January
10
ELA 9/10: Jan 10 Continue with questions, discussion, Matchbox 20 song…
- The students and I began reading the poem “If a Tree Falls” and circled several phrases after discussing what we thought they meant or symbolized. After this discussion, now understanding the meaning behind things, we watched / listened to the song again. They had questions attached to their handout to answer before moving on.
- We added another discussion topic to our day when it was brought up… well I can’t remember “how” it was brought up but I drew a coffee cup and a gas nozzle pumping gas into a car and compared their prices. The gas per liter is less than the cup of coffee, but coffee literally grows on trees wheras gas is a limit resource and will one day run out. Should gas cost us more, if we only have a small amount of it??
- Students viewed a short clip from a movie titled The Medicine Man with actor Sean Connery. He is an environmental scientist and lives in the Rainforest searching for the cure for cancer. He finds it, he beleives, but he has run out of time as they are clear-cutting the very forest he is living in.
- We talked about the idea that music usually matches what societal concerns are at the time. The Bruce Cockburn song was written and released nearly twenty years ago, whereas there are songs being released today that still focus on the same topic. After twenty years, have we made no progress or have we stopped listening? We watched a video of two high school students who recorded themselves playing the Matchbox 20 song titled “How Far We’ve Come” from the kid’s play area in McDonalds. They weren’t too bad, actually. We’ll discuss tomorrow the significance of the title.