As an English or foreign language teacher I’d be all over the “small people” quote by BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg. It’s not going to be useful much longer so act now.
Questions:
- Should this comment make people mad?
- What did he mean?
- What should he have said?
It’s a beautiful entry to arguing about word choice, synonyms and nuance. In this case, one word really mattered quite a bit.
It might be fun things like have students reword famous quotes/sayings using synonyms to make them offensive or otherwise rob them of power.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
becomes
“A chopped up house, will fall down.”
Minnesota’s “Land of 10,000 lakes”
becomes
“Our state has a lot of standing water”
After you get them written, you could have them post them in some way and students could try to figure out what the original quote was.
Another bonus was I found that I could search MSNBC video by certain keywords- in this case, small people. It highlights those words in a transcript and shows the points in the time line where the words occur with colored dots for the video. A really nice way to quickly get where you want.
