Now playing at your local elementary school

Governor here wants to make the school day and the school year longer.

I think both are already too long.  I have a bunch of reasons for thinking so and someday, if I ever get better at this blogging thing again,  I'll write 'em up.  But for now I'll mention just one.

Kids watch movies in school.

Since there have been movies and AV departments and that one kid who knows how to run the projector/VCR/DVD player that baffles the teachers, kids have always watched movies in school.  A teacher who is trying to keep her students' eyes open through a lesson on Shakespeare should reward them, and herself, with a showing of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, or Michael Almereyada's Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke.  Preferably on a big screen in the auditorium and not on the TV screen in the classroom, but you do what you've got to do.

When I was in high school I took a class in Russian Literature and the teacher arranged for the whole eleventh grade to get out of classes one morning to watch The Brothers Karamazov on the big screen.  It was a revelation to me.  I didn't know that Captain Kirk and Admiral Nelson could play anything other than Captain Kirk and Admiral Nelson, but there they were, starring as Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov along with The Magnificent Seven's Yul Brenner as Dmitri.  I learned a lot from that, not much of it having to do with Dostoevsky, but it was still educational.

But kids these days, my kids, anyway, and, from what I've heard, my brothers and sisters' kids and friends' kids and kids in the city of Newburgh, which is about 15 miles east of here, two school districts over, watch movies every week for fun.

All these kids in various school districts around New York State, which already has one of the longer school days and school years in the country, have at least two hours every week to kill watching movies for fun.

Couple weeks ago the eleven year old's fifth grade class watched a bootleg DVD of Night at the Museum.  One of the kids' dad scored it from somewhere.  I'm not sure what kind of lesson they learned from that.  I think I need to talk to his teacher about intellectual property rights.

Over in Newburgh, some junior high school students watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation last holiday season.

Their parents didn't see the educational value in that.  Many complained.  The superintendent reacted like a bureaucrat under siege, which is what she was and what bureaucrats under siege do, react reflexively and unimaginatively and with an increase in paperwork for teachers..

Teachers have to fill out request forms to show movies two weeks in advance and they can only show movies rated PG-13, PG, and G.  No more R rated movies for seventh graders.  Or, apparently, for 11th graders either.

"We want to respect (teachers') professional judgement," the superintendent said. "But an R-rated movie shouldn't be shown to anyone 17 years or younger."

Actually, an R rating means that 17 year olds can't watch the movie in a theater without an adult accompanying them and in practice that means that if they go with a crowd of friends that includes at least one kid who's 18, they're in.  But nevermind.

The trouble is that some movies that teachers have been using in their classes for legitimate educational purposes are suddenly banned, including Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List.

Teachers aren't happy.  From this morning's Times Herald-Record:

"Are we not supposed to deal with any of these issues that are generally brought up in R-rated movies?" said veteran secondary English instructor Mary Porpora, who argued that there's a place for the controversial in a high school setting.

"We feel it is our responsibility as educators to view and discuss even the most difficult topics in a safe and honest forum," said English colleague Jeannette Pape. "I think censorship undermines this."

There's the rub.  A PG-13 rating sets off more alarm bells in my parental brain than a R-rating because R ratings are routinely given to movies because they treat certain facts of life and issues seriously while PG-13 movies very often deal with the same facts and issues in silly, trivial, sophomoric, and insulting ways.

Sex and violence are as frequently depicted in PG-13 movies as they are to R rated movies, but they are treated as entertainment and wish-fulfillment fantasies and jokes. I'm about to generalize recklessly here but: Naked ladies in R rated movies are human beings.  Nearly naked ladies are objects of derision and aides to masturbation in PG-13 movies.  Violence is brutal, bloody, and gut-wrenching in R rated movies.  Violence is a cure-all and meant to be cheered in PG-movies.  Characters swear in R rated movies.  They talk dirty in PG-13 movies.

To put it another way, leaving aside horror movies and thrillers, R rated movies usually get their R ratings for dealing with life in a serious, mature, intelligent manner, which means facing up to a lot that is awful, scary, bloody, and violent, but also a lot that is erotic, intriguing, subversive, and otherwise intellectually and spiritually stimulating, which is to say, educational.

PG-13 movies are sometimes R-rated movies that don't feature any naked ladies or the F word.  More often than not they're G-rated movies with fart and barf jokes thrown in just to shake off the G or PG ratings that producers dread as the kiss of death at the box office.

What this means is that there are PG-13 movies that are far more inappropriate for classroom viewing than many R rated movies and a blanket policy like the one the Newburgh superintendent has dictated is like blanket policies always are educationally useless.

