Friday, May 3, 2013

Due to the time commitments around coaching Track and Field, my blog entries have not been as frequent.  




Some of the students from the Senior School watched a documentary called Girl Model.  It is part of the Hot Docs in school film festival.  As part of my discussion with some of the students, I showed them this video from an old CNN news story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/26/living/real-women/index.html

The film follows the career of a 13 year old girl named Nadya.  Here is the trailer for the film:

Although there are are many questions that can be asked about modelling, here are a few questions.  These ideas come from the education package put together by Dimitra Tsanos, a teacher in the TDSB

- If the United Nations sees "child labour" as "any activity performed by a person under 15," wouldn't it be considered child labour to send young girls into the modelling industry at an age younger than 15?

-  Why is the modelling industry so obsessed with youth?  Is youth beautiful?  Innocent? Unflawed?  Is it the industry, the consumers or the parents that have created the demand for young models? What images do we see in magazines?  Why?

Here are a few other links to discussion around the use of young girls as models:

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/modelling-young-adults-a-fiction-20120228-1tzyh.html

Here are a few shots from the screening:

Here are a few images of some students working on the 1 Point Perspective Art in the classroom:

The use of the Promethean Board often provides the opportunities to pull up examples for the students to see or understand how things work or look.

Two Youth workers from the Abrigo Centre (located at Dufferin and St. Clair)  came in to do a workshop with the class (we were paired with another class).  They will be doing this with all of the classes in the Senior division.  They played games and had some discussions around the issues of Bullying and developing healthy relationships.

I will use some of the issues brought up during this presentation for a discussion during our Community Circle time.

I have a Math test to mark this weekend.  I did ask for students to complete Study Sheets for this.  Initially, only 3 did this for homework.  With a bit of time provided in class, all but three students did this.  I am not sure if the sheets helped them -- the ideas is that they should -- but I am hoping it did.  If not, Rewrites are always an option for the students.  Here is a creative sample taken from Zhao Lun's notebook:

The only homework for this weekend is the completion of the 1 Point perspective Art.  Here is a rough example, done by me, alongside the Success Criteria chart:

 Enjoy the weekend.