Final Project

The lovely and talented Ms. Allison Witham and I created a Weebly to showcase our final project, What Makes Us Laugh?. It can be found here.

The Joker

This is the music video for Fatboy Slim's cover of the Steve Miller Band song 1973, The Joker:



I would love to have students analyze Fatboy Slim's use of kittens in this video to critique themes of self-promotion and partying commonly seen in music videos. In this video, the audience sees a group of kittens on their way to a Fatboy Slim Concert. On their way, they run into a group of ducklings, positioned much in the same way that attractive women are positioned in music videos. Later, the audience sees the kittens playing poker for money and catnip. In this video, this is hilarious and adorable, but I would also like to have students draw parallels between the kittens playing poker and the glamorization of gambling and drugs in many music videos. In the end, the kittens discover that the concert is sold out and they engage in a fist fight in order to get in. Again, how does this critique the violence typically glamorized in music videos?

Throughout the video the audience sees many signs promoting Fatboy Slim. In this video, how does he critique typical music videos, while still engaging in a culture of self-promotion? Does the fact that this song is a cover of another band's song play into this in any way?

Detective Stories

I am unashamed to admit that I loved Guy Ritchie's 2009 film adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, though it only scored a meager 70% on the Tomatometer. I believe that, though the film was, for the most part, a zany, fluffy romp, in many ways it stayed true to the spirit of the original novels.



I know that Sherlock Holmes novels are rarely taught in schools these days, but I think they set up really wonderful discussions about truth and the way that knowledge is acquired. The novels are also wonderful foundations for discussions about conflict and character development.



In a high school class (especially 9th or 10th grade), I would love to show the film alongside a reading of A Study in Scarlet or The Hound of the Baskervilles. I especially like the idea of using a film adaptation of a genre, rather than an adaptation of a specific novel. This way, students are not too hung up on comparing and contrasting plot points and can instead focus on reading the tone of the film exploring how the filmmaker may have changed characters in order to adapt the genre for a modern audience.



I would create a simple graphic organizer to help students compare and contrast elements of the text and the film. Something as basic as a sheet with a column for each would do. Students could fill out the side for the novel before watching the film, and take notes on the side for the film as they watch.



In the end, I would have students write a brief essay comparing and contrasting the tone and spirit of the text and the film and explaining what they might do differently if they were to create a film adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes text. For a more extended project, students could work in groups or as a class to film and edit a trailer for their adaptation of the text.

Harvest of Shame

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Edward R. Murrow's 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame. In this made-for-tv documentary, Murrow documents the life and work of migrant workers in Florida. 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of Harvest of Shame. It is appalling how little has changed since this film was made:

• Like textile workers at the turn of the last century, Florida tomato harvesters are still paid by the piece. The average piece rate today is 50 cents for every 32-lbs of tomatoes they pick, a rate that has remained virtually unchanged since 1980. As a result of that stagnation, a worker today must pick more than 2.25 tons of tomatoes to earn minimum wage in a typical 10-hour workday -- nearly twice the amount a worker had to pick to earn minimum wage thirty years ago, when the rate was 40 cents per bucket. Most farmworkers today earn less than $12,000 a year.

• In a January 2001 letter to members of Congress, the U.S. Department of Labor described farmworkers as "a labor force in significant economic distress," citing farmworkers' "low wages, sub-poverty annual earnings, [and] significant periods of un- and underemployment" to support its conclusions.

• As a result of intentional exclusion from key New Deal labor reform measures, farmworkers do not have the right to overtime pay, nor the right to organize and collectively bargain with their employers.

• In the most extreme conditions, farmworkers are held against their will and forced to work for little or no pay, facing conditions that meet the stringent legal standards for prosecution under modern-day slavery statutes. Federal Civil Rights officials have successfully prosecuted seven slavery operations involving over 1,000 workers in Florida’s fields since 1997, prompting one federal prosecutor to call Florida "ground zero for modern-day slavery." In 2010, federal prosecutors indicted two more forced labor rings operating in Florida.

(Facts from The Coalition of Immokalee Workers)

I would love to show Harvest of Shame as an introduction to a research project. Students could research issues surrounding agricultural process in the United States today and conclude the unit with a student-generated activism project.

In addition, I would like to teach this documentary alongside a novel that explores issues of migrant labor, such as Pam Munoz Ryan's novel, Esperanza Rising. This novel takes place during the depression and tells the story of a young and wealthy Mexican girl who suddenly loses her father and her family and immigrates to the U.S. with her mother. There, they must adapt to a new country and a new social class as they begin a new life working in the agriculture industry in California. Though the text is target for students in grades 6-9, the novel addresses labor and social issues in a rich and complex way and there is plenty of material for older students to deconstruct.



