I'll See You at the Movies

I love school, I love learning, and I love movies.  However, one of these is not like the other and movies in the classroom are a weird thing to me.  I don't really associate movies with learning, especially those made by Hollywood.  Maybe it's the paranoia that an administrator will see a darkened classroom and come in to see me watching a movie and think of me as lazy or that my students won't take me seriously if I show movies other than on the occasion that I can't be at school. I have fond memories of watching "The Sandlot" whenever there was a sub, but I simply don't remember watching any kind of television in school unless it was educational like Bill Nye or Nova or a PBS special about the Civil War that was narrated in monotone. Of course it was a different era too since our only real source of multimedia was a big tv on a cart.

I graduated high school in 2002 and looking back at just the 13 years since I've been out of the classroom it has changed tremendously.  The advent of  YouTube, interactive smartboards, streaming video, HD webcams and especially the demise of ultra-slow dialup internet has made everything so much more convenient.  I could only imagine that if the internet age had boomed ten years earlier, I would have seen way more multimedia in my education too.

I don't miss the dial-up tones, but this dog kind of 

                                         makes me wish it was still commonplace.

So the big question is, should I show more movies in my class?  We watch the nightly news and discuss one day a week during my journalism class for the purpose of current events and slowly implanting good journalism techniques. I think it is a fantastic way to use the internet and advances in multimedia have made the classroom better.  As far as Hollywood movies are concerned, after I had them complete all the research needed, I showed them "Guardians of the Galaxy" and they wrote a movie review for it when we covered that unit.  Beyond that, I showed "Shattered Glass" and "Good Night and Good Luck," and we researched and discussed both at length because they cover required J1 learning objectives.  I do feel I need to get over the whole showing a Hollywood movie is equivalent to being a lazy teacher thing however. I need to get out of the 90s state of mind and use the new resources at my fingertips. There are some great journalism movies out there that I can teach from.  Although I won't be showing "Anchorman" to my class even though it is hilarious and my students have asked me before, I have to give thanks to high-speed internet, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Video and Google for allowing me to quickly show any kind of video, from the NBC Nightly News to the occasional Hollywood blockbuster if it'll expand their knowledge of journalism.


Thanks, Roger Ebert for leading me to some great cinematic journalism gems.

Garrett Herbst
Reagan High School
San Antonio, Texas