History teachers can't show their classes Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List, but they can show them Pearl Harbor?

Baz Lurhmann's Romeo and Juliet is rated PG-13, but Ethan Hawke's Hamlet is rated R.  I have no doubt that if an honest movie version of Brothers Karamazov were made today that, because of Dmitri's carousing and womanizing but more because of Ivan's war with God, it would have an R rating.  And, although I hate to contemplate the possibility of Tom Hanks starring as Atticus Finch, how about a remake of To Kill a Mockingbird?  What rating would that earn?

One of my regulars, Sunny Jim, is a high school teacher.  He managed to work William Kennedy's Ironweed along with its movie version into his syllabus.  I'm not sure how he got away with that one.  But there are any number of lessons on local history, the Depression, homelessness, responsibility, guilt, and moral redemption that are automatically excluded by Newburgh's policy.

Turns out the superintendent has another reason for her new policy besides keeping down the number of phone calls from irate parents she has to field.

In some cases, officials said, very long or very graphic movies might be more effectively shown in segments. With classroom time at a premium, and the district's English departments struggling to meet state benchmarks, [emphasis mine] the length of time required to show an entire movie might undermine the benefits, the superintendent said.

Ah yes.  Showing movies in class gets in the way of teaching to the test.  Can't have that.  No child left behind, you know.

__________________________________

Your turn:  What did you watch in school?  What would you show to your students?

Related: Here are the pages for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan at the website for teachers, History in Film, which I just discovered this morning while working on this post.  Note the number of R-rated movies on the front page.  Haven't had a chance to explore it in depth yet, but it looks useful.  Let me know what you think.

Comments

[Mike Schilling]

My wife is taking a course in business ethics. The teacher showed them The Smartest Guys in the Room. Perfect.

[Campaspe]

We almost never got to watch anything in class. We were shown the Zeffirelli "Romeo and Juliet" in two segments with the one nude scene carefully excised. Other than that, not much. But this was a school district where the librarian marked over the diaper-less kid in Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen."

If I were an English teacher, here are a few films I'd show in class, depending on grade level:

Far from the Madding Crowd
A Room with a View
Shakespeare Wallah
Great Expectations (Lean)
Oliver Twist (Lean)
Henry V (Branagh) (PG-13, I see)
Richard III (Loncraine) (but I see this was an R!)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
A Streetcar Named Desire
Much Ado About Nothing
The Age of Innocence
Billy Budd

... I guess that would fill up some hours. There are a lot of good literary adaptations out there. It would be harder to pick movies if you were a history teacher. But Natl Lampoon? in a classroom? gah!

[Idyllopus]

I use film with H.o.p. all the time because he's crazy about film. I even use lousy films, talking about why they portrayed the material as they did, why they are lousy films etc.

Last night and today I posted on using George Pal's Puppetoons "Tulips Shall Bloom" to talk about WWII and from there venturing to Youtube to talk about White Supremacists posting films of the Wehrmacht and how the Wehrmacht was portrayed as glorious and heroic in these films, the sense of power communicated in these films and how George Pal lampooned this. H.o.p.'s interest in "Tulips Shall Bloom" is the animation. He studies it over and over again to see how it's done and our table now is filled with little things he's making out of his erector set for his next try at animation. So, since he was crazy into that film I used it as a springboard. A plus is that it's a great little film.

We spent several days on "The Bicycle Thief" and post WWII Italy.

We spent a week on "The Seven Samurai".

"Metropolis" was again a week long venture. How different people viewed it. What Fritz Lang was communicating and yet how he pushed his actors to exhausting, endangering extremes.

There's a lot of fun animation in old cartoons but also some deadly stereotypes. We talk about those stereotypes and their history.

Godzilla was the springboard for talking about the atomic bomb and its effect on Japan and the world.

I tossed in "2001" when we were watching "Walking with Cavemen".

He's only 9 now so as yet we've been fairly limited but it would still be impossible to list all the films I've used as springboards, good ones as well as crappy D flick sci fi ones.

[Jennifer]

My daughter (5th grade) recently got to watch "RV" at school. At first I was thinking, what are they doing using school time to watch Robin Williams singing "The big rolling turd!", but then she told me that this was a *treat* for some other job well done and most was shown during lunch and recess. There are many parents around here though who keep their undies in tight knots so I was wondering how much flak the school got for this.

I'm all for using a well-chosen movie in a classroom setting. The only ones I recall from my younger school years were Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" and "Signal 65" or whatever it was called... it was the scare flick they showed driver's ed students.