Murrow concludes, "The migrants have no lobby. Only an enlightened, aroused and perhaps angered public opinion can do anything about the migrants. The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do. Good night, and good luck."

Teen TV

There are few words that express how much I love teen television. It is, by far, my favorite genre of television.



I would argue that the best era of teen tv was during my teen years. The late 1990s saw such awesome shows as Dawson's Creek, Felicity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I know that before that time there was Melrose Place and 90210, but I, alas, am not very familiar with those shows. Since my teen years, there have been a few excellent shows, like Veronica Mars, the O.C. and, arguably, Gossip Girl.



Generally these shows portray the trials and tribulations of upper middle to upper class white teenagers throughout their high school and early college years. They usually portray a small, tightly knit group of friends. This group is generally fairly evenly balanced by gender, to better facilitate lots of combinations of inter-group dating.



Nearly all teen tv shows can be counted on to play on certain conventions of high school life to further the plot. Nearly every teen tv show has a "group project" episode where characters who hate each other are forced to work together on a project for school. More often than not, this episode is a parenting simulation. By the end of the episode, these characters generally discover that they have feelings for each other. It is terribly cliche, but it gets me every time.



Almost all teen tv shows have a "prom" or other significan dance episode. In this episode, one couple generally falls in love and someone has their heart broken. You can count on it. It is often the second to last episode of the season and generally is completely unrealistic. Like the "group project" episode, it is wonderful.



If I were to teach teen tv, I would have students compare and contrast an episode of a popular teen tv show (or an entire season!) to their lives. We would analyze how the world of tv teens is constructed and how and why it is so different from real life. We would also discuss the appeal of show that is so disconnected from reality.

Manhunt.net, an ethnographic study

To continue my theme of studying masculinities in the media, I studied the website manhunt.net for my ethnographic study. Manhunt.net is a dating site that caters exclusively to gay men. At the moment I am writing this posting, there are more than 50,000 men logged in to Manhunt.net. Not members, logged in at this very moment.

To conduct my study of Manhunt.net, my colleague and I created a profile. The process of creating a profile revealed a lot about the site. Manhunt leaves spaces for detailed physical information and a laundry list of sexual preferences, but not much else. There is almost no room to put information about non-sexual interests. Anything unique or personal must be typed within 650 characters or fewer.

Almost immediately after creating a profile, (in which we placed no information other than a photograph of a clean-cut young white man) we began to receive messages from other members. Many of these messages were in the form of "winks". The wink on Manhunt.net signifies much the same as a wink in person--a non verbal indication of interest. Most of the other messages we received were shorter than one sentence long, and often grammatically incorrect. Many included photographs of the writers' penises or posteriors. The implication was that the writers of the messages we received saw our photograph, found us attractive and wanted to meet for sex, simple as that.

I had a difficult time conducting this study without passing judgment on the culture of Manhunt.net. The site encourages men to meet for sex with little to know background knowledge of each other, something that could lead to a multitude of unsafe situations. The site requires that members be over the age of 18, but has no way of verifying age. And, perhaps most frightening, the profile page has a place where members can check whether or not they are HIV positive, but no mechanism in place to prevent people from lying. All of these things would make me caution anyone against joining this site.

All in all, I found my time on Manhunt.net illuminating. I don't think I'll be back.

Facebook

Like many of my peers, I have a love-hate relationship with facebook. There is not much about myself I want the entire world to know. I post on facebook infrequently, limiting the content of my posts to psa's about political issues that I feel strongly about or links to media that I find very very amusing. However, despite the fact that I am so reserved in my contributions to facebook, I love to read about what others are up to. There are some serious pros and cons to this. Lately, I have been horrified by some of what I have read on facebook. People I know have posted scathing critiques of other people without (it seems to me) much attention to the fact that facebook is a public forum. This sort of public gossip makes me extremely uncomfortable. On the other hand, facebook is a wonderful place to find out about friends' significant lifecycle events quickly. Last year, my partner and I were travelling in Marshall, MN with a group of teens when a friend of ours had a baby. We were able to see photographs of her beautiful daughter, just hours after she was born, even though we were hours away.

Speaking of teens, facebook is also a remarkably effective tool for communicating with adolescents. In my former job, I ran the teen department of a small non-profit. When I was having getting my teens to respond to phone calls, emails and flyers, I established a facebook identity for myself at work. This allowed me to see what my teens were up to (both good and bad) and to get the word out quickly about events and anything else I wanted them to know about. It was amazing how quickly they responded to something on facebook that they would have ignored if it had come to them via email!