Final Project

You can access my final project on google docs with the following link:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYKRzPeoSpNEZGdwa253M25fMWczM3ZuZGdz&hl=en

Thanks for a great semester!

Film Adaptations

I use film adaptations all of the time in teaching social studies. It takes a lot of time to find the perfect clip, but students really enjoy it and I think that it really reinforces material from their readings. Currently I am adapting the HBO Miniseries John Adams to show parts of in the next couple of days. It is a great miniseries that gives seemingly authentic looks at the time of the Revolutionary War. I am also currently adapting the movie Luther to show to my world history class. Sometimes I show very short clips from youtube from shows such as 300 or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Any type of visual really helps to engage students, as long as it is not too prolonged.

Frontline - Healthcare

I watched a Frontline documentary on healthcare recently that was filmed during the 2008 presidential race. The point was for the commentator to travel to five countries (Great Britain, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, and Germany) that are obviously industrialized and "first world" countries, and to see what their healthcare situations were. The audience for this piece would be educated, middle-classed people who have the time and the interest to watch a program on healthcare. Also I suppose you could argue high school students could be a potential audience because my students watched it as well.

Techniques that I thought were effective were his tone of voice and what he said. He kept each segment to around nine/ten minutes and the way he spoke and how the scenes were shot kept a potentially boring subject, interesting. The interviews were well done and were with common people from the different countries as well as doctors and people from their governments.

There were various perspectives given, and the plusses and minusses were discussed, however I got a feeling of bias while watching. In every example the United States was the worst option available. For example, Japan's healthcare system is such and such, tweny zillion times better than the United State's healthcare system. The angle at which information was presented definitely had a pro-universal healthcare slant to it.

Overall the documentary was informative and engaging and I would recommend viewing it.

For a lesson plan, I would do what I have already done. I had my political science class watch the documentary, and while they were watching it they had to take notes on the different froms of healthcare each country had. After the show was over they had to write an essay about what an ideal healthcare system would look like and it could represent one country, or could be a hybrid of a few countries.

Song Analysis

I like a lot of styles of music. Recent concerts that I have been to are: Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Jason Mraz, Bruce Springsteen, and Bon Jovi. I like to attend concerts that are going to have musicians that are singing songs that I know, and also are going to put on a good show. The song that I pick is I'm Yours by Jason Mraz. All of last year I would have my students analyze the lyrics. One of his lines are, "I've been spending way too long checking my tongue in the mirror, and bending over backward just to try and see it clearer. But my breath fogged up the glass. So I drew a new face and I laughed." To me this means that he has been trying to figure out who he is and maybe is being someone that he truly isn't, which wasn't clear to him, hence the fog. So he changes from the person that others want him to be into a few face, which he likes. Jason Mraz has a good blog where he writes some pretty insightul stuff.