The 2nd Annual 4th Grade Film Festival (Part 1: Metaphors)

I still have a couple of chapters to write about our year-long class economy, but since I showcased our class commercials this past Friday, I thought I'd feature what this year's class did in the next couple of posts.
There were several genres in advertising that this year's class identified, but when it came down to writing scripts, the following are what most students chose:
Metaphor
Famous People
Extreme Action
Humor
Make Your Life Better

I'll feature each in turn in the coming posts. For this post I'll start with metaphor. Two children decided to write a commercial script with "metaphor" as their main focus. The first commercial tries to tie in the following: hand made scarfs are as warm as a fire place, and book marks protect your books like a security guard.

The second commercial sells cardboard model buildings. The author wanted to show that these buildings are durable, and just like a lock, are hard to break.


We use a green screen for the backgrounds. There were a couple of interesting challenges this year, and I'll address them in turn.

Advertising and Social Inequality: Discussions For The Family

Wow! I haven't posted for a long time! And I'm sorry to my loyal follower for the wait. I totally understand if you unfollow me. There's a day or two lull in my work now, so I'm back.

One of the main points of our advertising unit is for the kids to start looking critically at the persuasive media that fills their lives. We try to look at not only the difference between food featured in advertisements and their real counterparts, but also what goes into making delicious food featured in ads so mouth watering. We go beyond food too. For example, what goes into making that model so radiant. That is about as far as I push it though, for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that we may just not be developmentally ready.

What I don't do is give this TED talk by Cameron Russell. 

I think it is a great compliment to our unit in advertising, and makes ties beyond ads and into our unit on social inequality. So I ask parents to consider if it's appropriate for their child and if it is, encourage them to watch it together and talk about it.
Here are some of Cameron’s major points:

-       She’s a model because she won a genetic lottery and she’s the recipient of a legacy.

-       The “Legacy” portion of the above statement is that we have been programmed to find slender, tall, white females attractive.  This is supported by statistics in the industry. In 2007, of the 677 professional models, only 27 of them (or less than 4%) are non-white. 

-       Saying you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to find a box of money when you grow up. It’s great, but it’s not a career goal and you have no control over it.

-       Photo-shopping ads is only a small component of packaging advertisements. Ad pictures aren’t pictures of her, Cameron Russell. They are constructions from the professionals around her; hair stylists, programmers, make up artists, and all of their assistants.

-       As a model, white privilege is taken to the extreme. She gets free things for how she looks and not who she is. There are many more people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are. Racial profiling is prolific in law enforcement.

-       She recognizes that her career creates an illusion that permeates through teenage girls and their insecurities. But once you become a model, that insecurity doesn’t stop. It becomes amplified. 

Advertising: A Lesson In Manipulation

This year I'm teaching my unit in advertising and my unit in social inequality at the same time.
The main goal for my advertising unit has always been the same: To understand a little deeper how our opinions and views are influenced by outsiders.
The main goal for my social inequality unit has always been the same as well: To understand that words have power. That there is a link between something as innocuous as, "You can't play," and a systematic segregation.
By teaching these two units concurrently, I noticed two polar opposite reactions with my children while showing them the same product in the different units.
Last Friday, I was giving my kids a fast and furious history to give them a bit of context of our social inequality unit. I started with human migration in general, followed by Christopher Columbus' voyage, his extermination of the Arawak people, the birth of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the birth of the United States, The Civil War, The Jim Crow laws of the South, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama. It's a dizzying amount of information, and we slow it down and build timelines and other activities to make it more concrete, but one of the images I show during the Jim Crow portion is this:

The kids were outraged with Coca Cola. They couldn't believe that something that they knew about and drank would be a part of this.
Today after dissecting a lot of different print ads and coming up with some genres of advertising, I asked them to rate the following commercial:

I asked the kids to think about how this ad affected them positively on a 10 point scale. 1 being not at all, and 10 being life-changing (with a little hyperbole taken for granted). Most kids said 9 or 10, and the lowest rating was a 6.
It wasn't until after class that I started thinking about the contradiction of the two reactions. After the first image, the kids were disgusted with the soft drink. After the video, they were salivating and cheering. Of course it's the same product. It tastes the same. But the image and video manipulates how we like something. This isn't a human revelation. But it is a teaching one. I'd like to search for more images and ads that feature the same product but invoke opposite reactions.

Updated Workshop Presentation For Digital Literacy

Today I got the news that I've been chosen to present at the NESA (North East South Asia Council of Overseas School) Educators Conference this Spring.

