picture show

I'm finishing up my second to last week of classes right now; next week I'll be giving the classes a short performance test, and then the week after that is finals week, and I have no classes. Because of a schedule change, I have no classes a week from today, so I had to give the performance test to a couple classes today.

The performance test is basically a brief quiz which covers some of the stuff the students ostensibly learned in my classes this semester. One question asks them to list five adjectives that describe a certain person, without using their dictionaries. I put a picture up on the television screen (there's a video input from the computer in the classroom), and they write about that person. I ended up using a photo of Zhenya (my adopted half-sister). I'd already burned a few photos onto a cd at the beginning of the semester, thinking of using them later, mostly pictures of my family from my graduation in May. The performance test only lasted about 15 minutes, so I wasn't sure what to do for the rest of the period. They reacted really strongly when I put the picture of Zhenya up, I think they were excited to see something from my life. So after the first class finished the test I showed them the rest of the pictures on the cd. They all thought Azelyn was beautiful, and Samuel was handsome, and Dad was either handsome, or just 'very good.' I also showed them a photo from Azelyn's prom, which they found really interesting.

For my last class, I decided to try to show them more pictures, since we ended up with even more down time. There was also a picture on the CD that I'd overlooked the first time of me, Gemma and Mike Hoppa, a picture the Quest took of us when we were Renn Fayre czars. This class insisted that I zoom in and pan around on most of the photos, and on this one they started yelling, "Princess Diaries!" when I zoomed in on Gemma's face. "The Princess Diaries 2" is a pretty popular movie right now, and I guess they decided she resembled the actress. It seems like a student habit to point out resemblances in most people they see, evinced by the number of students who bear somewhat obscure nicknames based on their appearance (like Teletubby--inventive but I have to admit when I thought about it, it made some sense).

After I ran out of pictures on the cd, I went to a couple websites, like the Reed website and other websites with pictures of my friends. I showed them another picture of Gemma and they yelled, "Model! Model!" Then I showed them a picture of my friend Hoku, and they also responded with, "Ooh, model! Model!" And then a couple girls started yelling "Blind meeting! I want a blind meeting with your friend!" It was interesting to see how strongly they responded to sort of more professional looking photos, for instance the candid one of Gemma that her brother, a really good photographer, took when they were on vacation, and the sort of 'publicity-shot' eque pictures of Hoku (big movie director that he is). They also freaked out and seemed somewhat disturbed by a pretty tame picture of Dan Denvir wearing a wig.