Today I woke up to a thick blanket of snow across my university campus. It’s the first time I’ve seen snow here in years, so I decided to scrap my planned class and teach a lesson based around a classic Simpsons episode: “Bart Gets an F.”
Lately, I’ve been teaching my students how to summarize, so the focus on this was simply having them understand and summarize the episode. It’s not hugely difficult to understand the overall ideas, and every student should be able to take something from this hilarious story.
First, though, I had the students do some vocabulary from the episode. They seemed to find it quite useful. I also threw in a few “snow day”-related discussion questions at the end of the PPT because my students love discussions.
The vocabulary takes about ten minutes to teach; the discussion another ten. The episode is a little over twenty minutes, and with writing and sharing their summaries, that should round out a one hour lesson.
— I found the episode quite easily on a popular torrent site.
