For Thursday, November 2, 2000 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 790 words
Film No R
My, oh, my, oh, my. Movies in the classroom rotting the minds of children. What's the next campaign? Banning No. 2 pencils as potential lethal weapons?
"Student in Willseyville stabbed with pencil during Scantron test. Movement afoot amongst a small, vocal minority to ban pencils."
To group all movies together as bad, even all R-rated movies, is just plain stereotyping, the result of lazy thinking. There are bad books, movies, standardized tests, teachers, and everything else, just as there are good ones. We focus on individual weak spots, we don't burn down forests to kill bark beetles.
If a teacher wants to waste away an hour of a child's time, he doesn't need to pop in a video to do it. He can just call, "Free time!" and let the kids goof off.
Truth is a high school student will no doubt hear more profanity in the halls during the six minutes of passing time between classes than he'll hear in a whole year's exposure to classroom films. Where is a lot of that foul language learned? Perhaps from watching ignorantly violent, low-brow R-rated shoot-'em-up movies in theaters that were hyped to naïve unsuspecting youths who have never been properly schooled in how to evaluate the quality of a film beyond its rating and exciting trailers.
Kids are inundated by manipulative, money-grubbing Hollywood executives who will do anything to get them into a theater to watch blood and guts films. Yet, educators are expected to ban film evaluation from the classroom. Duh.
Truth is we have classic literature that contains sex, adultery, murder, violence, child abuse, cruelty, assorted mayhem, and we don't even have to go beyond Shakespeare to find it. So these topics are somehow O.K. on ink and paper, but inappropriate on magnetic tape? Why? The few R films selected by teachers, you must trust, are not of the same caliber of R films most kids are flocking to the theater to see. Classroom films are sometimes R because of mature content, maturity being a goal of a good, adult-guided education.
In fact, research done in schools across the country by a Dr. Olson, who wrote Models for Teaching, rated 15 different educational activities based on effectiveness. Her findings placed movies twelfth. Guess what rated 13th below movies? Tests. Yep. Kids learn more from movies than from tests. Rehearsal is 14th. Small-group work is number one.
Drum roll. Guess what is the least effective, biggest waste of valuable class time? Lecture. Yes, a teacher talking to a group of inactive students is the weakest method of conveying knowledge. So, why aren't parents out there campaigning against lecture? Why aren't there letters in the city paper condemning the terrible waste of our children's time by the endless droning on and on of a lecturing teacher or columnist?
Guess what else destroys a child's ability to learn? Over-crowded classrooms. Give a teacher 140 students a day and tell me that he's always going to be able to dazzle them with profound, engaging adventures and process all their created reactions, and I'll show you a superhuman. Why aren't parents out there campaigning against overcrowded classrooms? Why not a letter to the editor that complains that a student gets, on the average, about two minutes of a teacher's full attention each class period. That's something worth griping about. Olson's research shows that in a class of 25-30, quality learning time is about 47-percent.
(I know there are parents out there who are complaining about the real deterrents to quality education, and I thank them.)
I have read some fantastic books in my time, and I have seen some awe-inspiring, life-altering movies. Novelists don't have a monopoly on genius. I share these works of art with my students. I seldom read a book and then watch the movie version, unless the film is exceptional, because it's just simply redundant. However, I will show a film that addresses a similar topic, provides valuable background to a novel, or is just darn good. If it's R, and it seldom is, I get parent permission. That's school policy.
To get down to it, for me, it's not a matter of inclusion or exclusion of films in a classroom. To me it's a matter of defending democracy. If a small, vocal minority of parents is so adamantly opposed to educating our children about how to evaluate films in a classroom setting, then let them go about it in the American way. Let them stand in front of Raleys and Safeway with clipboards and get up a petition. If a MAJORITY of Benicia parents are against movies in the classroom, I'll abide. I will not, however, be coerced by special interests or irate factions, nor will my peers.