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I’m on my third year teaching a college-preparatory Film Analysis class and I’m loving it. Not only because I love film, it’s a really popular course and showing Casablanca makes for some easy lesson planning. I love the course because there’s tons of content. There’s a textbook! Students learn things like the meaning of “rack focus” and “continuity vs. montage approaches to editing.”
I know that many people do approach the Language Arts curriculum as “content” focused. Our state achievement tests lean that way a bit, but I was bred and trained to think of English as being about literature, analysis and writing. I’ve never had much to do with teaching and testing students’ knowledge of the Elizabethan period, or the terminology related to classic rhetoric. There is stuff that’s important, like the various types of irony or the different forms of metaphor, but I’ve always figured students would learn that kind of thing by osmosis. The bottom line has always been their understanding and analysis of different kinds of text and their ability to express themselves in writing. There’s some other stuff that matters, but that’s the really important stuff. We pay attention to vocabulary, terminology and history, for example, but I’ve essentially never tested whether or not students learned it.
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