Teaching Rhetorical Devices

My third and final video teach went pretty darn splendidly, if I do say so myself.  The students had copies of three movie speeches.  We then viewed two of the three speeches, and I modeled answering questions about what the speaker was saying and how they were saying it.  I wanted students to discern between the literal message of a speech and the rhetorical and persuasive devices that helped transform their message into something acceptable.  I was defining and giving examples of persuasion, but I was also trying to break down the elements of persuasion in the hopes that students would be able to incorporate some of the rhetorical devices that I presented into their own writing.

The first example I used was the “You can’t handle the truth!” speech by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.  That speech is an amazing one to analyze.  He is essentially justifying the cover-up of the murder of an American Marine with rhetoric.  The students really seemed to perk up when I showed this clip, so on my cooperating teacher’s suggestion, I played the clip twice.  This speech helped me to easily model for students how to discern the What and How in a particular speech.  Many of them seemed to know plenty of persuasive devices, so when I proceeded to ask students to pick these out of the piece, they were ready to answer my questions.  The last part of the worksheet asked to combine their thinking in the first two questions: they were to analyze how the content of the speech and the rhetorical devices worked together to create something new, complex, and eerily persuasive.

I am teaching the same lesson in a few minutes during fourth period.  This time I want to allow students to work together in cooperative groups during the guided practice.  It wasn’t until I taught the lesson that I realized that I needed to allow the students to talk more about what I am teaching them.  This little change in plans will hopefully allow for better answers during the independent practice portion of their lesson.

And a few words about “edutainment”.  I liked my lesson because I knew it would get their attention, it was controversial, and it allowed me to analyze short pieces, which is a must with this class of reluctant readers and writers.  I am pretty positive that I will use media as a teacher quite extensively, though not the exclusion of novels, articles, poems, graphic novels, novems, poems, short stories, biography, propaganda, (I could go on).  It’s not an either/or situation.  I would argue that by showing them a clip of Jack Nicholson’s rage-filled oratory COUPLED with a transcribed copy of what the words actually said made the words on the page more powerful.  Students saw how the words affected the message, and that is what I want them to take away from a Language Arts class.

This lesson was also great because I can think of soo many extension activities.  Maybe I’ll write more about that later, but for now I have some teaching to do….