I love learning from Dr. Dowdy because she always keeps me off kilter. Even though I have had two classes from her and seen her workshops in a variety of other settings, I always come away with a new insight or a reminder of something I've put on a back shelf for too long. That's how it was this morning. So much can be done with film in the classroom. A couple of thoughts I had in particular during her presentation were:
1. My Honors 10 students struggle with The Odyssey. I like the idea of talking about it as if the text were already a film. So little of the epic is written in "close-up" mode; much more of it is in "long, establishing shots." I wonder if making that distinction - and then maybe doing some scripting or process drama to get at what might have been experienced in the "missing close ups"- would help it come alive.
2. I need to think of using CLIPS more and full movies less. It'll be another thing to make my students crazy, but I'm not saying that I would never use a full movie, but that before I do, I want to do more and more with reading the clips. Two benefits: better critical viewers and an opportunity to introduce them to a greater variety of films.
After that, the time flew by. I enjoyed the circle activities. Definitely ones to add to my list of community building activities. The Singing Syllables activity will be a nice ways to review pronunciation. I'm saddened at how many of my high school students have poor decoding skills for multisyllabic words. This could be a fun way to review - using the excuse that we need to stretch our legs.
I'm avoiding the wiki issue because denial always works for me when I have a big project and I can't decide on a topic. (Making a decision is my goal for tonight.)
The classroom of the future was interesting. A friend of mine has a classroom full of technology similar to that set-up without the research component. She's working her way through it, but there is so much to learn and to integrate. Today it's feeling rather overwhelming.
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Teri, I think you'll love teaching with movie clips. When I teach Hamlet (which is comparable to the Odessey difficulty-wise), we read a scene and then we watch how 3-4 different directors interpret the same scene. Have you ever thought of showing clips from modern epics to compare to scenes of The Odessey...Lord of the Rings, Troy, Beowulf, etc. You could discuss tone, symbolism, etc. My experience has been that an epic is an epic no matter the time period...blood, guts, and lots of travel.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the idea, Elizabeth. Clearly I have some "out of my genre" film watching to do! Your idea fits really well with what I do in the course with archetypes and making the connections between different representations of epics will undoubtedly help my students also realize the continued "relevance" of The Odyssey!
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of using the "close ups" and "long shots" while reading a novel! I'm going to steal this idea. What a great way for students to think about what an author chooses to focus on and when they choose to be detailed or broad. Thanks!
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