Who the hell ARE these people???? I won't even show an R rated movie that IS content related and very valuable, like Schindler's List or Mona Lisa Smile or whatever. First of all, I have an ambivalence toward eating up my classtime showing movies that these kids could see on their own and probably have seen on their own. Second, I don't want the F-bomb tossed near my presence while on school property. The special ed teachers once used my classroom on my prep hour to "teach" a US history class-- and I walked in one day to find Love and Basketball blaring onthe tv-- I heard some of the language and practically flew out the door faster than my Victorian gasp could escape my lips.
I once worked with a teacher who was the administration darling who showed Disney movies in her 8th grade math classes all the time. And it wasn't like she was trying to make it remotely relevant to her curriculum, like say, "Find all the examples of Euclidean geometry in Fantasia," or "Explain why Peter Pan could not actually achieve escape velocity with Wendy hanging on to him," or something. I consider this type of behavior, while not nearly as galling and idiotic as the example you cite, to be just as wrong.
I have worked with people who used movies quite a bit and some who never did. The key, IF you're going to do it it must be purposeful and well assessed.
I have not used any movies since my transition to High School but I did use clips and short films in 8th grade. The best compliment I ever recieved was when a student saw the TV in the room, rolled her eyes and asked "do we get to watch this one or do we have to think again?" Yessssss.
In high school, my Senior AP History teacher showed us movies of various levels of relevency 75% of the time. I know this because we tracked it in a classmate's notebook. My favorite was the JFK "second shot" conspiracy documentary. I learned very little that year about history.
The *other* AP history teacher was the guy everybody wanted, his homework dittos were our tests. He actually had essay questions.
And, as exhibit A that we live in Bizarro World: the next year only my former teacher was allowed to teach AP History, because at some point he got certified, and the other guy didn't.
This may be the root of my contention that teachers should be paid at a very high level (50+K to start, 100K at a few years) in exchange for scrapping tenure and giving regular competency testing.
i'm also pretty sure the author of this blog and I had a heated discussion about this once :) But, you know, blame it on Mr. E., my AP History prof.
bdh
I was gonna rage but I lost my motivation at 100K...
Post a Comment