by There are many ways to evaluate excellent educational leadership. Here is a true story demonstrating such leadership.
A school principal recently led me on a tour of his elementary school. As we walked into one classroom I saw the blood flush from the principal’s face. We walked in on a classroom full of children watching a Disney cartoon while their teacher did paperwork. Once outside the classroom the principal apologized profusely and promised that the teacher would be spoken to.
This principal was embarassed by the lack of teacher professionalism demonstrated by using a cartoon to distract her students. Such practice is widespread and illegal. It is against the law to show commercial films to a public audience (including public schools) without the consent or license of the publisher.
My grade school-age nephews are watching plenty of commercial films as the school year winds down. Therefore, I’m inspired to share an article I wrote six years ago.
One seventh grader’s journey includes learning math through Scooby Doo
A version of this was published in the August 2001 issue of Curriculum Administrator Magazine
At our annual family dinner to celebrate the end of another school year each of our children reflected upon the lessons learned and the obstacles overcome during the previous ten months. Our seventh-grade daughter, who will be referred to by the top-secret code name of Miffy, shared with us a new pedagogical strategy and use of educational technology not yet conceived of during my school years. What was this innovation? Was it project-based learning, multiage collaboration, constructionism, online publishing, modeling and simulation? No, it was Disney films.
Yup, that’s right. Disney films (and several others too).
The following is a partial list of the films shown this year during class time by my daughter’s teachers.
I know that you must be marveling at the remarkable interdisciplinary properties of The Nightmare Before Christmas. You may also be wondering why there were no movies shown during fifth period. That’s because they don’t show movies during lunch.
Now I’m as fond of wasting time and goofing-off as the next guy, but Miffy was able to remember watching at least 34 films having no educational value whatsoever in one school year. In case you were thinking that they could be studying film criticism or visual storytelling you should know that they only watched half of most films because the periods are too short. Others were watched over several days.
This remarkable waste of class time occurred in a school where requests for meaningful projects, hands-on experiments, field-trips, drama and other productive learning experiences are abandoned because of an oft-repeated “lack of time.” Sure the standardized tests and top-down curricular pressures wreak havoc with creating a productive context for learning, but we can’t blame this one on Princeton or the President. Somewhere along the line educators determined that the demanding curriculum was elastic enough for the illegal showing of countless commercial films.
My Daughter the Rodeo Clown
Miffy also told me that due to the SAT-9 exams, Career Day had been cancelled. I’m not sure which part of that statement is most tragic, so let’s state it in the form of a standardized test question.
Which is most pathetic?
a) Canceling Career Day because of SAT-9 testing
b) Career Day
c) The school’s remedy for having cancelled career day
The ingenious remedy chosen was to spend much of the last week of school watching a series of instructional videos called, “Real Life 101.” While hardly as educational as Mulan, these shows turned out to be far more entertaining. The audience was repeatedly reminded, “you don’t need a college degree for this career, but it wouldn’t hurt!”
You can’t make this stuff up! The worksheet that followed the Career Day substitute asked each child to rank these careers in order of preference and write a few sentences explaining their number one choice.
If I wanted my children to watch television, I’d let them stay home. At least at home they could watch something educational like “Behind the Music: The Mamas and the Papas“or learn about Beat poetry from the “Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” At least then they would have a chance to learn something more than the unfortunate lessons being modeled by their schools.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Sadly, this is more common than is known. I think the thing that struck me the most was the typo in the last paragraph of the Career Video Survey. Now that’s just WRONG. I also think the addition of a creative “other” selection option would increase the size of the box. You know the one…”the box.”
I’ve only been exposed to this “movie day” curriculum on the high school level. While your article may have been published 9 years ago, it remains relevant. Although now, with the ease of youtube, “movie day” has become “youtube time.” This would make tasty fodder for a discussion with my students who sometimes beg for a movie.