Electrified Term Papers

Abstract

are delighted to use the equipment educationally. Highly motivated students require a minimum of training and, in fact, train themselves through close critical observation of television programs, if they are given the opportunity of expression through specific assignments. An electrified is such an assignment. Senior English students at King High School in Corpus Christi, Texas, convincingly demonstrated the relevancy of nineteenth-century Romanticism for twentieth-century Americans with reports that employed conventional techniques: theses, outlines, bibliographies. Yet there was one significant difference. composition was not several pages to be read by the teacher but a movie or slide presentation, accompanied by appropriate music. assignment came naturally after students read Wordsworth's sonnets, Composed on Westminster and the disillusioned London, 1802, and were asked, with camera in hand, to view their own high bridge at dawn. From the bridge the next natural observations included the skyline, the sparkling bayfront, the industrial section along the turning basin, and favorite haunts. A student with a camera cannot remain uninvolved in his environment, and no classes ever read with more feeling the sonnet The World Is Too Much with Us. These students, accustomed to responding in multi-media, immediately thought of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Waters and Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. With this the students had a mental grasp of a sight-and-sound composition. In this very brief encounter of past and present sensory impressions, the responding student was already cultivating Keatsean synesthesia, the habit of sensory coordination, translating the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of his world into the imagistic patterns of Byron, Keats, and Shelley.