[Michael Rebain]

I have two distinct movie watching memories from Catholic grade school in the 1960s: learning that JFK had been shot after we finished watching some Disney animated movie, and being mesmerized by The Cardinal when we saw it in the 6th grade. Among the movies I remember seeing on class field trips were The Singing Nun, The Shoes of the Fisherman and Hello Dolly! (that last one in Manhattan!)

[grasshopper]

I couldn't agree with you more about the rating system, Lance.
In high school I saw a Japanese war movie that upset me so much I was sent home as hysterical. The movie was directed by someone so famous that in 1978, a suburban English teacher (my father had forbidden me to take "Cinema as Art")a teacher, who no doubt considered himself subversive, prepared us for weeks before eagerly showing it. This was tenth grade and while I have always been embarrassingly emotional, sobbing over a work of art did me no harm. The emotional impact was so thorough, however, that black-and-white blood horrifically shed, bad subtitles, and no women on the screen did not keep me from over-reacting to the miseries suffered first by the soldiers interlaced with scenes of intimate, and thus worse to watch, miseries suffered by the defecting soldiers.
So swept was I by the slaughter and injustice that I had no clue then, let alone now, as to the title or the director's name. The actors were appallingly emaciated. Possibly it was a documentary.
But the movie has stayed with me far more deeply than all those (vaguely racist I remember thinking even at eight)leprosy movies, rife with saturated color close-ups of the disease's advanced ravages upon South Pacific Islanders with no access to antibiotics that Catholic students watched every Friday. (The Catholic school dismissed me in 9th grade.)
Anyone know the details of that classic Japanese war movie? [Siren?] One defecting soldier (excuse me if this is too gross, but the grossest images don't fade and in the movie's context it was not inappropriate) ate his own waste in a failed attempt to keep himself alive.

[Victoria]

Well, no wonder student evaluations from college students often include either "needs to show more video" or "not enough video." Because that really is the most effective use of the brief three hours a week you have them there in class.

[KEn]

Ran (Akira Kurosawa): in high school english class, after reading King Lear.

Eskimo (Woody Van Dyke, not Nanook of the North): in high school history class, to illustrate clash of cultures.

Witness (Peter Weir): in a different high school english class, and I have no idea why. I did get to see Kelly McGillis' breasts though.

Ran was actually pretty cool, and probably the first foreign film I'd ever seen. It is extremely bloody and violent, though, and somehow I'm surprised Mr Connaughton didn't get in any trouble for it.

[Amy]

Grasshopper, could it have been Fires on the Plain by Kon Ichikawa? I never saw it, but the DVD was reviewed on Roeper this week. It's about the remnants of the Japanese army in the Philipines hiding out, starving and cannibalizing each other. One guy survives because he has TB, so no one kills him.

[Mike Schilling]

In high school, a history teacher showed us "The Seventh Seal" as an attempt to show how different medieval life and thought were from what we knew (1970s California suburbia). It wasn't entirely successful (I think none of us could make head or tails of it), but I respect him for trying.

At least I finally understood the Woody Allen routine about the man who plays gin rummy with death.

[inge]

I do hardly remember any movies from school. Sleep deprived teenager + dark room = REM-phase before the teacher has figured out the remote control.

One exception: "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf". I do not know in what grade or for which class we watched it, but it has stayed with me as one of the two movies that I wish I had never seen in my life. I have since then done my best to stay away from anything that gets recommended by teachers or doesn't go well with popcorn.

[burritoboy]

"In high school, a history teacher showed us "The Seventh Seal" as an attempt to show how different medieval life and thought were from what we knew (1970s California suburbia). "

Wow........ a history teacher thinking that "The Seventh Seal" is an accurate depiction of medieval life is........ wow, that's not really just a minor mistake. The Seventh Seal merely uses a medieval setting for Bergman's own Pirandello-esque philosophy.

[Greg]

I saw Schindler's List and Birth of a Nation in History. In English we watched The Scarlet Letter (a PBS miniseries version), A Tale of Two Cities (ditto) and Romeo and Juliet (Zefferelli). In Social Dance, Friday was movie day, so we watched Footloose, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Shag, and Swing Kids. In Band, to relax the first class after a concert we'd watch Amadeus. And in Calculus we watched Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land.

[Suffering Bruin]

"Ah yes. Showing movies in class gets in the way of teaching to the test. Can't have that. No child left behind, you know."

Showing overly long and graphic movies can and will be a hindrance if they are not part of a standards based lesson plan. Lots of teachers use multimedia to add to a lesson. What is criminally negligent is to show movies just for the helluva it. "It's a great movie!" is the rationale of some teachers when what they're really saying is that they are too lazy to write a lesson plan that goes beyond tomorrow. By the way, the standards we teach to are a terrific guide (I'm in California) and yeah, I know NCLB is a bad joke but my kids are required to take tests that are standards based so pardon me for trying to do my job.

