Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

We finished Bridge to Terabithia this week. Most classes are showing definite progress in their ability to use concrete events in a movie to illustrate claims about a character’s traits; that they are not just saying “she’s lovely” and that they know because “it’s a feeling” is actually a major improvement. Next week, we will be having organized debates about whether, for example, Leslie is brave or foolish, which I hope will have the effect of emphasizing how people can disagree about a character’s personality. (I’m planning to giving my best class some specifically targeted feminist theory to broaden their interpretations, borrowing a bit from a paper on The Secret Garden that I heard at the pop culture conference– and to share my own ideas about Leslie’s family being Bohemian bourgeoisie who get more than they bargained for with their actually iconoclastic daughter.)

Of course, I won’t really see how well each individual student has developed their abilities to consider the significance and meaning of a character until the following week when I receive their papers (though I may get some idea this upcoming week, since I plan to give them time in class to work on their outlines).

I have two classes, however, that have shown an absolute inability to even repeat back the most basic summary of what has occurred in a scene. Perhaps they will surprise me and show that they have understood but simply have been hesitant to speak. If not, I’m going to have to rethink my strategy for teaching them during the second half of the semester. I may show one movie twice– once requiring them to write a summary of the whole and then a second time requiring them to pay attention to the details.

On the writing front, it would appear that students either understood third-person limited perspective entirely or not at all. The main issue is that some absolutely refuse to keep themselves out of it: everything has to be about “my friend” or “my classmate” and “I think”. I also had students write a description of a person in-class; going through these essays has revealed that some are having a difficult time differentiating between narrative and descriptive writing, while others still fail to consider organizing principles. Their next assignment will be another description of a person, but this time it will require a small amount of research, so it should give them another opportunity to improve in both these regards. I’ve also noticed that very basic issues with grammar and style tend to be forgotten two weeks after we practice them in class. This is not surprising but is frustrating, and I’m hoping that the multiple-choice grammar section on the midterm will wake them up to these issues.

The students in my movie classes presented their first homework assignment of the semester this week, and as they acted out their brief sequels to the Shawshank Redemption, I realized that it reminded me of nothing so much as Elizabethan theatre– without Shakespeare, Marlowe, or bear-baiting, though one group did include an attack by a (pink teddy) bear. Student-actors used a mishmash of anachronistic props and costumes (the latter being more suggestive than complete), and they included popular songs in their scenes for no other reason than to make them more appealing to the audience. They used prologues (required by their limited resources for scenery and the rest) and the occasional dramatic monologue presented with exaggerated gestures and bluster.

However, the clearest resemblance had to do with the performance space. The movie rooms feature large desks with AV equipment on a raised platform for the teacher– a space which became a sort of Lord’s Room, as I sat there while the students performed in front of me facing their peers. Of course, in this analogy, the students were all groundlings.

After their performances, I introduced them to a variety of techniques for thinking about characters; the biggest challenge is getting them to see that traits are not something factual but, rather, something that must be proven.

My writing classes were mostly review this week: description and perspective brought together in a warm-up that had them writing from the point-of-view of an object in their dorm rooms. Since I knew they’d find that a bit strange, I gave them an example of one written by my alarm clock. Sadly, only one student laughed at it. Their assignment for the week is to write a description of an object; as part of in-class prewriting, I had them generate different types of adjectives for their chosen item and write them in standard order. This caused a few issues, as a few students insisted on starting their essays immediately without thought, and I also had to take a book for another class away from one of them.

I let my movie classes watch the conclusion of our current film straight through without interruption this week, as their assignment for next week involves speculating on what follows. Needless to say, the students were quite pleased with being able to avoid actually talking in class. We’ll see if it was worth it next week when they’ll be acting out mini-sequels, despite complaints from a few students that they would prefer a written assignment.

As for my writing classes, I’ve had the opportunity to peruse their descriptive essays and have decided that the outdoor session had mixed results: a few students did do a decent of job of including specific details, but many continued straying to beautiful, nice, and other vague terms. The belief that such words are deep and meaningful, however, is deeply ingrained, so it was unreasonable to expect to break it in a single class. I’ll have an opportunity to continue work on that when we reach the chapter on describing objects. Other weaknesses in the writing included poor organization of details and a tendency to jump write into describing a place without introducing it.

For this week’s lesson, however, we worked on understanding and using different perspectives. After having them do a free-write while listening to Dead Can Dance (and a brief review of SVO sentence structure), I introduced them to first, second, and third person as well as objective versus subjective and limited versus omniscient. Finally, I gave them an in-class assignment: each student had to read another’s personal narrative (which I had handed back at the beginning of class) and then re-tell it from a third-person objective omniscient point-of-view. The stories I’ve looked at so far indicate that this was quite a struggle. Many students insisted on writing “my friend” and “I think”, while many of those who avoided the use of first-person pronouns still moralized and drew lessons at the end about what people should or should not do. This latter case is quite similar to the trouble I had last semester with students in movie classes insisting on filling what were supposed to be analytical papers with moral condemnations of characters. I still don’t have a good solution for it, however.

My weekend officially started at 10 this morning, so I figured it would be worth taking a moment to review how the week went. I have two sophomore writing classes, both of which appear to be populated by absolute gems, including a few students who are actually willing to volunteer to read things aloud. They completed all the exercises I gave them at a pace that pleasantly surprised me. I used six-word memoirs as a warm-up/introduction activity and a few students came up with snappy examples. Two things did surprise them: first that even copying a single sentence without credit is plagiarism and second that I would be having them turn in eight first drafts for which they would receive full-credit simply by turning them in on time and not plagiarizing (the second half of the class will require them to turn in second drafts and one final third draft, all of which will be graded based on quality). However, though some students even double and triple checked with me on the second point, they didn’t seem to have trouble understanding these things once I explained them. Of course, I won’t be completely certain of their comprehension until I read through their brief personal narratives which are due next week.

Nor will I know if the comparison I used to explain the importance of studying throughout the semester as effective until the end of the term. After explaining that we were learning skills rather than facts that can simply be memorized, I gave them an example of two basketball players, one who practiced throughout the season but relaxed the week before the championship game and one who practiced intensely the week before the same game.

I used this not only in my writing classes but also in my seven movie classes. Five of these are groups I taught last semester; two are the separate halves of a class that I taught half of last term, but the halves been remixed so that neither contains only students I’ve taught. (The one that skews more towards students I didn’t have is probably my most challenging group; I would like to take credit for that, but given that each class only meets two hours a week, that might be a bit too much.) What seems likely to be the biggest issue in most of these classes this term is the method of viewing the films. I already met some resistance to this on Monday; I’d hoped that spending more time explaining the reasoning behind this decision would ease that with later classes, but I think I was just being naive. On the other hand, I haven’t given any homework to my film classes as yet and am uncertain as to how they will feel about the creative response presentations and papers I’m planning. (We did analysis last semester, so now we’re moving on to synthesis for those of you who are into Bloom’s Taxonomy).