Okay… I’m basically going to go all out here and let my mind speak out about this whole “project” that we’re doing.
In replacement of a big, now I mean big (like over 10 pages), essay that all other sophomores have to do, our class is doing this video (which we fought over and debated on the topic which ultimately came to be Global Warming). Now the first thing that comes to my mind or any teens mind is, “Sweet, we don’t have to do an essay… a video ought to be easy!” But no, a video IS NOT EASY… I mean seriously, we are basically doing exactly what an essay is requiring on these … time consuming BLOG POSTS with all this research and opinion stuff, all we are missing is an introduction, conclusion, and a couple transitions in there; we are do A LOT MORE WORK because we have to take what’s written and creatively spend hours shooting, editing, and consulting one another. I seriously am aggravated by the idea of being genie pigs for this project. No it’s not one of those teenage act ups where we all get mad because we aren’t doing good in it; like if you die in a shooting game you hate that game or if something doesn’t work you hate that. No this hate is nothing like that. I just hate how this whole thing was carried out and the fact that it’s being weighted so hard on my grade. I’m in the REGULAR English 2 class and I feel like I’m in HONORS English 2 right now (of course how do I know what honors is like, well I was in honors last year so ha!). Back to my frustration at hand, so our whole class thought this would be a fun filled project at the start, but it’s turned out to be so irritating and troublesome that I truly would rather do a paper now. Here’s some tips of when you wanna try out something new on your students: First don’t make the project assignments so much and big that you are unable to grade everything you assign (that’s how everyone in the class gets like C’s, D’s, and F’s and pissed off because you can’t possibly check all the work at once and you don’t know what the work is titled either; of course you gave us the chance to fix our grade, but that just a ton more work for us to figure out where that work is. In my opinion this project should be an effort grade as long as a good product is produced, unless they really slack off and don’t do anything barely which some people are), Second, please, please plan things more time efficiently and clearer (…making a video takes a lot a lot of time, so we need more then merely a few weeks to pull it off. Also you have to think what’s important to teach them when making the video and what to cut out, teaching the class how to work a program for a whole period is very boring and unnecessary especially if you personally don’t know how; kids these days are very up to date with technological gizmos), Lastly, this sort of group work is fairly non-functional (everyone in the class wanted to do different topics, so why not do more then one topic? blah, filming can be last seeing that the school is too poor to buy even those cheap things from Wal-Mart; why waste money on tapes and fire-wires when digital is more efficient. Also, group work in unfair seeing that mostly 1 or 2 persons actually do real work to make a GOOD product).
Oh, if you’re reading this, you HAVE TO read my reflection on street interviews if you haven’t already. (I’m not done with that one yet neither)
Okay Here’s some more. OUR PURPOSE OF MAKING THIS DOCUMENTARY HAS TOTALLY GONE OFF TRACK OF WHAT WE SHOULD REALLY BE TRYING TO GET ACROSS TO PEOPLE. Yeah yeah, so what, a bunch of whacked out interviews from random nobodies and even whatever experts, but what do people care. In order to get something across to a person you must to get their morals and emotions in the game. When I was pounding hours over making the conclusion for the video this Saturday I realized that really pictures and touching environmental clips made a much larger statement then those boring I don’t care about random interviews. NO NOT VISUAL METAPHORES WITH THINGS ON FIRE OR STUFF DISAPPEARING OR MOVING!!! Things like dead fish lined on the coast which I clips earlier on my own, bridges and electrical wires invading environments, pollution and trash all over streets, hundreds of cars relentlessly polluting the air, and animals all caught in the middle of everything. Basically, the conclusion I made has no audio words yet, but has music (which is a universal thing that connects everyone) and lots of clips and pictures in a detailed and well thought out order which really need no words if your smart enough to see what I’m implying into the whole thing. With the thing everyone else is doing in the class, it’s a joke really. No, I know I’m not any kind of professional being a nut-case to everyone, this is my opinion on this video. What are we really going to get across with interviews from people and also the areas we are covering are child’s play in this subject of enormous proportions in importance; “what is it? how it’s impacting? why should we care?… OH PLEASE! I mean you can’t tell me people are gonna have any change or lift a finger to aid global warming when all we tell them is it’s bad and you should do some of the stuff you probably already knew but whatever.
