Week Eight: Popular Music

I believe the most valuable way to include music into a unit of study is to include songs that represent alternative or minority voices. If anything, finding authentic voices that address the issues being studied in a personal way could really add to the curriculum. While I appreciated White's suggestion of using song parodies to help students memorize important facts (I once heard of a teacher rewriting "The Thong Song" to help his students learn the presidents or something) I think using music as text that actually adds something new to the curriculum is a more valuable application.

Here are a couple of ideas I've been thinking about:

As an English teacher, I often think about ways to pair poetry, especially less contemporary poetry, with more modern texts. I had a professor in college that paired Walt Whitman's poetry with Sufjan Stevens, and we discussed both the style and the view of America that Whitman portrays in "Leaves of Grass" and in Stevens' "The 50 States." It was one of the most interesting lessons on poetry I can remember (and not just because I LOVE Sufjan Stevens) because it reminded me that there are artists that continue to write about America in the same way that long-dead poets did.

Another idea I've considered is looking at the perceptions of war and the role of the soldier. If teaching a unit on The Things They Carried, for example, which deals with soldiers in Vietnam, I might pair it with poetry (like "Dulce es Decorum Est") that portrays what being a soldier is actually like. "Soldier Boy," a song by my favorite artist Mason Jennings (who writes many songs that include social commentary) would fit in quite nicely, as it is another text written from the perspective of a soldier that satirizes a soldier's attitude. These texts would feed into a discussion of the demands of war, and whether it's okay for a country to ask its citizens to take on the role of soldier.

Week Seven: Fake News

For me it was just exciting to see fake news catching on like that. We don't… you know, it's interesting. I think we don't make things up. We just distill it to, hopefully, its most humorous nugget. And in that sense it seems faked and skewed just because we don't have to be subjective or pretend to be objective. We can just put it out there.
--Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart from The Daily Show has been scrutinized quite a bit over the last few years, and not necessarily because of his content. It seems like every day the six o'clock news reports the results of another survey that claims most young adults get their news primarily from satirical shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Often, Stewart gets "blamed" for this, told his news program is skewing the opinion of millions of impressionable young adults.



His response, in a nutshell? It's fake! As you can see in the quote above, Stewart does not believe his satirical news show is obligated to follow the same journalistic standards as 60 Minutes or the Nightly News. Because The Daily Show airs on Comedy Central, Stewart argues, viewers should expect entertainment, not objective journalism. Fake news anchors do not have to swear to whatever version of the Hippocratic oath journalists take when they vow to be objective reporters of current events. "We don't consider ourselves equal opportunity anythings," says Stewart, "because that's not - you know, that's the beauty of fake journalism. We don't have to - we travel in fake ethics."



It seems to me that the problem is not with the show itself and its obvious lack of objectivity. The problem is that, allegedly, people are watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report instead of getting their news from a source that is expected to report objectively (whether they actually do or not). I'm still working through this argument. Even if it is true that there are young adults who watch fake news and nothing else, are they really laughing as hard as those who've seen the material being satirized? If I've never seen The View and I watch an SNL skit that parodies the program, will it be funny to me? And even if it isn't, will I never be able to take The View seriously after seeing Tracy Morgan dressed up as Sherri? My thought is that the responsibility is in the hands of the viewer, not the writers of satire, but it's true that SNL satire has forever changed my impression of Sean Connery.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK1jpywBQLM



It is my feeling that lessons on satire are very important in the classroom for two reasons. First, teaching students to read satire is very important. Students should know what they're getting as viewers of a satirical news show, and what they're missing. One of the articles from this week explained that those who consider satirical news shows to be their primary source of current events knowledge are left with fewer facts and deeper impressions about public figures or events. Kari's blog this week compared articles from The Onion to headlines in the Star Tribune, which might be a good activity to help students compare the information and impressions transmitted by two different sources of news.



Another important way satire could be used in the classroom is to have students write their own parodies of news stories or other works. To understand and write effective satire, one must have a thorough understanding of the original source material. Asking a student to analyze or write a satirical version of A Christmas Carol, for example, both requires a high level understanding of the novel and calls on other critical thinking skills.

Week Six: Toys

Like many girls, my favorite toys growing up were dolls. I asked for new ones every Christmas, and we had huge boxes full of dolls and their "stuff" in the basement. I still remember many of them as if they were dear friends: Joyce, my Cabbage Patch Kid; Sean, my Dreamland Baby; Megan, my "Teeny Tiny Preemie." I also had a whole array of Barbie dolls, including a really cool one my mom bought me when she was pregnant with my brother which had a tiny baby you could hide in her retractable belly. "House" was absolutely my favorite game as a kid, and my friend Shelly and I played it daily. Dolls gave us the freedom to play endless iterations of the same game. While playing "House" Shelly and I took care of kids and pets, sent them to school, and survived tornadoes.

According to this week's reading from Tooning In, as well as other articles I have read, play is an important learning process for children. Often play is in imitation of adult activities, which allows them to have imaginative rehearsals for their later life. There is an evolutionary factor at play here: children like me who played parenting games as kids are historically more likely to raise healthy children who are also good parents, continuing their line of decendants. Playing kickball on the playground helps kids learn the important skill of negotiating rules, a skill they will use daily later in life. Play "enables children to make sense of their world, develops social and cultural understandings, provides opportunities to meet and solve problems, fosters flexible and divergent thinking, allows children to express their thoughts and feelings, develops language and literacy, and develops concepts in all academic areas" (White 145).

While the more "modern" toys definitely have the potential to increase cognitive development (video games, as discussed earlier, help develop spatial reasoning among other things), I would argue that it is the more low-tech, open-ended toys that have the greatest potential for learning. Parents often joke that their children are more interested in the box the toy came in than the toy itself, and I believe there is definite wisdom in that statement. While modern toys often come with "one way to play," there are hundreds of possibilities for engagement with a cardboard box. As an experienced babysitter who has spent more than her fair share exploring toys with kids, I can tell you that my kids will have toys with the greatest number of ways to engage: dolls, blocks, play food, musical instruments, toy cars and ramps, bats and balls. As the article discusses, children need "an environment in which children have the freedom to construct their own dramas built out of their own interpretations of reality" (147).

Vygotsky and other learning theorists have argued that there is definitely a social component to learning. I truly do not believe that the noisy toys with lots of buttons that claim to teach your children the alphabet will actually live up to their claims. Children need to explore literacy with their parents, teachers and peers. Literacy and numeracy will not just come to kids without the scaffolding and social support of an actual person. In addition, computer games should be considered learning supports to a school curriculum, not school itself. In my own classroom, I believe it is important to incorporate toys (are there any language arts toys? Magnetic Poetry, maybe. I'm open to suggestions), games and play, but not at the expense of actual teacher interaction and teaching.

Week Five: Avatars