I had this brilliant Penn professor come through a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about the ways in which kids were approaching their CSpan films and then he was talking about how his students ought to approach my students as they approached their films.

He noted that he was putting on his “producer’s hat.”

I was thinking about this as we work through our films. In some ways, I’m the producer for these twenty-six documentaries. I’m helping kids frame them, gathering resources, trying to ask good questions, and pushing on spots I see as weaknesses. I think this is what producers do or at least some of what they do.

On great days, that’s what I feel like I’m doing. I do a bit of teaching — here’s something you all need to think about (transitions, framing a shot, invoking the Constitution) — but then I’m just traveling around talking to students about their films. As they see a need, I try to help them address it, as much as I can. It’s their work. I’m there to help.

On other days, though, it’s much harder. You can’t sit in that producer role when the director doesn’t want to work. You can’t make the film for them.

Did an activity where the students had to compare  where they began with their CSpan  film and where they are now.

Two favorites:

I have no idea/why the f*ck do we have to do this?
TO
My  film is about the NFL’s protest due to the President’s comments on one of the Football Player’s choice to kneel during the National Anthem.

About Donald Trump
TO
I would first say my topic.  Then talk about how society portrays Muslims and other religions and how even though it’s freedom of religion, we don’t really have it.

An attempt to help everyone realize that any project requires lots of extra work.  In other words, how do you help kids realize that no real project has just enough work, that any project requires work that doesn’t always have immediate pay off.

I tried it with three areas — house building, recording an album, publishing a magazine — with the prompt of what gets left behind or what the extra work might be.

Example below:

CSpan and Individually designed projects

Based on student comments.

General feedback on CSpan Documents

I finished working my way through these documents on Friday and the grades in Worksis should be live and accurate.  Below are some general thoughts for all of you.

One, given the nature of this assignment — a short assignment — you need to think of it as an opportunity to think deeply about each word. You only have 250 words so you want to make sure that you’ve thought about each word, that it represents the best word you could choose, and that you’ve edited each sentence carefully.  Here’s author E.B. White:

“Vigorous writing is concise.   A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should contain no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.  This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”  

I read a number of papers with minimal efforts to punctuate sentences or capitalize proper nouns.   I read papers with multiple sentences that simply did not make sense.   Here’s the deal: you’re in 11th and 12th grade.   I will now read papers until I reach four basic mistakes at which point I will make the assignment not completed until you re-submit the paper.

Two, I deeply appreciated those of you who began to collect evidence about your topic.  Having a feeling or having watched something sometime is not evidence.  It’s just something you happened to write down on a paper.   Given the English seminars most of you have had and given the projects you’ve done in the past, I’m not going to spend that much time thinking about this.  Ask yourself again and again: what is my evidence for this claim? How do I support my claim with more than a feeling?

Three, a number of you did something important.  You realized that you had deep thoughts and ideas that might help you create this film and you added them to your paper, even if they didn’t necessarily relate to the prompts and even if it forced you over the word count. (For those of you who submitted 250 words exactly, you should know that I received five proposals with more than 750 words.) Thinking deeply about your film and about the end goal of this project will always serve you well.

Please feel free to make an appointment to discuss any and all grades.  Send me an email explaining in 2-4 sentences why you feel the grade is too high or too low and we’ll find a time to sit down together privately. Like on the green bench in the hall.

MC

No laptops in university class.  Thoughtful article here.