WGBH Journal; Course On Tv For

It is basic to start with what kids know already. When you want to teach them a host of other things what they know already is television. You can start off at a fairly sophisticated level with kids in teaching them critical and analytical skills when they already know the texts. Kids know Happy Days inside now. You don't have to wait until they've read all the sonnets of Shakespeare to start talking about the form and shape of the experience. Now there are things that don't go on in Happy Days and then when they do experience in Happy Days is limited but we feel we can call kids attention to that too. And move beyond television by moving more deeply into it. Several public schools in Watertown Massachusetts are using television as a means of teaching students to be analytical TV viewers. A report on this program is the first feature on today's show. Good afternoon and welcome this is GBH Journal and I'm Bill Katz. We'll also hear about the

visit of a local Latin jazz band to a public school in Minn.. And a closed mind will have commentary on the news. Public schools in Watertown are acknowledging the fact that television does play a major role and does have a major effect on those who watch. Which means virtually everybody. And instead of dismissing the medium as hopeless Several schools have instituted a course of study to make people examine TV critically. By brick oven is a librarian and media specialist in Watertown schools and Vince Khan's unary is an

independent producer and writer. Since last spring. They have been working on a curriculum which has the aim of teaching children to become analytical viewers in the courses which are taught. Excerpt of television programs are viewed and examined by students to develop what go in terms of visual literacy. The feeling among the teachers is that which kids have it can be turned into a critical I. Visited a few of these classes and put together this report. Just watching a few questions. Thanks for this sort of like a something like go like or go for English teach you how to comprehend a book like what you just read. That commercial is about you comprehend the commercial. Are. At least proponents of the notion that today's educated person

has to be educated in both print and visual literacy and that the visual literacy requires as much training as print does. And so what we've been trying to do is to deal with a medium which has the most impact on children in the global sense and dealing with it by using the imagery on the medium to explain a variety of notions. OK what's really OK with this. After after these beginning exercises in critical viewing. Children who are reluctant to express themselves or who haven't been especially articulate about their ideas are suddenly becoming more sound and willing to take eulogist

orally and in print. We've seen just a tremendous change in the level of sophistication of expression. They are dealing with abstract notions with concepts rather than just simple facts. What I think is very clear. There's more with that kind. Yeah. I'm down right now. If you. Think you won we did he look like much prettier. Let's get right

to me. But you know we didn't think it would go you know and we don't try to teach content for its own sake but we try to teach kids to recognize how content has been shaped and formed by the medium so that what they see and hear is not what would ordinarily come to their eyes and ears. But it comes to their eyes and ears through the eyes and ears of television producers and programmers and the makers of commercials. We're trying to get kids to recognize that that the content of reality is being shaped by the time it gets to them. Like your career they make them feel good you know I think in there they're better in remembering them than would be really really good or bad but usually if you know they're really into commercial really sort of big red cup football player you can do under pressure here who are I mean we could really mean

in me to make their women who spent a lot of time with commercial because A they are very effective very efficient bits of communication but they're also they also carry a lot of if he if he usages of verbal language of camera language. And so that there are there are rife for and they're ripe for analysis that are rife with problems and they were and they were and they were ripe for analysis. And we can we can go at them in great detail we can get at the whole thing but only 30 seconds worth of stuff 30 seconds with jampacked problems. Then too we try to look at the relationship between commercials and programs as a as a as an educational device because. You'll find quite often that the commercials in the programs go together for candy reasons. The subtext of the commercial will appeal to certain emotional needs. That we all have in the same way that the

programs probably will appeal to certain subtextual they will appeal in subtext to a ways to emotional needs that we all have making connections between those two. The kids get exercise in looking beyond the literal level both of the commercials and of the programs to making analytical connections. Our favorite is is one Cheerios commercial with a buy ionic woman. I'm always. Keeping with the gentle approach IMO. It was really powerful and she's like Flynn the woman they're not usually that strong in the family which really isn't that strong. They became plain

