I love a good movie clip. It can introduce a lesson, reinforce a concept, motivate students, or show students how their learning applies to real life. So I've joined up with Techie Turtle Teacher's link-up to promote great movie clips to use in the classroom.
Today's movie clip is a scene from the movie Dead Poet's Society with the late and great Robin Williams where Mr. Keating introduces poetry to his class. He has a student read from an awful prologue in their textbooks about how to judge the merit of poetry, and then promptly instructs them to tear it out. After, he quotes Walt Whitman, which is just amazing. I found this was the perfect anticipatory set for starting a unit on poetry. I showed the clip (which the students found quite funny), and then had a quick discussion about how students think poetry is awful, and how it doesn't have to be. We also discuss our purpose for studying poetry in the class is that we want to learn to appreciate it as an art form, and do what the textbook author in the clip wanted us to do. I found my students were a little less resistant to studying poetry (and reading our class novel, which is in verse) after seeing this clip and having a little discussion.
Below is the clip. Unfortunately, the clip gets split and isn't shown in its entirety on YouTube (that I can find). The first video is the introduction to poetry clip, and the second is the second part where he quotes Whitman. Enjoy!
Thanks for linking up! This is a perfect way to introduce poetry.
ReplyDeleteCheryl
Techie Turtle Teacher