Alien Pedagogy

My lesson on exaggeration and farce (in preparation for The Brute) went well.

On the board, I’d written that students were expected to understand concepts “exaggeration” and “farce,” be able to identify ways to tell that an author is writing in a farcical tone, and analyze why we’re attracted to farce.

• We started by distinguishing truth from exaggeration. I told two stories and asked students to vote whether I was truthful for exaggerating. We then shared our own stories in groups.
• We then identified a list of human characteristics (ex/ confused, angry, and beautiful) and from there broke into groups of two. Each group had one person that represented the “true characteristic” and one person that represented the exaggeration. Then they switched roles (The best was tall, in which the shortest girl in the class was “tall” and then the tallest person in the class stood on a chair and looked down at her to represent exaggeration). I asked students to journal their definitions of exaggeration, inviting them to draw whenever possible. They were good notes.
• There was a lot of laughter in our truth vs exaggeration activity, which worked well with my introduction to farce. We identified common jokes that can be found in farce and made connections to popular movies including Scary Movie 4 *.
• From here we worked on ways that one expresses farce in written English by taking a statement made in MSN and then applying techniques of exaggeration. Sadly, there are no emoticons in The Brute, but we otherwise, we produced a solid list that we’ll be able to use while reading the text.
• The class was open at this point and we came up with some theories about why people enjoy farce. Journal.
• Review concepts as a class.

I felt that the lesson was successful, though I feel some guilt that there were few tangible resources in this lesson and in some ways it required very little preparation. However, it included student interaction through speaking, listening, and action. There were cultural references to frame student comprehension. Even my most reluctant readers took notes.

* I have not watched Scary Movie 4, but it was easy to pretend that I had.