Sentence Structure Repetition
The Wire was brilliant in the way that it depicted scenes of teaching and learning. Almost every sub-plot was constructed around characters in teacher-student relationship to each other, and every conflict was the result of a failure of teachers to teach or of students to learn. When Omar's grandmother is shot, he and several other characters use it as an opportunity to teach other gangsters about old-fashion gang ettiquette and history. "Nobody ever shoots on a Sunday!" xxx lectures the two boys who work for him. When xxx and his runners are waiting for drug deliveries, he uses the time to explain to the runners how to play chess and how chess can work as a metaphor for their own situation in the inner-city. "We the pawns" he tells them, as the camera pans the desolate housing projects where they live. When McNulty discovers an intricate crime conspiracy, the older, more experienced Officer Bunk explains the police procedures they will need to unravel the mystery. "Now you might think the best approach would be to interview a bunch of suspects, but you'd be wrong," Bunk instructs McNulty. In every scene, the viewer watches as more experienced characters mentor newcomers and the young, making every character familiar as the student we once were or the teacher we once had.
All great police dramas revolve around mystery. They keep the viewer wondering about the motives of the crime. They keep the viewer invested in figuring out the method of the crime. They focus the viewer's attention on the difficulty of ever discerning the truth from distracting and ultimately irrelevent clues. In this way, The Wire was a classic police drama, focusing as it did on criminal's motives, their methods, and their truths and lies. But The Wire took this focus on mystery a step further: it asked viewers to consider the mystery at the heart of human relationships. It asked viewers to think about the mystery of how institutions work and how people are positioned within them. And it asked viewers to contemplate the mystery of our own cultural and personal
truths, as it depicted different cultures' very different ways of life.
The wire took this focus a step further. Viewers could think about human relationsips. The Wire was about instutions too. And it was also about cultural and personal truths.
All That is a classic kids' tv show that aired at 6pm...It is closely related to Sat Night Live only for kids. All That was centered around kids simply being kids, having fun and telling jokes. It had well-rounded hosts who coould bring the show alive, bringing the punchline at just the right moment and giving kids a laugh. It offered kids a chance to laugh at adults, giving them opportunities to make fun of stereotpyical adult behavior.
Because All That was aimed at kids, it offered viewers a chance to... Because it was old-fashioned in its humor, it didn't offend kids' parents... Because it was on Nickoledon parents could trust it.
Tennis is one sport I ahve always enjoyed. I see myself playing it for as long as my body permits it. It's one of the few sports that works out your entire body, from your foot to your legs to your torso, arms, and hands. Last time I played, I was sore for a week; every muscle ached. It's one of the few sports that looks simple but actually requires great skill and agility. When I first started playing, I imagined that all I needed to do was hit the ball; it seemed like a big version of ping pong. It's one of the few sports that works out not only your body but also your heart. When I play, I often find myself panting, trying to keep up with the pace! Finally, tennis is one of the few sports that both the young and old can play, proving that anyone who plays the sport can be pyscially fit, no matter how old they are.
Students are much more unmotivated by school than teachers realize. This lack of motivation is caused by several factors. Parents and teachers over-emphasize the importance of grades, giving students the false impression that the purpose of school is winning points, competing with others, and pleasing authority figures. Teachers fail to teach with passion, giving students the false impression that intellectual work is dull and disconnected from real-world concerns. Teachers focus too heavily on narrow definitions of student success, giving students the false impression that memorizing is the same as learning, that grades are the same as achievement, and that performance is more important than understanding and engagement.
One of the best aspects of PLL is the suspense the writers create. The writers switch some details around in the show in order to keep the viewer on edge with the suspense. They add storylines to pique viewers' interest and keep them coming back for more. They play with the endings of each episode to create mysteries that the viewer can solve in the next episode.
Chaining
The Wire got rave reviews from critics but was nearly cancelled several times because of low ratings. This contradiction -- rave reviews coupled wwith viewer apathy -- can be partly explained by the racial make-up of most of the characters: 70% of the stars of the Wire are black. But this explanation misses a deeper point. Surveys show that most viewers were willing to watch a show about African Americans. But they weren't willing to follow a dense, multi-layered, highly intelligent crime drama, most of which was delivered in heavy Baltimore dialalects and accents. It was this difficulty, more than the racial make-up of the stars, that drove viewers away.
The idea that blogging, as opposed to traditional essay writing, will motivate students, is relatively new. But this newness shouldn't keep teachers from experiementing with it. My own experiment with blogging in my 414 class has led to several intersesting results. For example, students tell me they are more motivated to write when they know their audience is broader than the teacher. This kind of audience awareness is central to developing writers. Students also tell me that they like writing in more visual modes. This kind of writing -- where meaning is conveyed by image as well as words -- has liberated students, who are used to reading and writing in the visual world of the web.
Omar Little's and Snoop's characters in The Wire defy many American stereotypes. These stereoptyes include the ideas that violence is the perogative of males, that gay men are not "tough," that gangsters don't have codes of honor, that children are innocent. These ideas have structured many television and film productions, and The Wire plays with them in order to subvert the viewer expectations. This subversion of viewer expectation reaches a pinnacle in the scene where Omar's grandmother is shot. In this scene, Omar is....
No comments:
Post a Comment