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You can easily find many special reports about the school shooting in Virginia Tech on April 16th, for example those from CNN, Newsweek, CBS, the Guardian or France 24. Class Activities
On eteach, a colleague asked for suggestions to deal with the event in class. Sandrine Babayan from Le Raincy suggested using an article from the International Herald Tribune, stressing the new features from this magazine : « listen to the text » and « printer-friendly ». [ Hearing the text read is really interesting for us! Although using a written document for an aural comprehension isn’t recommended, listening to the text as they read it a second time can help the students memorize the pronunciation of the key words. As an exemple, here is an article presenting the feelings of the students after the massacre, with a memorial in mind as for 9-11.] And Catherine Serreau from Versailles recommended the cartoons on Gaggle I chose this last idea and selected several cartoons which I saved on my key to be able to show them to the whole class with a video projector and I printed one of them for each student. Then I put all the pictures on the desk and invited the students to come and chose one. Then they had to work on a presentation to the class, stressing the cultural element in the drawing or the reference in the text, linking it to the event, describing how the picture manages to get a reaction from the viewers and provoke thought. They started individually, then went around the class to find if other students worked on the same theme and then did their presentation together. They also asked around about references and in each class there was a student who knew about uncle Sam, the Purple Heart, Columbine. I was surprised to discover that Columbine was remembered only by those who studied it in class (which means it is no longer a current event but an academic topic!) and that the pledge didn’t ring a bell…. For advanced students Here is what my students worked a lot on and found difficult: *** and I have just discovered the reference in this cartoon : it shows the same picture as the photo that was taken 37 years ago, on May 4th 1970, when the Ohio national Guard fired at students demonstrating against the Vietnam war on the campus of Kent State university and killed 4 students. Here is the site with the photo, the cartoon and an article from IHT explaining the link School shootings from NewsBusters
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