The Coming Week

So, here I am at the chicken hof, having completed my lesson plans and done all the other things I am supposed to do.

In first grade, we will continue to focus on technology--specifically, the cellphone. We will begin by practicing some common phone phrases, then in pairs rank the features of cellphones: is a camera more important, or current weather conditions, or GPS, or texting, etc? In the final activity, students will write five GOOD questions about cellphone use, then conduct a poll of their fellow students. They will then report their results back to their table.

Somewhere in there, we will listen to the following song, whose lyrics I have transcribed into the powerpoint:


Second graders (that's HS juniors, in case you've forgotten) are continuing a unit on Western music. This week, we will turn to criticism, and examine the question of whether ART can be evaluated simply in terms of good and bad. Is a Classical conductor inherently better than a pop singer? Is representational art superior in any sense to abstract works, or to the line drawings Picasso used to capture the essence of a thing in a few strokes?


Click here to check out a cool study of Picasso's progression to this image.

Rather than giving a thumbs up or thumbs down, we try to be more subtle, using adjectives to describe our reactions to some artwork. I will play some music clips, each embedded in a slide that details the type of response I want them to write about: Rhapsody In Blue, Faint by Linkin Park, Winter from Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Bongo Bong from Manu Chao:


In other news, I finally bought an MP3 player (since I never got around to it on my trip to China); now I'm looking for music to make a couple of killer workout playlists. The whole reason I wanted one is because the continuous stream of K-Pop in the fitness center, while lively, just doesn't do it for me. And TB's proposal for looping 'Eye of the Tiger' isn't quite what I had in mind.

Suggestions are encouraged.