Cheerios by having an operation like you want to be like the Brannock woman except you can't have a operation so you wanted the Cheerios. We've asked kids then to go out and make a come in with connections of their own from their own TV watching they've come up with things like ABC twenty three. If you go back in the year like took pictures for special programs. And if you buy a camera you can take pictures and go back and keep the pictures like that go together. The other relationship that children seem to be getting a handle on now has been kind of fun for us really has been notions of form. And we find now they look at a football game and think of it in terms of a drama and can kind of break it up into points where they can identify the climax of the

game the denouement of the game and. It's weird but we had one little girl come to us and talk about game shows as wife and she wrote a little less say about how life is going forward two squares and then kick back two squares and what the things were that women had to do in order to get ahead and all this from an 11 year old child was pretty surprising to us and rather interesting and we're finding now that even when they sit for a TV show that they all seem to feel that they're watching very differently. I thought I could but I don't watch as much I just rather read a book a place company. But sometimes the shows get stupid and they don't make any friends they just kind of fall for what you said just read a book there are no commercials. The thing is like a pastime or some for me here except when it comes to a commercial I don't just stare at it and let it soak in I I really like get up and look at like look at all the side of it not to like just was absorbed.

We can't teach kids everything they're going to need to know. About television or life. But we can try to teach them some of the processes and some of the basic concepts that will help them to look at television throughout their lives as television changes. This year it's violence next year it's sex who knows what the problem's going to be. But look at it and decide what's really there. And then decide for yourself what you think or feel about it. The use of culture as a means of educating children can be both effective and

enjoyable not only can it help students to understand the society in which they live but it can also help them to understand some of the manifestations of ethnic variety. So it was not just for entertainment for the Latin music group from Boston. This is a public school in Lynn recently. Along with the group but several members of the GBH staff including David Friedberg who has this report. By lingual education lit up the faces of about 500 youngsters at the Corbett junior high school in the working class ethnic community of Lynn On a recent afternoon. To understate the atmosphere there students were enthusiastic as they streamed into the school gymnasium for a performance by. A Boston group noted for its fine Latin rhythms. Some of the GBH radio staff went along to introduce the program including host of Music America Ron Della Keyes. What you're going to hear this happening is really the best of what goes into making up. What we call Latin American music

now don't let that term for your Latin American music involve many different elements. Just like in this country we all come from different parts of the world. We come from people from Europe from the Dominican Republic. We have we have black Americans we're very proud of it all Americans. And. When you hear this music. This afternoon just bear in mind that everybody contributed. You'll hear elements of black jazz and also from the great Latin American countries bands like people in Brazil. So I think you're really going to enjoy. That's why we're here to turn you on. You write with musicians adjusting their instruments in the background. Even the dulcet voice of Rondo here is a left the audience a bit restless.

So there was no choice but to present a song. This rare performance was the brainchild of Ingrid Bucknell the teacher of bilingual students at the junior high. Her inspiration was to show how the cultural roots of Hispanic students and Lin have affected everyone's appreciation of music. I teach English effect and language to. Spanish. Children that we have here. To teach bilingual man. And I thought it would be a good idea. For my English classes originally to know a little bit about Latin American music and its influence. On the pop music that they hear in this country and so forth. And then the whole thing.

Kind of has expanded. To include. The entire school to hear. A little bit about this music and have the band. And so we're very pleased to have the opportunity to share this kind of cultural. Delight with so many of the Street of course because unfortunately so many times this area community is segregated. From the rest of. The school. From the rest of. The population. And I think the first. Day of. The entire school should have the opportunity. To know what a wonderful experience it is to have these kind of neighbors so close and that we can we have them we can learn a lot from. Them in Spanish. Here. In the school. And one of the ways of their music a sense you know recognizes a need to broaden the musical repertoire for Latin students. A percussionist with a group Human Didi's has participated extensively in special music programs of the Boston public schools. His presentation on a given

day might have the effect of turning on a student for life to good music scene then to really pursued a career in music. It is. You know it is already inside. If something like a concert motivates them sometimes because some people we search for a specific kind of sound sometimes we might hear a band that has that sound that we aspire to or something that we want to improve. But inside that sort of a name I help them to make their decision. Yes I like to do that you know this is something I really like to do. Just some others it's it's just another reinforcement and it's just you know seeing and different styles but you know musicians and. Professionals to widening the spectrum of musical tastes for among others students at the corporate Junior High School in Lynn Massachusetts for GBH tour and I'm David Freud.

