by Markella Giannakopoulos, staff reporter
Ms. Sacksteins’ AP Literature and Composition class read the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and created a satire project based on it. The class had to choose an element that was present throughout the novel and select an angle in which to film a movie that reinterprets the book through a modern perspective.
“I like to vary between academic work and creative multimedia projects. It’s a good project that synthesizes knowledge of the text and understanding of satire because they have to modernize it,” AP Lit teacher Ms. Sackstein said.
Although there were several challenges throughout the project, many had fun with it.
“I found the project to be fun, even though it was difficult to collect the quotes [from the book] and write the script and make sure it stayed true to the text. But once that was done, it went by fast and we had fun recording it,” senior Brais Sampedro said.
Sampedro and the rest of his group members chose to satirize the Pocket family, who were the “model” family in the upper class, but actually had several flaws. They modernized it by comparing it to the Kardashian family and named their 9 minute movie, “Keeping up with the Pockets.”
“It was the first year I chose the groups because it was necessary to push them out of their comfort zones. The history between students created issues that I had no idea of,” Ms. Sackstein said. “But the movies were really well put together. They were able to work through their problems, which was the biggest success of the whole project.”
Although they had fun and thought it was a really good project, many wanted to change a few things about their movies.
“I would probably [change] the way we memorized our lines and make sure that everyone memorized them,” senior Sage O’Brien said. “We worked really well with each other and got it done quickly, so we had several days to make sure it was well put together.”
The project was an overall success as the AP Lit students were able to get a better understanding of the book by analyzing certain parts of it for deeper understand and being able to relate it back to modern times.