And ten degrees off the subject but has anyone seen "Freedom Writers?" God, if one more person tells me that I should teach like that woman I'll peel my own skin. She taught for three--count 'em, three--years, she is self-promotional (ask her colleagues) and very, very few of her students were successful at the college level because she was a little too helpful in her "teaching" while they were writing their papers. In short, she's a hell of an editor.

[Suffering Bruin]

Sorry for the double post but I'd like to back off from the confrontational and grouchy tone of the above post. I like the dialogue here and re-reading my post, it seems like it was written by a grouchy old bastard... which I just might be but I still would like to refrain from the aggressive tone. That is all...

[SV]

When I was in 5th grade in the mid-70's, the whole 'upper' school (5-8) got a really special treat. We all got to go on a field trip together to the local independent movie house, which was showing a movie that had just been re-released. We were all assured that it was both a special treat and a really great lesson in American history: Gone With the Wind.

Very educational. I especially remember learning how the KKK got started, protecting poor Scarlett's virtue from those murderous thieving Yankees and their [ex-slave] collaborators.

(Actually, the movie portrayed them as something besides "ex-slave" but I don't feel like prolonging the stereotype.]

I suppose the teachers meant well. It was, after all, supposed to be a classic, and in purely technical and artistic terms, it IS a masterpiece. But I wouldn't show that film to children. It would, however, be useful to a college class, as an illustration of historical Revisionism.

[Henry Holland]

And, although I hate to contemplate the possibility of Tom Hanks starring as Atticus Finch

Why not? He's already starred in that vile abomination, the remake of the glorious Ealing The Ladykillers, why not have him piss all over Gregory Peck's memory like he did Alec Guinness's? Guinness'? Guinnesses?

[weepingsam]

Anyone know the details of that classic Japanese war movie? [Siren?] One defecting soldier (excuse me if this is too gross, but the grossest images don't fade and in the movie's context it was not inappropriate) ate his own waste in a failed attempt to keep himself alive.

That sounds very much like Fires on the Plain, which I believe is just out on DVD. As grim a piece of work as you could ask, as well as the blackest of black comedies. (A style Ichikawa excels at.) Makes a fascinating companion piece to Ichikawa's Harp of Burma, also about Japanese soldiers trying to survive at the end of the war, but as redemptive as Fires on the Plain is brutal.

Another very good (and very grim) set of Japanese films about WWII are the Human Condition films, directed by Masaki Kobayashi. About a Japanese liberal conscripted into the army in Manchuria, where he and everyone else suffers for Japan's sins.

[Geoduck]

The one my school showed all the time (back in ye olden days of film projectors) was the Disney South-Seas coming-of-age flick Call It Courage.

[moriarty]

I went to a Jesuit high school in the 80s, and was shown Clockwork Orange, Death Wish, Silent Scream, Danton, On the Waterfront and The Breakfast Club, among others.

[harry near indy]

lance, i enjoyed your reason for why you favor an r rating over a pg-13 rating. i never would have thought of it myself, so thank you for mentioning it.

jennifer, the movie you called signal 65 -- it's really called signal 30. it was made by the ohio state highway patrol from films it made of auto accidents, many of them fatal, to scare students into driving safely.

i saw it when i took driver's education. my friends and i would laugh at the melodrama it in.

it also was auto accident porn, with a lot of red, red blood and twisted metal and limp, dead bodies.

signal 30 and other movies like that are now available on dvd.

moriarty, you just reconfirmed my belief that a jesuit education is superior to many, many others.

[KathyF]

I hope you did complain, about the bootleg copy of the film being shown. You should also complain about the choice of film.

In fact I'm not even sure watching any film is a good use of a student's limited time in class.

[inge]

About the legal aspects, many teachers I know never showed any films except those which were especially produced for use in schools and where the school board had purchased licenses for, because there was no way to do it legally, and showing movies, no matter how useful or educational, isn't something worth ending up in court for. The ones that did show movies usually trusted their luck.

[Jennifer]

Thanks harry. That was indeed the movie I was thinking of and you're right, it is car crash porn. Thinking of it made me think of the James Spader movie that came out in the mid-90's. I think it was called, "Crash". It was about car crash fetishes.