Today Harvard got more mileage out of one commencement address than from all the victories of its crows and championship baseball team. The views of Alexander Solzhenitsyn every day for a full week following the subject of editorial columns or both as commentators interpreted refuted as his rejection of American democracy. To Ellen Goodman of the goal of his Harvard speech shattered an illusion but she observed he stimulated at

least a wave of national introspection about our values. And now a second wave has begun in letters to the editor appearing on the editorial page of The New York Times yesterday and a whole page of Solzhenitsyn letters in the globe today. His hybrid host would naturally expect appreciation of the American he thought from this great fall of communism. He must be on our side but not so the shock or surprise sharpened his rejection. I could not recommend your society such as it is today as a model for the transformation of ours. He saw our democracy as a triumph of mediocrity. The American Constitution that freed the individual from oppression by government. But what has he done with that freedom meows. It's been shaped by a system of laws but a society would know where the scale but the law is not quite worthy of man. The reception of Solzhenitsyn criticism has been a very mixed bag. He's been called the Great Prophet con man James Reston except it's also the materialism and mall squalor

of the Western nations. That's fair enough he said so many true and noble things Reston wrote that one wonders why he spoiled his message with so many unfair provocative and even silly comparisons. Mary McGrory had a simple explanation. He's a Russian and Russians otherworld supreme suffrage Freston considered the Russian had some good tough criticism to make of the press. He said some true and poignant things. Well that's a very mild account of what he did say. Solzhenitsyn the nonstop press is having the widest freedom in abusing it insensitive to its responsibility to give the public credible information. He turned around the press slogan of the right to know all people he said also have the right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip nonsense vain talk. He berated the precious shameless intrusion on privacy more than elsewhere. The press reflects the haste in this and superficiality that rather psychic disease of the 20th century. I haven't noted any of

Solzhenitsyn's press critics refuting his wildest words that the press in Western countries has become more powerful than the government has to go around the full speech next morning. It's writers and readers had a clear target. But the New York Times having failures the text had to run the substance of it five days later so their readers would know what they meant by their lead editorial. The obsession of Solzhenitsyn they conceded years and the right to call the West to a moral reckoning and that the nation is in thrall to material things. But I rejected his willingness to set aside all other values in a crusade against communism. That's an obsession the time said we're happy to forgo in this nation's leaders. Ellen Goodman turned his words back at him in summing up. I was left with a sense of irony. He was a man who had spent three years in seclusion in Vermont embroiled in his work on Russian life coming down to Harvard to report on America. He looked at America with Heyst innocence super officiality and then

withdrew to Vermont. The other irony of that extraordinary commencement which has caught no press attention were the long delayed and Riley awarded honorary degree to the discoverer of the basis of genetics and DNA. James Dewey Watson precocious investigator uninhibited author present Bach again his citation of what he went on to call a biological discovery that ranks with those of Darwin and Mendel and heroes a new and revolutionary era in the life sciences. But Watson's revolutionary discovery was made 25 years ago when the precocious investigator was just 25 on a fellowship in an English university. He had brought in the Nobel Prize nine years later shared with a British colleague Francis Crick his uninhibited account of their momentous discovery became a scandal on two continents. When he wrote The Double Helix the dull so we were reverently was several British science administrators as to make them look like kind of brands.

Watson was by then on the Harvard faculty. I remember making a laughing crack about it and meeting a senior I have a professor crossing the yard. He was indignant first of me for laughing but then that young Watson disc. Lasting rotten taste irresponsible. I have a coporation have and they agreed they refused to allow the Harvard University press to publish the double helix it was a violation of academic to promising not to say of good taste and caution was advisable against possible libel from overseas. The director of the Harvard Press left Harvard and took the rejected manuscript with him to the Athenaeum press in New York. It became a minor classic. With its candid recital of the gamesmanship played by the two young researches in pursuit of the highest prize of science it had this suspense of a whodunit as the partners played their hunches alternately thrilled and frustrated that the near misses hiding their progress from possibly a competitive laboratory colleagues keeping an anxious eye on reports from

America on the parallel research of diet Linus Pauling already a giant in the world of science. They beat him to it. The British proved less squeamish than anticipated. Now I've read that had rejected his book right Watson with Darwin and Mendel like the Supreme Court hybrid corporation members are appointed for life. But like the court members change the balance shifts and the climate changes. Mr Dooley would have understood the Supreme Court he said follows the election returns. With. With. With. And call Monday the 19th of June 1978 that City Beach Journal regional news magazine good Monday through Friday at 4:30. It is your editor for The Journal of modern

heads Dave engineer Michael Garrison And I'm Bill cabinets it's Monday. Do you practice money on monogamy. I have I'm a nation. It may be meaningful. With the.