Activities using the movie “Horrible Bosses”.

Teachers are always asked by their students and even their bosses to use different elements to turn the classes more interesting. Movies are a good way for doing it. But how can we use a movie as a pedagogical tool for learning?

It’s not only about playing the movie and come back to normal class again. The teacher should prepare in advance to point the students the important topics, and parts of conversation they should pay more attention.

I prepared here some suggestions to work with advanced students.

1- Analyzing the content of the movie “Horrible Bosses”

This worksheet was prepared to generate a debate supposing you have more the 1 student in class.

Guidelines:

Debate:

Divide the Class in two groups;
Each group is supposed to be for each one of the articles.

Group 1 is going to defend a more conservative opinion expressed by the New York Times article.
Group 2 is going to defend a more liberal ideal expressed by the second article from Examiner.com.

Discussions:
The students must express their opinions about the statements below. The teacher are supposed to manage the debate by provoking the students, but not to support one’s ideas.

The movie “horrible Bosses” is a crude, charmless and dirty comedy.
Horrible Bosses must not be broadcasted on TV, due to its full-mouthed content.
Humor is about being crude and sometimes even offensive.
It’s totally possible to be funny without being cruel.
Comedy must have no control. If you control it, it’s not fun at all.

Download Worksheet with the activities: DOWNLOAD

                                                                            DOWNLOAD (teacher's guide)

2-    Horrible Bosses discussion:

This worksheet is about the issues treated in the movie. Its objective is discuss about the characteristics of a “Horrible Bosses”. And there is an article by Geoffrey James - 9 Core Beliefs of Truly Horrible Bosses- to support the discussion. Here they are not supposed to discuss about film at all, but about the issue the film illustrate.



Download Worksheet with the activities: DOWNLOAD

3-    Horrible Bosses - Multiple choice questions:

Here a very funny activity of multiple choice to simply evaluate the comprehension of the movie. It could be applied as a supplement to the activities above, or alone.

Download Worksheet with the activities: DOWNLOAD



*Know in advance about the kind of students you are showing this movie. It is a very dirty comedy whose language is not appropriate to very young teenagers or even conservative adult students. But on the other hand it is a very valuable tool to show them, the bad word they surely are going to face in the real life, words that we are not permitted to mention in the classroom.

      Have some fun with your students, and please comment the content of the worksheets. Suggestions and even corrections are welcome.See yah!