My mom used to tell me that when she was growing up, she used to watch re-runs of "Leave It To Beaver." Even as an eight-year-old kid, my mom would always get frustrated at how dumb Beaver and Wally were. Even as an eighth grader in the later part of the series, Beaver still talked like a five year old. Every lesson that June and Ward tried to hammer into his head went in one ear and out the other, and he'd get himself into similar trouble a few episodes later (usually as a result of giving into peer pressure from his friends.) Then, when my mom was a teenager, she used to watch "The Brady Bunch." Like "Leave It To Beaver," she enjoyed the show, but found it extremely cheesy and unbelievable. The Brady children always won every award, made every team, and even became famous. (Did I mention that Marsha took Davy Jones to prom?)
The point of that tangent is this: if cheesy educational films like "Shy Guy" were used in classrooms as a legitimate attempt to teach teenagers manners, were they ever taken seriously? Did teenagers sit around avidly taking notes on this film? Were there tests on it? Could teachers have done a better job getting the point across?
In the afternoon, we worked in our blog groups to develop a lesson plan about the recent oil spill. First of all, let me state that it was nice to actually meet everybody in my blog group, since many of them are in Section B and we've had little to no contact these last couple of weeks. Our group was so diverse that we had a hard time figuring out what our common subject area was. We settled on foreign languages, including the not-so-foreign language of English. The next part was breaking up into smaller groups to design projects for foreign languages and English (the translating part of the project wouldn't apply to English classes, so we had to think of an alternative, meaningful assignment for a potential English class.) Since the group with English majors only contained two people, I decided to stick with my major and turn the duo into a trio. Danielle, Mallory, and I thought of a nice lesson that involved teaching students how to use one of the google search engines that we learned to use in the AM session of class. Through the search engine, students would find recent articles about the oil spill and read and compare the tone, perspective, and voice in the articles. The hardest part of this assignment for us was properly articulating our thoughts. One of us would come up with a good idea, and Mallory had her hands on the keyboard ready to type it into our wikispaces page, but we would struggle to find the clearest and most concise wording of that idea. Yep, we're English majors.
In closing, I feel that if Shy Guy wants to make friends, he should revolutionize his black-and-white world by wearing bright colors.
But that's just me.
Hilarious picture at the end of that piece. I can't believe you're knocking Wally and Beaver. I grew up with them and they were complete knuckleheads, but it never occurred to me that they were dumb. They were lovable relics from some preceding era when kids were respectful and right and wrong were clearly identified. And truth be told, I was in love with Marcia. Lastly, it was great to have our wiki group together. I really like working together.
ReplyDeleteThank you for knocking Wally and Beaver, Stephanie. Thank you for also colorizing shy guy. I think the shy guys in the class should dress like this at least one day during the program and see what happens. As always, I loved your blog.
ReplyDeleteShy English majors unite!
Danielle
Reading your post and the comments, I'm reminded of how often we work to make things "safe" for students. (Fairy tales and folk tales were originally designed to scare kids into behaving; now they're Disneyfied!) That balance between safety and stretched boundaries is a tough one!
ReplyDeleteStephanie, your posting raised a really good question about the effectiveness of Mental hygiene films, and while I don't know that literature (or if there IS one) some poking around led me to a piece by Tina Besley that connected a few dots between this genre of film and progressive education (and John Dewey, of course) in some new ways. She raises the question of indoctrination, and that in turn put me in mind of my mentor who used the idea of essentialism to frame the differences between various schools of Educational thought in American history. With essentialism, he referred to a body of knowledge that students needed to learn. He would speak of two "general" pedagogical styles (the direct and the indirect approaches which distinguished between telling the students what you wanted them to know, and having a clear idea of what you wanted them to know, but trying to allow for more of a discovery approach). In addition to direct and indirect essentialism, there was also a more conservative approach that eschewed essentialism (what you learned wasn't as important as the building of mental muscles through learning difficult subjects like Latin) and a more liberal one, which we might call unadulterated Dewey, where students were guided in their engagement with the world of ideas, and the teacher was content (and free of whatever constraints such that she was able) to follow the student’s discoveries wherever they took her. This is a place where few of us (even if we desired it) are able to go as teachers. Paradoxically (here I borrow from Deborah Meier) we get the closest at the beginning of education (think kindergarten) and at the end (think doctoral work).
ReplyDeleteAs for the cheesiness of Shy Guy...I was watching Notorious the other night (the 1946 movie starring Cary Grant) and was thinking about how to me it can be cheesy in some parts and then I wondered if people in 1946 found it cheesy? I would guess not--it's so funny how fast the medium has evolved, along with the audience. I think Shy Guy might have been taken seriously--it was a different time (reminds me of Leave It to Beaver), and at this time you couldn't even show kissing in movies.
ReplyDeleteI was very proud of our lesson plan!