Organized chaos? A little bit.

So my kids have been writing "letters of resistance" to our governor, our superintendent, our principal, our assistant principal, our English department chair, and our school newspaper saying that classes like ours, required by law to be "writing-intensive," should include in their curriculum "new literacies," like, for example, the iMovie projects they've been working on. (Also, some of them are writing to me saying that this project is bullshit and that it would have been better for them as scholars to have just stuck with a traditional essay.)

It's taking longer in some class than other for them to finish up their send-able drafts. So in one of my classes that's finished, we're making a video version of their letters as a whole class. Oh my gosh, it's so exciting. Today, they journaled for a while about how they could best utilize nonverbal communication and we watched a good example of a powerful nonverbal video. After that, they decided what the most important points were that they wanted to get across to their audience, and came up with the idea that they'll stand in a circle and each say one word at a time of their message as the camera follows along the circle. Then they broke themselves up into committees. There's a music committee that threw around a few ideas for background music that settled on "Robot Rock" by Daft Punk. There's a script committee that's putting together, in the most emotively powerful way they can think of, the sentences that they'll break down into their word-by-word presentation. There's a communications committee that's coming up with twenty different ways that the words can be presented, like spoken, written in refrigerator-magnet letters, typed on the screen of the laptop they'll hold up, texted into their phone screens, written on a dry-erase board, and my favorite, cellphone-videoed lips speaking the word and then held in front of their mouths. Finally, there's a team of directors who spent the class period listening in to the various committees and reporting back to one another in a way that helped them plan out a filming schedule for tomorrow.

How exciting are these teenagers. I mean really.