Sandra K. Friday
Because of its geographical and cultural remoteness to us and yet, at the same time, our political and military involvement in the region, the first film that I have chosen for my unit is from Iran. Most of my students do not know where to find Iran on a map of the world. As we locate countries in various parts of the world through our films and stories, students will name them and the countries around them and color them in on a blank 11" X 14" map of the world that they will keep in their two pocket folders.
Reminding the students that the story we read focused on Geoffrey Canada's childhood anxiety, I will tell them that we are going to the other side of the world where, while many things are different, the anxiety of a nine-year old boy is just as acute as that of Canada who, at five, is confronted with the horror of having to fight his best friend. The story we read had essentially one scene. The film is one and a half hours long and has many scenes. I will introduce the use of storyboards to emphasize sequence and to track Ali's anxiety that increases as the pleasures and innocence of childhood fade. Except for brief interludes of levity, the responsibility of growing up is piling itself upon Ali.
The movie can be divided into more than a dozen scenes; the first two scenes establish the root of Ali's anxiety and place it squarely on his young shoulders. Coming home from school, he picks up his sister's only pair of shoes at the repair shop, stops for fresh bread and potatoes as directed by his mother, who is nearly bed-ridden from a bad back, and while he is sorting potatoes at the market,
we
watch a bagman come by and, inadvertently, take the plastic bag with her shoes in it, along with the other bags that the proprietor has put out for him. Ali in his frenzy to find the shoes where he tucked them among the baskets of produce outside the market, accidentally dumps over several baskets of produce and is driven off by the proprietor. There are several clues in the first scenes that Ali's father is much too poor to simply buy Ali's little sister Zahra another pair of shoes. They haven't paid the rent in five months. The father is also strict and does not spare the rod, so Ali does not want him to find out that he has lost Zahra's shoes.
To motivate students to pay attention to the cultural differences in these first two scenes in the film, I will tell them that for every five significant differences they can jot down, they will earn twenty-five extra credit points, up to 100 points or twenty significant differences, numbered in groups of five. They respond well to extra credit challenges. After we have watched these first two scenes, and they have had time to brainstorm the differences, we will do a "chalk talk" activity, or they will call out the differences and I will record them on a transparency on the overhead projector. If I use the overhead, I can copy the transparency for everyone.
After recording these differences, students will
write a response
to these first scenes, possibly predicting what will happen, responding to the differences between Ali's life and their own, or commenting on the setting and customs they saw. We will revisit the prompts students used when they wrote a response to the Canada story and I will add in a few more prompts for them to record. In fact, students will begin to make a list of prompts for responses to stories. They can keep this in their folders, and refer to it whenever they are asked to do this activity.
Now that students have observed differences in Ali's culture and daily life from their own and they have written a response to the first two scenes, I will show these two scenes again, asking students to focus on all the indications that Ali is experiencing anxiety. For example, when he comes out of the produce market and cannot find the bag with the shoes, he becomes frantic and digs around under the baskets of produce until he has tipped them over and the proprietor comes tearing out and drives him away. We might set up a
web
or
spider graphic organizer
with "Ali loses the shoes" in the center and then, on tendrils or legs, record each indication of anxiety that we observe. There are plenty. These indications of his anxiety also establish conflict in the story. On the tendrils or legs students might indicate what kind of conflict Ali is experiencing in each incident. Modeling this, I will review various categories of conflict, e.g.: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. society, man vs. himself.
Students could use this same
web/spider graphic organizer
at the end of the story as the types and levels of anxiety have multiplied for Ali. It turns out that he must try to win third place in a race where the third-place prize is a new pair of sneakers. And in his daily life he is confronted again and again with the impatient principal because he arrives late to school. Of course, we want him just to
tell
the principal that he and his little sister are sharing the same pair of shoes, but either because he is a child, or because of his culture, and/or because he is afraid of the principal and that his parents might find out, he just stands there being reprimanded and crying. Even when six-year old Zahra runs as fast as she can from school to the meeting spot with Ali, it is too late for him to run to school and be on time. And, the day one of his over-sized shoes drops off Zahra's foot into a gutter and starts rushing down a canal out of her reach, the viewer is already anticipating the outcome for Ali if he ever
gets
to school.