ESL Week 2:
On Saturday afternoon at the Queens library ESL students used a list of past tense verbs to write and talk about what they did during the week. Commonly used irregular and regular verbs that they changed to the past tense included: be, begin, choose, come, do, eat, give, go, have, know and make. We studied images from Zhang’s Mao series and talked about the definition of satire. Satire as used by Zhang in his Mao series is used to reclaim individuality in situations of repression. Both students and teachers talked about the need to have a sense of humor in challenging situations and gave personal examples of times of where we have used humor to reclaim a sense of self. We watched a video of Zhang’s opening that scanned the images of The Big Red Door and the Great Wall With Gates II and discussed the meaning of these images. For a free exercise students made collages from different magazine images, exploring the use of opposites and contrast to show humor. We worked without a definite end goal in this collage exercise, exploring process and materials while creating surprising and unusual juxtapositions of various images.
El sábado por la tarde en la biblioteca de Queens nuestros estudiantes de ESOL utilizaron una lista de verbos en tiempo pasado, los escribieron y usaron hablando sobre lo que hicieron durante la semana. Se vieron imágenes de la serie “Mao” parte de la exhibicion en Queens Museum del artista Zhang y hablamos acerca de la definición de sátira; La sátira usada por Zhang en su serie “Mao” como un llamado al espectador para recuperar la individualidad en situaciones de represión. Tanto los estudiantes como el profesor hablaron de la necesidad de tener sentido del humor en situaciones difíciles y dieron ejemplos de momentos cuando han utilizado el humor para recuperar el sentido de individualidad. Se presento un video tomado durante apertura de la retrospectiva de Zhang en la que se aprecioa imágenes de “La Gran Puerta Roja” y la “Gran Muralla” y se discutió el significado de estas imágenes.
