Can I tell you how fun it is to teach satire?!? Of course, no matter how many times I told the kids, "If you're getting offended by it, you're not getting the point," I still had students glare at me like I was a total sicko for laughing at Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal."
Then one student made a great point, "When does satire cross a line? When does it become mean for mean's sake instead of a joke to prove a point?" And that's a hard one to answer but a HUGE issue, especially with satire today. Could Don Imus claim that his comments about the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team were satire? How do we know a writer's true intentions? What if the creators of South Park really were racist people trying to promote their immoral ideas? My kids are so smart.
But we laughed a lot about boiling and roasting one-year-old babies ('cause you can nurse them for free for a year and get them bigger and plumper) and seasoning them with a little salt and pepper. And the next job: figure out how to effectively create satire in a technological/digital age.
Advice to teachers: get to know your kids really well, teach them what satire is, and then read "A Modest Proposal." You won't regret it.
1 comment:
Interesting. I worry people below the age of 20 just don't tend to get satire, but the idea of trying to teach it anyway is kind of intriguing.
I don't agree, however, that satire can never be offensive. It can go over the top or serve to perpetuate bad ideas. I mean, it can be done poorly.
Are kids really going to write satire or are they just going to try to write the wildest, most irreverent thing they can think of?
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