Visit 3 11/11

Hello!

This is going to be a bit of a shorter of a post. It's been a whirlwind november for me. That said, today's lessons were about students putting on their detective hats and understanding how historians learn the things they learn. Sometimes they look at people and  can tell what age their from based on what they are wearing in their pictures. They may even be able to tell what socio-economic status they are, what profession they had, or what part of the world they are from.

However pictures or paintings are not always available. Often historians have to read the first hand accounts or listen to the stories of people who were there. We have many documentaries based on first hand accounts of historical events like wars, movements, discoveries and inventions.

Other times, however, they simply have to try to look at the big picture and the story of what's already known, and then draw inferences from what they have learned from other historians.

The amazing thing about the world of theater is that it tries to do the very same things. Theatre today often tries to tell the stories in as realistic a way as they can come up with. They try to re-create what was done in the past, what they think it looked like, or if talking about another time, they must try and find ways to show that what is being shown on stage or in film is from another time.

As such, I gave the students the chance to do a little investigative work on a short part of the story "To Kill a Mocking Bird." There's a scene in which a "mad" dog is coming down the street and Atticus is called in to shoot the dog in order to protect the town.  In order to help the students try and understand the setting which "To Kill a Mockingbird" takes place, I showed them the following images from a film version of the story.

I asked the students to tell me what they thought about the people in the pictures. Were they wealthy or poor? What time period did they live? Were they all from the same place? Where was that place? Did they know each other? Were they family?  Some students had read the book or seen the movie and had an advantage -- something that also relates well to social studies. The students took their conclusions and  then took a 2 page cutting of the script to read in small groups. The students worked together to try and learn more about their own characters and the story on the whole through using a different medium of information.

Had time permitted I'd have read that chapter in the book as well, but as it did not, I asked students to think about how we could learn things in history this way. The insights the students shared, as usual were insightful and interesting. I think the students got a good grasp on seeing how characters and real people are both expressed in what they do and say, and what we see from them.

Until next time!