[Ebon Kreig]

I remember only a few films and they were from grade school. Our school/church had Saturday matinees in the auditorium where you had a choice of popcorn or an oversized lollipop (red or purple flavors) which may or may not have contained a star, I believe, which meant you could get a free one. I only remember one movie from the matinees; Jason and the Argonauts. I loved it. The two that were shown in school that I remember were Balloons (a day in a quiet European village as seen from the perspective of a lone balloon) and A Hanging at Snowy Creek (about a soldier during the civil war who was about to be hung having a dream about escaping death only to end with his body dangling over a bridge.) Don't even ask me what movies I saw in HS because I honestly don't remember one. I'm not counting health docudramamines either.
What would I show to HS students today? My list in no particular order:
Twilight Zones (so many) Rod Sirling was a visionary
Space Balls
I, Claudius
And the band played on
Catch-22
Duck Soup
Grapes of Wrath
All's Quiet on the Western Front
The Manchurian Candidate
Canadian Bacon
A Clockwork Orange
2001: A Space Odyssey
Quest for Fire
Less Than Zero
The Outsiders
I could go on and on but I stop for brevity's sake. I tried to encompass as much of the human condition as I could. I haven't included any epic historical dramas, although I would include the chariot race from Ben Hur and the Rhohirrum cavalry charge outside Minus Tirith from Return of the King. What? Lord of the Rings is not historical. Screw you, it's my list and my lesson plans. Pardon me. I stand by each choice and will provide lesson plans to any teacher out there who would use these films for class enrichment.

[Ebon Kreig]

Oh yeah, Screw Disney...

[Redbeard]

The Arkansas Governor's School, a six-week summer program, had regular, required movies. These varied from year to year, but included Bladerunner, Night and Fog, Alphaville, The Times of Harvey Milk, Koyaanisqatsi, Weapons of the Spirit, Birdy, and Ran.

[Sunny Jim]

I came to use 'Ironweed' in the classroom due to converging multiple crises in an inner-city classroom in New Jersey. The first was a-literacy, which is somebody's textbook term describing people who know how to read but refuse to. It seems to be a huge - and underreported - problem these days. My class was populated with such kids. I was given a single textbook to use with them, and speaking of crises, here was another: Have you looked at any high school literature textbooks lately? They are more often than not appallingly dull, lifeless and narrow in scope. Back in the Reagan years, self-appointed textbook watchdogs like the Gablers in Texas and Reverend Wildmon in Mississippi began making a stink at anything in school textbooks that they considered controversial, immoral, or in any way not to their liking. To me, these people should be widely exposed as the intellectual and academic frauds that they are. Like them or not, the lasting result we all live with has been an extreme chilling effect. The publishers simply avoid trouble - and save big bucks - by putting out the most inoffensive textbooks imaginable.

I was assigned some kids who were two steps removed from the youth house. The typical, cynical administration response was: "Just keep them out of the hallways." Expectations were low for these kids. I know it sounds like some cliched movie script, but with one greatly supportive supervisor and a well-stocked used book store, I began to put together a curriculum that clicked with these students. We read 'Ironweed' and bounced between the book and the movie. There were other things used that I just added to my lesson plans and which were not a part of the official district curriculum:

I used 'The Count of Monte Cristo'. I used a Pulitzer Prize-winning play called 'A Soldier's Play', which was made into a movie called 'A Soldier's Story', a Tobias Wolfe autobiography called 'This Boy's Life', which was made into a movie with DeNiro as 14-year-old Decaprio's abusive stepfather. Donald Woods' biography of Steve Biko, for which the author risked his life as he smuggled the manuscript out of South Africa in order to get it published, was made into a terrific film by Richard Attenborough ('Cry Freedom'). As you know, there was much criticism that followed Oliver Stone's 'JFK', Kevin Costner's 'Dances With Wolves', and Michael Moore's 'Bowling For Columbine'. I found the criticism and designed lessons around it, and we watched parts of these movies so the students could come up with their own written criticism.

Did using this stuff violate some school law? Could the classroom time been better spent with a more structured approach? All I know is that it worked to spark a lot of interest.

[Chuck]

Here's a short version of my film schedule. I've done The Third Man and Daughters of the Dust on occasion. And I'm currently teaching Harlan County, USA and I've been surprised at how well it teaches. Of course, this is for a college level class.

[Sabutai]

Huh. We showed RV to the kids today. Because our state's standardized test expects 12-year-olds to write for two hours straight (first and final of a 3-page handwritten essay). First time I've shown anything vaguely non-educational, because the test that measures how wel lthey learn had emptied their ability to learn for the day.

[Cris]

My 11th grade literature teacher finished off the unit on Conrad's Heart of Darkness by showing Apocalypse Now. It was intense unit, so she probably played the film mainly to get a break.