May 24, 2007

Homework:
Be ready for the Buzzword quiz on words from 5/7 - 5/23
The students can get the missing words from the archive.

Today:
I handed out grade slips. They do not have to be signed.

We had quite the discussion today. I don't know how much your child talks about what we do in my class, but today we discussed the results of the voting for the best TV ad. The background to the story is that a student in one of the classes is Asian and very serious. As you well know, students can be cruel, and they pick on him. In his TV ad, his group was advertising the lights for a party scene. I asked him to dance a little to make the video more lively. As you can guess, the kids thought this was a scream. I did not fully comprehend the impact this recording was having on the student until he won the vote for the best TV ad. He was so embarrassed.

It was when I heard students joking about this in the hall that I realized this had gone too far. The students did not vote for him because his ad was good. It wasn't. That was obvious to the kids. What the students did by voting him as the winner was ridicule him. I explained that they had the power with their votes to recognize a group for their hard word in producing a good ad. Instead, the students wasted their vote by making this student the winner. They thought that since it was so stupid and made them laugh that that was a good thing. So they voted for him.

This reminded me of William Hung from American Idol. We read paragraphs from his entry at Wikipedia. We explored why William Hung became so famous. It was because people could make fun of him. But it wasn't just that he was a bad singer. William Hung is Chinese, and if you read the entry on him, what bothers commentators about the phenomenon is that people laughed at him because he embodied the qualities of the stereotypical Chinese person. People used him as the fool and made money.

After reading about William Hung, I asked the students again why they thought the student's video was so funny. In general, they got the point. Not every student voted for this child, and I am sure there were plenty of students who thought laughing at him was wrong. However, in the class he was in, we did have a friendly laugh. It was funny because, in that class, we care about each other and appreciate each other. It's like watching family be silly. But what I saw happening over the course of the day was not fun. I saw children being mean to a fellow classmate, and we needed to discuss it.

I did not include this student in the re-vote. I only included videos that were worthy. "With great power comes great responsibility." The students did not act responsibly. They acted like kids. Therefore, I thought it was time to teach them how they should be acting.