I decided I'd spend the afternoon updating my presentation. I'll go into it in depth in later posts, but below is my updated "Developing Digital Dendrites: Teaching Internet Literacy" Prezi.
The changes I made are primarily from feedback I got from my initial presentation at Lincoln, but they're also from some new blogs that my kids and I were trying at the end of the semester. They are:

- Added selected posts from both student blogs and our class blog.
- Trimmed the embedded videos to be much shorter and relevant.
- Added duckduckgo's tracking page to the presentation.
- Dropped the Play It Off Cat video showing the dad yelling at the son. Some people were uncomfortable with it.

My Class Economy Part 5: The Christmas Firings

On December 25th, I'll send my class a mass email outlining how they were each an invaluable resource during the first semester economy, but I no longer need their services. In short, they're fired from their classroom jobs. They'll receive a small severance package upon their return to the classroom in January. Good luck and Godspeed.
Trust me.
This is not as nearly as cruel as it sounds.

Or cold. Or hairy.

In fact this might not even warrant its own post. But the Christmas firings of all classroom employees marks a fundamental shift in how I run my fourth grade class economy, and I thought it was important to highlight not only it, but the shift in thinking that occurs in my students.

During the first semester all students are my employees. I call them government employees, and I represent the government. They all get more or less the same salary, which varies slightly according to their work. The bankers work the hardest, so they get paid a little more than the rest, but it's not a huge difference. That changes second semester, because the security blanket of a steady paycheck evaporates. 

My Objective Was Never To Recreate Joe Versus The Volcano

The sole goal for the first semester though is to prepare my students to be entrepreneurs. That means to teach the kids how to deposit and withdraw money, but also give them the tools and lessons to help them succeed on their own.

By the time we have our last class-economy-class in December, most everyone is begging to be fired. Not because they don't enjoy their jobs. But because they're ready (or they think they're ready) to venture out on their own. To help with the transition, I provide business grants for startup businesses in January and a couple other opportunities for grant money.

My Christmas Email To My Class

Despite how I prepare them, here are some lessons that can't be taught, but must be learned with experience:

1) Don't Partner With Anyone.

No matter how many warnings I give or cold hard numbers I throw at them, my students want to partner with each other to open their own business. This is because partnering with someone does two things that will hurt a small business in our small microcosm economy. 

- It takes away a potential customer, since that customer is now your partner, and

- It forces that business to make double the amount of money to make rent.

Partners 'Til The End

The second point is the key. Instead of the business having to make 700 moneys for rent, it now has to make 1400 moneys in a month. This is a crazy amount of moneys, because no one knows how to price anything in the beginning. Up until January, no matter what a child did, they would get a paycheck at the end of the month. To go from that to the harsh reality that you now have to make your own money is something that has to be experienced to fully understand. 

Partners do expedite my discussion of welfare and taxes however. As soon as someone doesn't make rent, I introduce a tax on rent. The students that can afford to pay rent have to pay a little more to cover the students that can't. The alternative is that the entire economy collapses. The more students that can't pay, the higher the tax is.

2) Spending Money Is The Best Way To Make Money

I artificially encourage buying when we do start selling to each other. If I didn't, no one would dare buy anything, and I'd be stuck with a buch of hoarders on welfare. So I have the following mechanism built in for our second semester class economy:
For every product that you sell, the government will buy something from you of equal value.

Shut Up And Take My Money!

Collectively if this rule was fully realized, everyone would make a ton of money and probably create a class of millionaires. It's never fully realized though, and the rule does what it is supposed to do: encourage students to spend and make deals with each other to scramble enough to make rent. 

3) You're First Entrepreneurial Idea Won't Sustain You

Customers are a finicky lot, and there are only so many bookmarks you can sell to one person. If your customer base is only between 11 and 20 people, you'll need to diversify your product.

Gaze Upon My Colorful Wares

In order to succeed during the second semester, a student entrepreneur will go through several reincarnations of their business. Those that get stuck into selling only one product are usually the ones that suffer in March.

4) You'll Never Make Bank If You Price Your Bookmarks/Stickers/Pictures/Comic Books So Cheap

In the beginning, students have no idea how to price anything. Many will start by pricing their products between 10 and 20 Moneys. This means to make rent, they'll have to sell between 35 and 70 products each month. There are two problems with this: 

- They don't have 35 - 70 products to sell.

- They don't have a customer base that will buy that much. 

The biggest class I have had the past three years is this year's class of 21 children. My previous years I've had 11 and 12, respectively (I know, that's crazy). But figuring out the right price model- what people will pay and how much they will buy- is an important lesson that can't just be taught. It must be experienced.