This scene contains lots of curses but the idea is for students to watch without sound. First they describe what's happening and then they create their own dialogue (3 characters = Chris the angry guy, Gino the guy who almost went in front of Chris, and the clerk).
This one might be usable but it does contain "eat shit"...
This is the same scene only longer. It contains "motherf*cker" which I am much less comfortable with in my classroom. I may do the longer scene with no sound and again have students explain what's going on and create a dialogue.
I think it's kind of funny, but then again, it's not my 4th grade kid that cried after getting made fun of in school because the teacher made him turn his shirt inside out.
Students in my high school had to turn shirts inside out if they were obscene. In this case the kid was wearing a Yankees shirt and the teacher was a Red Sox fan. I guess the Yankees insignia is pretty obscene to a serious Red Sox fan but it's not quite the same...
Interesting article here on Obama's desire to add hours to the school day.
One issue that's not addressed here is how this would impact school sports. When I was in high school, we finished school around 2:30 and then had wrestling practice (in winter anyway) until 5:30. If we had finished school at 3:30, would wrestling have gone to 6:30?
And based on this LOL quote it seems like we're talking about more than one hour:
"I was like, `Wow, are you serious?'" she said. "That's three more hours I won't be able to chill with my friends after school."Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools.
Here's a little listening / conversation activity I designed.
Student 1 (boy from Spain)
Student 2 (boy from Germany)
Student 3 (girl from New Zealand)
Student 4 (boy from Norway)
Student 2 again (boy from Germany)
There's a lot of school spirit in America
Stuff is big in America
Americans don't kiss each other on the cheeks
Measurements
American high schools have organized sports teams and cheerleaders
Americans drive on the wrong side of the road
A lot of food has peanut butter in it
Conversation questions:
If you were an exchange student in America, which of these cultural differences would affect you the most? Which would you enjoy and which would bother you? Why?
What cultural differences would exchange students in your country have trouble with? Which cultural differences might they enjoy?
Here's a good scene from Mr. Baseball to introduce the topic of cultural differences:
Students can describe the cultural differences evident in this scene from the movie Mr. Basbeball and can then move on to other activities like listing more cultural differences related to eating or cultural differences they have experienced firsthand or ones they have seen in other movies.
Roleplay:
Mr. Baseball - You are Jack Elliot, an American Major League Baseball player. At least you used to be. You're getting old and no longer good enough to play for your old team, the Yankees. Now you are playing in Japan. You just had dinner with your team's manager's family. They seemed upset with you. Speak with Hiroko, the manager's daughter to find out what went wrong.
Hiroko - You are the manager's daughter and you're supposed to show a baseball player who is new to Japan how to handle Japanese culture. He just made a few errors during a family dinner and now your father is upset with both you and the American. Tell him what he can do differently next time.
You can then ask students to bring in their own roleplay based on a movie clip that shows a cultural difference. They should be given a few weeks for this assignment. Students need to submit a link to where the movie clip can be found online (like on Youtube) or be able to bring in the DVD (hopefully the school library or media center has these available).