Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Film Elective

Tomorrow I start teaching a Film elective that will meet for 1.5 hours each week. I'm super excited about it because I absolutely loved the film class that I took in college (taught by this guy, Nick Davis, who memorized pretty much all of our names before the 1st class by perusing our ID pictures - this was a big class of about 75 students, so super impressive). I'm selfishly using this elective as an opportunity to revisit what I learned in that intro class in college, and to continue to learn more about film.

So, I have 16 kids who signed up for the class. 13 boys and just 3 girls (which surprised me), and the majority of the students are 10th grade boys that I teach in Geometry. I think it will be cool to have a group of kids who chose to be in the elective - talk about instant intrinsic motivation just based on interest!

My plan of attack for the first day is a brief survey of what types of movies the kids consider to be "good," what their favorite genre of movie is, their favorite film, and their favorite director. Then, we'll watch A Trip to the Moon and a scene from Broken Blossoms, and begin discussing shot scale and introduce some vocab.

Finally, I'm going to put kids in groups of four to create two-minute long silent films.

I'm excited!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool - sounds like fun!

How does that work into your school day or week? I'd love to try teaching an out-of-the-box elective course, but our scheduling always seems so rigid!

Jackie said...

Oh, I love "A Trip to the Moon"! Sounds like fun, keep us posted!

Carol Lee said...

That short course seems interesting. During my college days i am aching to attend one but i end up with photography.

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