Sunday, September 10, 2006 

 The first classes were a welcome to the challenge that the whole idea of teaching media poses—especially to younger kids, which just isn’t written about enough for me to pull curriculum and ideas from the literature.  I struggle with “is this really relevant?” and I’m hoping it does grow from these beginning stages.  I see right away that all of the students are connected in some way to television.  They all had shows right away deemed as “favorites.”  When I introduced the concept of “genre,” mentioning novellas, game shows, news shows—they seemed to understand right away the format and look of those shows—even though they might not spend long periods of focused time watching them, they are a part of the family, the culture.  

   I was surprised by their choice of “sports”—the genre they would like to develop into their own show.  It was hard for me not to just throw that option out, because I didn’t at first see how we could investigate television production by focusing on sports.  As I watch the U.S. Open today, though, it is obvious how t.v. alters the event itself—focusing on individual stories and triumphs, announcers with personality, locker room/post-game interviews, stats, shots of audience and players—it will of course be different than creating a typical story with characters, etc—but not so much.  It could be even more an opportunity to see how “real” events can be controlled in ways by the media—given a certain slant to build audience, to keep the audience.  Since there was also interest in novella, I told the kids we might be able to create two shows—but I wonder how I can make that work without having to cram everything together.  It might not leave enough time to go deep into the curriculum.  I’m wondering how I can make “sports” work for everyone in the class—or how I can incorporate these two genres.  I will ask the kids more about it as we begin to work on story development (their answers will help shape how that unit is led), but any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated.    They are the experts creating the show, so I need to let them articulate how that looks within the project.  This happens through asking the right questions, I think.