Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Media Class

Yr 11 Media, R8/24

Oh my god, it’s Media Studies, a subject I’m actually competent and qualified to teach! Usually it’s stuff like Woodwork, Maths or PE.

The students have a choice of three activities: storyboard, cd covers and news report. Most students want to do the cd covers since it requires using the computers, but the room they’re in doesn’t have them. Typical. There was a room swap due to exams in their usual room, which has the computers.

The teacher’s notes include the following, to do with the news report activity:

“They may wish to look around the school for suitable scenes as the whole lot must be filmed in the school.”

Oh yeah, they’ll love that I think – an opportunity to wander around the school, bludging in the guise of ‘research’. I don’t mention it.

I go around the room speaking to each group (there’s three of them, from only eleven students) helping them with their storyboards and news reports. The basic activity seems sound – they are to present two different versions of the same news report, one looking at an issue in a positive light, the other in a negative light.

One group of girls are doing their news report on a fashion show. I’m thinking it’s not a very hard-hitting issue to cover, but typical of young girls, and maybe there’s an opportunity to cover it in terms of body image and stereotype. But the girls aren’t interested – they hardly know what I’m talking about; they see the issue as just being about good clothes and bad clothes. 

The second period is pretty much more of the same, but we’re now in Room 24 and I let some of the more responsible students use the computers. Some of the boys have sneaked out their Diskmans on the way down and are listening to what sounds like techno crap. I let them - it seems to keep them happy. It’s much better than having a class of bored, restless students. We ride out the rest of the period relatively unscathed.