Dave . . . Teaching Words

Our district pretty much told us to pause instruction this week because so many kids have religious holidays (Orthodox Easter-- and we have a lot of Coptic Christians in our school . . . not sure why we didn't have this week off? but I guess the borard wanted Spring Break to coincide with Passover? it's impossible to please everyone) and so I decided to show a movie that fit with our current text: "Always Be Optimizing" by Gia Tolentino-- and show the kids what happened around the time when they were born and give them an explanation as to why they might not be able to afford a house or get a mortgage and might be living in their parents' basement for the near future—and so I reviewed the terms of when various agents in the marketplace optimized mortgages, mortgage rates, adjustable mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, collateral debt obligations, credit default swaps, and lots of other financial tools and this led to the real estate bubble of 2008-- so I taught them lots of words and then showed them "The Big Short" because I was also looking for an example of "the cyborg" in Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"—which is alluded to in the Tolentino text-- and this is a person that embraces the artificiality of the technological world that we live in and both works within the system and rebels against it, sometimes violently-- and there's no better example of this than Michael Burry . . . the the Michael Burry that Christian Bale portrays in the film.