Date: Wednesday, September 16th, 2016
Lesson: Film methodology, terminology, and audience etiquette
__________
General Rundown of the Class:
- Brenda greeted the class
- She collected the worksheet done by the students from last Thursday
- Brenda wrote the homework up on the blackboard (partially obscured by the projector screen
- After putting terms like, “Mind the Gap” on the board to remind students what they did last time
- With her Powerpoints, she showed a brief movie on audience etiquette and then walked through different video/film analysis terms
- She tried to talk about the film analysis terms and was largely met with crickets, so she filled in the blanks for her class
- Finally, she showed a documentary on War of the Worlds after passing out a worksheet to correspond with the film
- Closing remarks, farewells, etc.
Observing Brenda in a computer classroom (technically a laptop classroom, but it had the same claustrophobic, hallway-like feeling of my own lab classroom) and teaching ISUComm 250 gave me a completely different, though not what I’d call alienating or foreign, new perspective on teaching. Since I was coming in at the middle of a film analysis project, I found that Brenda was doing what tends to happen in the middle sections of an assignment’s lifespan, which is refining her student’s understanding of the material that they’re looking at so they can more intelligently grapple with it. Something I immediately took note of as the lesson progressed was how much more Brenda was able to accomplish just by having that little bit of extra time from having a Tuesday class. Whether or not her students share my enthusiasm is a subject for interpretation, but I always feel so sandwiched between opening and closing remarks that I’m sometimes sprinting to cram everything I need to say into one class before my students, inevitably, go off to their next classes and largely empty their minds and memories of ISUComm 150.
For the most part, as hinted at by the way I described the synopsis of the class, Brenda chose to teach the class in a primarily professor/lecture-driven way. The way her room is set up, two rows of desks on either side, doesn’t allow her to naturally circulate when talking as mine does, so I think she worked with it the best she could, choosing to capitalize on the fact that student attention is universally given her way at the end of the class. Throughout the class, Brenda was mostly trying to instill more specific vocabulary about film, as her class is film-based. What was a little strange to me, however, was that she chose to use a Powerpoint presentation to talk about filming techniques like the close-up, Dutch angle, and medium shot. It seemed, to me, that using something more directly associated with film, like a DVD clip or Youtube video, would be a more direct way to teach the class. Additionally, from where I sat at the back of the classroom, I didn’t see the students getting terribly involved with that aspect of class. Since the information was getting given to them, rather than riddled out or tossed around, they seemed all-too happy to just accept the straightforward dumping of terms and ideas.
Still, Brenda would often make reference back to terms such as, “Mind the Gap” that are film-centric that she talked about in previous lessons. This did keep the class more engaged, as they saw that their earlier pieces of learning were being put to use. That seemed to be the rule with the class: students were often silent/uninterested until they were being asked when the next assignment was due or what they had learned in the last class. It was very individual-centric, rather than collaboration-centric. In a bit of irony, when Brenda showed the class a Youtube video about how to be a bad audience member, the class became immediately disinterested, using their laptops for anything but taking notes. Granted, the video was quite the semi-unrealistic caricature of what audiences are typically-like. So, I felt there was an inherent disconnect between the students and the material being given to them. That’s something I avoid like the plague in my own teaching. While I’ve been trying to push group work more of late, my usual style of teaching is based on whole-class collaboration conversations for the sake of establishing new master-lists of knowledge so we can all, as a class, learn from each other and build on past successes and failures. So, seeing a class that could be as engaging as a film one treated much more clinically was strange.
Still, there were a few students (two-three) that consistently raised their hands when called on. And yet, Brenda would often skim over the contribution of the students who raised their hands, since Brenda wanted a certain kind of answer, rather than a different interpretation of the material. In our conversation after the class, Brenda said that this was usually because the students had been fairly quiet from the beginning of the semester (which seems par for the course, honestly), so she decided that taking control of the class more directly ended up being more successful for her than trying to wrestle answers out of different interpretations of the material. Since I’ve been working with art and interpretation with my class lately, I’m very much interested in making sure that my students understand the value of their own interpretations and perspectives (this is just part of my larger creative writing background, in all honesty), so I’m more than happy to work with unexpected answers from my students. Seeing how the class can sometimes clam up when simply being talked to about a material that has multiple dimensions to it, I think I’m poised to teach it in the opposite way when my time comes in ISUComm 250.
I did, however, enjoy the idea of the worksheet that Brenda gave out for students to work on while watching the film she provided. Brenda then engaged the class with their answers, so that felt much more complete then some of the rest of the class. That could have been a good basis for an entire class’ discussion as part of the larger film unit. Altogether though, the class was very much a pendulum, swinging between stark quiet and healthy conversation, with the latter in a noticeable minority. I think that mostly came down to the fact that the class was more directed by the professor, less-so collaboratively-constructed by the students in the class.