5/26 class record

Today I was shocked to find out about what had happened to Rab's mother in law and his son :(
But Rab's video reassured me that things will be okay. His son is sooo cute!!!!!!! x)
I hope they get better soon!

Before class started, we had a little CB meeting about what we wanted to do for the ICU Festival. As a class, we will be selling cupcakes (Cupcake Bakers... get it?! ;] ) most likely and we decided on a place near Bakayama, I think? and for both days of the festival. Thanks to Tomoya for organizing everything! We're planning on making a class t-shirt which will most likely be designed by our artist Sayaka, but she needs ideas! So give her an idea of what you would like to see on our potential t-shirt :)

Class itself was conducted by an ELP teacher named Sylvan. Not many of us were familiar with him, but his class was really interesting. Building on our knowledge of selection, slanting, and charged language from the Birk & Birk reading, he focused today's class on American political attack advertisements and how these qualities applied to them. We watched four commercials; two of which had the intention of persuading the audience NOT to vote for John McCain and two which suggested the opposite: to NOT vote for Barack Obama. We watched the commercials and were given handouts that showed each major scene and quotes from the commercials. Then, working in pairs, we analyzed the reasons the advertisements gave audiences to not vote for the selected individual, the evidence behind these reasons, any assumptions and examples of selection, slanting, and charged language via emphasis on words, voice of the narrator, images and colors used, mood of the BGM, etc. After discussing each commercial as a class, Sylvan also introduced the backstories of these commercials. I was especially shocked after learning about how McCain "does not know how to use the computer" because he was physically tortured in North Vietnam during the war and hence, cannot use his arms very well to this day. The fact that this is widely known and yet this commercial was still O.K. to be used on television is unfair and I felt sympathetic towards John McCain :( Nevertheless, these campaign videos are really worth analyzing, especially once we learn about the stories behind the scene. I'm really interested in the ways a single word or color from some type of media can affect the way people feel, so this may be a topic I should learn more about in the future. I wonder what would happen if they had these kinds of commercials in Japan.

Well that's about it for today.
:)