Someone you (shouldn't) Admire?
Ok, so I'm on the road now....my second move in the last month. Back at a school. The old same same.
Or is it?
Wonderful first day....let me tell you. Everything was going great; nice staff, nice students, old building, but wait...
So I started my second class of the day. It was a speech unit....so that mean students have to write a speech before class about a selected topic, we workshop it a little in the lesson, and then they give it. Easy lesson-not much preparation is needed. However, this time a student dropped a bomb in class. An atomic bomb. (I know I lived in Hiroshima, but trust me on this, the metaphor kind of works.) The topic of the day was something like 'a person you admire'....easy, I picked my grandfather.
However this one student comes in with a speech about Leni Rienfenstahl, an old German director. "Oh! Interesting," I thought to myself. Her speech seemed pretty normal, apparently this lady made some controversial movies and went to jail for a while, and made her last movie when she was over 100, shortly before her death.
"What kind of movies did she make," I unwittingly asked.
And the Enola Gay flew overhead.
"Well, she was friends with Hitler, and he asked her to make a movie, so she did. Actually she made many movies for him. When the Allies arrived in Germany, she was arrested for making propaganda films." She boldly stated. (Grammatical mistakes omitted)
"Well, yeah. That's...um...great. Holy, she's, um, quite a lady. Wow, Hitler." I cleverly responded.
Now, upon looking it up, this lady directed Triumph of the Will!!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Will (sorry, I cant get hyperlinks working on this Mac yet.) So to sum it up, this lady has great admiration for the foremost World War II Nazi propagandist.
Other than that she was a really nice lady, and I get to see her every week for now on.
Labels: Classtime