The 12th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 12th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Language study is embedded in every 12th grade unit as students use annotation to closely review aspects of each text. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.

Students will consider the different ways that humor can be used by a writer to criticize people, practices, and institutions that he or she thinks are in need of serious reform. Students will read satirists ranging from classical Rome to modern day to examine how wit can be used to make important points about culture.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students research an aspect of modern life that they would like to lampoon.
Students read from satirists across history to absorb the style and forms of humor and institutions satirized.
Students write their own satire, drawing on techniques of famous satirists to criticize their targets.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What is satire, and when is it too harsh?
How can humor and irony make you more persuasive?
What do you think is funny? How far would you go to satirize it?
Who gets more reaction—satirists or protestors?

Students plot the six most important events in “Once Upon a Time” and discuss what they think the author is saying about life in South Africa. Then they look at how the story made them feel and where it seemed particularly Juvenalian.Lesson PreparationRead the lesson and student content.Anticipate student difficulties and identify the differentiation options you will choose for working with your students.

This guide walks you through the basics to get started on screenwriting. It's designed around my college-level screenwriting course, with writing exercises, assignments, and a sample syllabus and course schedule.    

"Focus on 'Henry V'" is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as teaching resources and in-depth case-studies of particular scenes. All chapters include rich multimedia and audio recordings of body text and image captions. In addition to a traditional Table of Contents, the digital book allows users to navigate the materials through multiple pathways and visualizations. In this way the book offers not only a cutting-edge, renewable OER for college and K-12 teachers but also a model for maximizing the affordances of the digital medium.

This open set of course materials for Film Aesthetics is a downloadable version of a course created for a learning management system. Included are learning modules and a quiz bank based on introductory film concepts including the following topics: Narrative Structure and Motifs, Mise-en-Scene, Cinematography, Sound Design, Music, and Visual Effects.

Discussing the basic positions of a film set, including director, producer, director of photography, editor, and the lighting jobs like grip and gaffer. 

This course examines problems in the philosophy of film as well as literature studied in relation to their making of myths. The readings and films that are discussed in this course draw upon classic myths of the western world. Emphasis is placed on meaning and technique as the basis of creative value in both media.

This class will investigate the ways in which the formal aspects of Western storytelling in various media have shaped both fantasies and perceptions, making certain understandings of experience possible through the selection, arrangement, and processing of narrative material. Surveying the field chronologically across the major narrative genres and sub-genres from Homeric epic through the novel and across media to include live performance, film, and video games, we will be examining the ways in which new ideologies and psychological insights become available through the development of various narrative techniques and new technologies. Emphasis will be placed on the generic conventions of story-telling as well as on literary and cultural issues, the role of media and modes of transmission, the artistic significance of the chosen texts and their identity as anthropological artifacts whose conventions and assumptions are rooted in particular times, places, and technologies. Authors will include: Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Christian evangelists, Marie de France, Cervantes, La Clos, Poe, Lang, Cocteau, Disney-Pixar, and Maxis-Electronic Arts, with theoretical readings in Propp, Bakhtin, Girard, Freud, and Marx.

The goals of this class are two-fold: the first is to experience the creative processes and storytelling behind several of theater’s arts and to acquire the analytical skills necessary in assessing the meaning they transmit when they come together in production. Secondly, we will introduce you to these languages in a creative way by giving you hands-on experience in each. To that end, several Visiting Artists and MIT faculty in Theater Arts will guest lecture, lead workshops, and give you practical instruction in their individual art forms.

This subject examines interactions across the Eurasian continent between Russians, Chinese, Mongolian nomads, and Turkic oasis dwellers during the last millennium and a half. As empires rose and fell, religions, trade, and war flowed back and forth continuously across this vast space. Today, the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s reforms have opened up new opportunities for cultural interaction.

This course examines representations of race, class, gender, and sexual identity in the media, with a particular focus on new media and how digital technologies are transforming popular culture. We will be considering issues of authorship, spectatorship, (audience) and the ways in which various media content (film, television, print journalism, blogs, video, advertising) enables, facilitates, and challenges these social constructions in society.

This course examines representations of race, class, gender, and sexual identity in the media, with a particular focus on new media and how digital technologies are transforming popular culture. We will be considering issues of authorship, spectatorship, (audience) and the ways in which various media content (film, television, print journalism, blogs, video, advertising) enables, facilitates, and challenges these social constructions in society.

Students will act out a popular movie trailer in the target language. Keeping with the original plot of the movie, students have to act out the trailer as if it were a different genre.

The topic for Fall 2006 is short film and radio plays. This course investigates current trends and topics in German literary, theater, film, television, radio, and other media arts productions. Students analyze media texts in the context of their production, reception, and distribution as well as the public debates initiated by these works. The topic for Fall 2006 is German Short Film, a popular format that represents most recent trends in film production, and German Radio Art, a striving genre that includes experimental radio plays, sound art, and audio installations. Special attention will be given to the representation of German minorities, contrasted by their own artistic expressions reflecting changes in identity and a new political voice. Students have the opportunity to discuss course topics with a writer, filmmaker, and/or media artist from Germany. The course is taught in German.

Students will plan a trip to a movie in Vienna, using the computer to plan the travel, figure out how to purchase their tickets, discuss favorite movies and actors/actresses, and figure out what snacks to have at the movie.

Students will plan a trip to a movie in Vienna, using the computer to plan the travel, figure out how to purchase their tickets, discuss favorite movies and actors/actresses, and figure out what snacks to have at the movie.

This 5-day curriculum teaches digital storytelling and media literacy skills through engaging youth to think critically on issues relevant to their life and future. This unit is guided by the question, "How does media contribute to positive social change?”

This course explores artistic achievement in a culture that over the past century has engaged in constant and intense imaginative self-renewal. The class studies film, narrative (e.g., Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), and poetry. Conducted in Spanish.