After a quiz in each class today, it was time to do some media literacy. I realize the topic has such a broad brush, but we’re talking about things that kids can do that they do already. They just don’t know that they do it all the time. Does that make sense? I go along the lines that students are bombarded with images and slogans and products online, so much so that they have a hard time looking at anything and processing it.
I took a picture from one of my former student’s Facebook pages and displayed it on the overhead projector screen. It featured two girls and two guys. I asked my students if they knew these people. They didn’t, though many thought my former student looked like someone from Gossip Girl.
I asked them again–do you know these people? Once again, they couldn’t figure out what I was asking because they’ve never been asked to do something like this. So I broke it down for them, asking questions to stimulate them to pass judgement, to have an opinion based on the facts shown in the picture. Suddenly, people they had never met before, and never will, became frat boys, sorority girls, salesman, golfers, businessmen. They were at a party, at someone’s nice house, a wedding. One guy was more athletic because he had a sturdier jaw, but the guy who was redder in the face had drunk more that day. The guy on the right had a nice watch, which is why he rolled up his sleeve. It was to show off that sucker.
Oh, I know, it was not annotating the two articles and coming up with an essential question. But Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink, where he dedicates many chapters to how we can immediately process something and come up with a pretty close assessment of the situation. Since Blink will be a sophomore book this year, I figured this fell under the teacher-talk term of anticipatory set, where you stimulate interest for something bigger that comes around later.
Plus, watching my students create their scenarios from just a few questions was FUN. Yep, that word again. Students who had no clue what I meant with “Do you know these people?” created a whole world for them real quickly. We even tied it into The Catcher in the Rye, the book we’re reading in senior English APN right now.
I asked, “Would you like to hang out with these guys?” The answer was no. “Why would Holden not want to hang out with these guys?” It took a millisecond to hear that Holden would have thought they were phonies.
Sweet. A victory on day 94. Thanks, social media.