The side you never hear
I know throughout our experience in our class we’ve been talking about methods for analyzing reading and different strategies to use for our content. But how do we choose what to read and whose points of view should we listen to? Strangely enough the thing that got me thinking was this bit by British comedian and transvestite Eddie Izzard. For those of you who don’t know his work Izzard is widely popular around the world and just recently received critical acclaim for his F/X series the Riches. His set called Dressed To Kill won for best comedy program and best writing at the 1998 Emmy’s. He’s a great comedian if you love history.
My primary focus is on the bit about Saving Private Ryan. The more I thought about that bit the more I realized how little I heard about the British when I was being taught about World War I. Truth be told I think it’s a great injustice. So can we as literate teachers take a stand and ask our students to consider these ideas or do we continue to teach what we’ve been told to teach? It’s a difficult question. Maybe we as teachers can’t all be inspirational and thought provoking but I do hope that we can. I leave you with some Ryan Gosling being a teacher I hope we can all be, minus the crack addiction.
The clip from Half Nelson is a great example on how I’d like to teach history one day. Less textbook, and more focus on the broad ideas, like turning points, which Gosling brings up with his students. however, we have to get the students excited about it. textbooks at least provide some sort of backbone or guide as to what to teach. If we choose to freelance, like Gosling seems to be doing, we have to make sure the students get the most from it. Many of the reading strategies we’ve picked up over this course will certainly help me do just that. Things like ReQuests, KWLs, and Book in a Day can be a teacher’s best friends for particular lessons.
mwaseleski09 - March 2, 2008 at 6:41 pm
What an intriguing question: how do we inspire students to learn what we are not told to include? It’s hard to teach kids everything there is to know about history especially when you only get one side of the war. If you don’t mind me quoting a musical, there is a song from the Broadway show called Wicked where a character sings, “A man’s called a traitor or liberator. A rich man’s a thief or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It’s all in which label is able to persist.” Teaching students about everything is hard and sometimes inadvisable. At times like this, I think about the quote I have on my website by William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” We can’t teach students everything by ourselves. All we can do teach them everything we can while we have them in our class and work to light their creative fire in hopes that they continue their search for more answers. But after this class, I think that process got a heck of a lot easier.
pmcleod09 - March 2, 2008 at 8:03 pm