I know that is very difficult to bring new things into the classroom. I am talking about new material, technology or games. So, through this essay I’m going to motivate you to use new things in your everyday classes, but not any material, I’m talking about movies. And the special movie that I’m referring to is called “Elizabeth the golden age” Firstly, I’m going to explain why I think it would be good to use this kind of material in the classroom. Then I’m going to refer about negative aspects and finally a conclusion which will define if we should use films in the classroom.
From my point of view, it is very important that we as teachers use different material in the classroom. We can not be monotonous. Now, I think that a good thing to use is a film. But I’m not talking about any movie; I’m talking about Elizabeth the golden age. Here you have a little summary about it: Two empires and two faiths during the golden age find Queen Elizabeth facing bloodlust for her throne and familial betrayal. Papist Spain wants to bring down the heretic Elizabeth. They want to restore the Catholicism in England. So, Philip build and armada to attack Queen Elizabeth I. But the virgin queen fights with all her heart and sticks to her beliefs to save her people. She tries to show that she was not just a Queen, she was a heroine too.
The movie Elizabeth the golden age has a lot of positive things such as: spectacular visual effects, the quality of the film, the unexpected plot twists and the music, of course. It really calls the attention of the watcher because it has a very interesting story, and for me that is very important. From my point of view, a movie needs more than good actors. It is a group of things which are going to make people watch a film. And in this case Elizabeth has much more than just good actors. I strongly believe that here we can find a spectacular movie with all those things that make a film great. So, I firmly recommend people see it.
Elizabeth is a great movie with a lot of historical content, but we can use it to teach our English lessons. Thus we can have a nice class using something fun. We can use this movie to talk about tenses, to do some listening, sketches or even for describing people. So, movies are not just for watching them. We can use them as a tool in the classroom.
On the other hand, we have to take into consideration that the movie has negative things too. One of those is the excessive violence that we can find there. So, the movie is not appropriate for children and sensitive people, they can feel very bad watching it. Another thing that I didn’t like too much is that it is a little bit complicate to understand the film at once. Therefore if you don’t pay attention to it you are going to get lost easily. I’m telling this because I got a little bit lost at the beginning, but then the plot captivated me.Also we are talking about a classic and most of the people are not accustomed to appreciate classic because they find them unoriginal. But you can find exceptions as Elizabeth.
Anyway, we can choose just some scenes, the best ones and show them to our students. Then we can explain a little activity and in that simple way we are going to be using something different. We can avoid that boring classes with worksheets and choose something simple as a movie and have a really nice class. I’m sure that everyone is going to enjoy it.
To sum up, I strongly believe that we can make a difference choosing simple things as movies to teach in classes. Nowadays teachers are doing the same thing as many years ago. We have different material that we can use almost everywhere. And everybody knows movies. Elizabeth is a great one, and I think that it would be good to use it to teach English or even History. So, try. I know that you will get good results. You just have to take Elizabeth into your classroom and see the difference.
“Modern Times” is a film which shows us how industrialization changed people’s life. The thing is that we can see trough the movie how many people suffered because they couldn’t find a job. Almost everyone worked in these factories where they were not treated like real people. They were workers with no rights or even decent salary.
So, what it brings modernity was mass production. This one was known because of fewer expenses and many profits. After all small producers were affected in a huge way. As a result, they could not sell their products because those were too expensive. Thus, people who had factories made things in mass productions and they were the only ones who had the opportunity to have a decent life.
To sum up, we can clearly see that there was no class mobility during those times. Chaplin showed us how hard it was to live in those circumstances in a funny way but it wasn’t funny at all. We could see how people were almost slaves of factories just because they wanted to have some food to take it home.
The reign of Elizabeth I is thought as a Golden Age. One of the contributions of Elizabeth’s reign was the literature because of the famous writers that we can find at those times, like Shakespeare for example. And explorers like Drake and Raleigh sought to expand England's territory overseas.
Elizabeth was well known because of her virginity, that’s why she got the name of “virgin queen”, and the fact that she never got married. She considered herself as the mother of England. So, she didn’t need a man to reign England. Elizabeth thought that to marry a man was to marry a country.
Another important thing from my point of view was religion. Elizabeth was a protestant queen, because she received protestant education. She was not a fan of Catholics. But anyway we could see the commitment that she had with her people because she was very stick to her believes. The most important thing was her people and she demonstrated that through her acts.
I am going to write you my reflection about the natives and immigrants in the formation of the United Kingdom. As we know United Kingdom is a very rich place in terms of culture. I mean, we could see trough the texts that we are reading how different people from different parts of the world got there causing changes . The thing is that these people had different abilities. So, the United Kingdom’s natives could learn new things about these new immigrants. Things like customs, art, skills and so on. Moreover, these people not just learn new things; they were creating a new culture too. So, United Kingdom’s culture nowadays is a completely new culture from the one which we could find thousands years ago. I think that it was pretty important the role of immigrants in the United Kingdom. They change the story there. From my point of view wars and invasions had to happen to create what we have nowadays. And what we have nowadays is not quite bad at all.
My conclusion about the set of questions and asnwers that we have is that the holyday had a big influence on those asnwers. If we had interwied in another date we had had a completely different set of asnwers. So, all those answers that we have are related with Spetember 18.
In my opinion if we interview some people on January for example people will think on vacations and that kind of stuff. So, we cannot have these answers like the whole true. Anyway, it was a good excersise to know what people think of culture and another topics too.
We can say that critical thinking is a reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments. That is one of the definitions that we can find for critical thinking.
Now, if we think about criting thinking in the classroom we can find many people that don't have any idea about what critical thinkg is. Nowadays it is a pitty to say that many school don't let students to think on their own, they just have to repit the things that the teacher is saying. We know that students have their own point of view about diffetent topics and we as future teachers have to let him to express what they feel. To teach English has a lot of advantages about "teaching critical thinking" beacuse English can take a lot of topics for discusion that another subject can't. So, we have to take advantage of that. Critical thinking can be boost, and I do think taht we can do something about it.
I really would like to learn a lot from this course, I mean, all about USA and Great Britain because I think that it would be very important for us as future teachers of English. I think that we have to know about the culture and the civilization of these two beautiful countries. It would be essential to us.
I think that we are going to learn a lot of thing in this course, but I think that we are going to learn other things related with education too. The thing is that when we meet a new teacher we meet a completely different method to teach, so, we can get thing that we believe are good and then we will be able to apply those knowledge when we are teachers.
And finally I would like to have help with texts because I’m not good at all reading texts of history or that kind of things.
And that’s it, I guess. I hope that everybody can enjoy the course including me =)
