Review: Akeelah and The Bee Movie (13 January 2011)

Movie review: Akeelah and the Bee (13 of January 2011)

Today, we were watching Akeelah and the Bee during class.

Akeelah and the bee is a story about Akeelah Anderson, an 11 years old girl and went to Crenshaw Middle School, who is a bright girl in school and find her interest in words but lives a poor life with a widowed mother and three siblings. She were asked by her principal to enter the spelling bee contest but refused to do so; afraid of being called as a nerd in school. Akeelah who is being isolated in school felt it more after winning the Sricpps National Spelling Bee in her school. After met a new friend, Javier Mendez, and new rival, Dylan, during state competition, Akeelah realized that she needed a coach as everyone who enter the spelling bee came from a rich family and they have their own coach and seek a help from Dr. Joshua Larabee, Professor in UCLA. Akeelah faced a lot of obstacles in order to win for the spelling be; from her mother, who refuse to let her enter the competition in the first place, her friend who thought she had abandoned her, from the society who put too much hope on her and her own coach who has his own dark secret and also from her rival, Dylan. But towards at the end of the story, she managed to dodge all the problems and won the competition and became friend with Dylan.

In my opinion, this story is quite good and it is very suitable to watch during free time. The storyline is so easy to understand and direct although the way they talk are quite hard to understand for me. Other than that, the movie is suitable to watch for every different kind of age.

What attract me to this story is on how Akeelah shows her passion while spelling the word. She was fast and full of passion. How fantastic! In this movie, the way Dr. Larabee is teaching Akeelah on the words is also interesting. At first, he lowered her anxiety by asking her to read the words on the wall. I realized that it was as a method for him in order to lift her spirit towards the competition and by doing this, it is related to what I am learning now where we, as teachers, need to aware of our student’s surrounding. By doing this, I can see through the movie that Akeelah is becoming eager to learn and full of spirit during her exercise. Other than that, I can see that Dr. Larabee had used Akeelah’s potential in spelling the words by using own her specialty in remembering which mean that he has used Akeelah’s ability and specialty as her strength. This remind me that, in order to gain student’s attention and to make the student’s success in her study, I must find and know their weakness and strength and use the ability to enhance their performance in their study.

There is a different of Dr. Larabee's way of teaching and my teacher's way. One of the differences is that, my teacher used to teach us according to the syllabus and text. there are times where we did not use the text at all, instead, we were using own our creativity and thinking during the lesson. these took place when the teacher askes us to rewrite the story that we think it is better to be have the storyline the way we imagine rather than the normal, happy ending one.