Media in the Classroom

Media in the English classroom has mainly seemed to be a reward/relaxation time for me when I was in middle and high school. We would read a novel or play, and then we would watch the movie. That would give us two or three class periods where we did not have to do anything, because we were never asked to do something with what we watched. I think that media needs to be used for a meaningful purpose. Media needs to be used in a way that makes something more alive, vivifying the text or activity; students need to be aware that media can be approached critically and can expand an experience. I really liked the idea of analyzing magazines (339), however once the students performed the four steps the book talked about, I think it would be interesting to expand off of that and have students write their own article for the magazine and use the tools they learned while dissecting it in their previous activities/assignments. I also really liked the idea for the bumper stickers. We had to make a bumper sticker in one of my education classes; they had to speak to our field of study. It was concise, interesting ways to think about my English profession and how I could sum up something I love about teaching into a few words. I believe I may be teaching quite a bit of grammar next semester, and I think it may be a fun idea to give a student, or pairs of students, each a grammar term and have them come up with bumper stickers that help us remember the term in a clever, precise way. They can then be presented and hung around the room.

Last week, at Dalton, we had the students look at pictures and think about what the poems they were about to read could be about just from looking at the picture. The students were able to think visually, and many of them picked out minute details that ended up being important in the poem(s). We also read a poem a few weeks back and had the students draw what they heard before we gave them the poem – we did not give them the title of the poem because it would have given the topic away. The kids need to think more creatively, and from the pictures we were able to see how well the students were listening and understanding what they were hearing.