Tag Archives: Film

August 27, 2009 · 4:00 pm

Three classes later…

…and I’m loving teaching.

modern-times-poster-starring-charles-chaplin

I had some great discussion over Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times in my afternoon class today.  Maybe it’s a cliché, but it’s amazing to watch things click with your students when you’re a teacher.  Right now, I’m loving the way these 18-20 year-olds are relating Chaplin’s depression-era film to our current economic situation.

If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it.  Seriously.  I know you think Chaplin is boring cause he’s silent, but the man was a genius.  My kids and I are laughing out loud through the entire 83 minutes.  So do it.

By the way, my current cute thing my students do?  After every class, I’ve had a boy (always a boy) hanging around to talk to me, and when I ask him what he needs, he looks like I startled him.  Like I surprised him.  Like he wasn’t waiting around to talk to me.  It goes like this:

Me: Yes, Tyler?  

Him: (startled) Oh! Um…yeah…I was wondering what the assignment is/when our first test is/what we’re watching next week?

What’s that about?

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August 24, 2009 · 9:41 am

Freshly sharpened pencils and clean white notebook paper

With the entire house all to myself this morning, minus my 3 housemates (including my husband), I’m commandeering the living room for my own purposes of coffee drinking and class planning.

I start teaching an Intro to Film class tonight at a local community college, and I just need some time to go over the schedule for my first class again.  I’ve been running up and down the stairs, back and forth from our little basement flat, gathering things together, making sure I had my books and calendars and syllabi.  

I’ve been anxiously eyeing the pot of coffee I made 40 minutes ago every time I whiz past, drooling over the rich, black stuff, desperate just to sit down with a mug on the comfy couch in the living room.  I’ve eaten two Eggo Multi-grain waffles – a delicacy I hadn’t partaken in, until last week, since 1991.  I got Simon out the door with our friend Steve to go help hang hooks in Steve’s wife Sarah’s classroom; her third-graders start tomorrow.

And now, here I am.  All alone on the couch, with my textbook and my notepads and my steaming cup of joe.  With first-day-of-school butterflies that have not quite (but almost) as much to do with what I’m going to wear and whether people will like me as they did back in 1996, when I was a high school freshman.

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