Blades of Glory

Connecting with my last post, a new and popular movie (Blades of Glory), is also a hot topic among adolescents.

I saw this movie yesterday and could not help but think about the same idea we learned from our field trip: use movies to help students learn literary elements. In Blades of Glory, the first few minutes of the movie deeply describes each character in a flashback segment. My revelation was this idea:

Here I am, sitting in a movie theater, decoding this information so I can make predictions, judgments, and assumptions of characters, and I am doing this unconsciously. How did I learn to do this? Isn't this exactly what we want our students to do when they engage in a text, whether it is print or electronic-based?

The opening scene I describe is very funny, which would really capture students' attention. Will Ferrell has the ability to grab anyone's attention, especially that of a sleeping class. Students will be more interested in decoding the characterization in Blades of Glory than a literary text. Start with an example like this, and then characterization might be better understood when examining print-based texts that students read in class.