Today my students started working on their final projects, where they will design media literacy lessons for actual high school students. Their first task was to come up with a topic, so I put them into groups based on their interests and gave them a few minutes to brainstorm. Before long, one group signalled to me that they had a topic, so I said "Great! What is it?" Their response:
"Different media have different effects on different people."
I tried hard to disguise my sinking feeling. Had they not been paying attention when I gave them that lecture on pointless vague statements and how they are pointless and vague?
I entered salvage mode, asking "Can you be more specific?"
His classmate piped up with "What he means is that we're going to compare written, audio and video versions of the same story and have the students discuss how differences in media lead you to different interpretations."
Phew.
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4 comments:
Is disguising the sinking feeling something teachers need to practice?
Yes, unless you use humiliation-based techniques, like "Wow, what a stupid comment!" or "Have you been fooling around on facebook all semester instead of listening, you ingrate?" In this particular case, I attribute the vague topic to the extraordinary lack of expressive ability among engineers. Fortunately, a marginally more expressive one was on hand to translate.
Sometimes I find certain comments of yours can be amusing.
Go for the Bart Testa approach.
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