Ready to challenge the status quo of classroom movie days? As a substitute teacher, I've been witness to the tradition of "movie day" and have found it to be a less than engaging practice. Join me as I unpack my experiences and observations on this controversial teaching tool. Drawing from my time in the classroom, I'll share anecdotes and insights, highlighting the pitfalls and lost opportunities of this approach.
Ready to challenge the status quo of classroom movie days? As a substitute teacher, I've been witness to the tradition of "movie day" and have found it to be a less than engaging practice. Join me as I unpack my experiences and observations on this controversial teaching tool. Drawing from my time in the classroom, I'll share anecdotes and insights, highlighting the pitfalls and lost opportunities of this approach.
Greg Collins substitute teacher's lounge, december 19th 2023. For the most part, all of us have finished substitute teaching for the calendar year 2023. And you know as well as I did. We went in this last week or so and we walked into the room and a lot of times we would see a note from the teacher we were subbing for that said just show them a movie today. Here's Elf. They're going to love it. Well, I hate it.
Speaker 1:And before you say bah, humbug, I'm hoping by the end of this episode you'll be saying just the opposite about me. All right, before you get too upset with me, I actually love the movie Elf. I'm not as big a Will Ferrell fan as some of you are, but I think he is absolutely hilarious in that movie and I can't wait to watch it each holiday season. With that in mind, this isn't going to be a Christmas or holiday related topic, because I want to give you something you can use and by the time you go back, christmas is over, so it wouldn't do you any good for a year. So I'm going to talk about using movies in class and how I have come to hate that idea and what I have instead done about it. In my perspective. It's probably a little bit different than yours. I'm still going to guess that the majority of you are in the teaching profession or the teaching career plan pathway, whatever, and I'm not. I'm a retired accountant and I've done substitute teaching for six years now since I've retired and as I go along, each week's episode now is pretty much made up of things that happened to me the previous week. This week is no exception to that and what happened to me this week concerning the movies, I got so fed up with them because I'll tell you my observation Then. I'll tell you my observations over the six years, because not all movies showing happens at holidays or right before breaks. Sometimes it's like in a maybe a related arts class band. I've substituted taught for band and since a band director knows that you're probably not going to be able to direct the kids with their instruments, they would rather the kids just leave their instruments in the cases in the cabinets and instead just show them a movie. Well, I'm not a big fan of going to non classroom situations. I've told you that before. I did finish with a PE class, pe slash health class Friday and in which a movie was involved. But I'm all about letting those kids have some fun on the last day of class before the winter break. So I'm all about that.
Speaker 1:But here's what happens with me concerning movies. Whatever you show them, the teacher is giving you that movie and, yes, I'm going to use the babysitter word again, it allows you to. You know, maybe busy work is better. I'm going to use the busy work word, it's just something to keep them busy, occupied, not because the teacher is lazy, not because the teacher wants to just throw something out there. That's going to be easy that you can get through real quick. In fact, maybe the teacher is doing it because they're thinking of you and they know that those kids' mindsets are not going to be on working that last day. Or if you're substitute teaching a band class, a chorus class, anytime when those kids see a substitute, they're not going to be thinking about practicing that day, most likely. So here's the movie.
Speaker 1:Here's what has happened with movies. There's only been one movie that I've ever shown that the kids actually enjoyed, even though I've shown a lot of movies that are enjoyable. But my point's going to end up being that the kids would rather let you let them socialize during that time. They'd rather just hang out with their friends. Maybe let them play some games on their computer, because even when you're doing days that are like celebration days and they announce alright, all of those with straight A's in the eighth grade, come to the gym, you get pizza in a movie. I bet less than 10% of the students in that gymnasium watching that movie are really watching that movie. They're not. They'd rather just hang out with their friends. Let's go back to the classroom. When you're showing a movie in the classroom, do you make them watch it? Well, of course not. Do you have more of a control problem when they're watching a movie than when they're doing homework? You do, because it becomes more of a social environment and they don't really want to watch that movie.
Speaker 1:I will tell you what I did Friday. In fact, one of the teachers that came in and told me what the plans were actually agreed with what I wanted to do with them instead. Now, granted, the teacher had also left some fun word searches and some things to draw for those that consider themselves creative. So the word search was a Christmas word search on one side. I looked at it before class started and I was looking for another word that wasn't even on the list. That was diagonal, maybe.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you know kind of word that's a little bit harder to find, and I found one. So here's what I told them. And you know, here's where those good old, cheap Jolly Ranchers come into play. I told them all right, guys, here's what we're going to do today. Here's a word search In and of itself. They're not crazy about it. They'll do it to occupy the time. They might ask me if it's for a grade, and I said well, I can't tell you that the teacher has indicated it would be for a grade, but I can't tell you that he's not going to grade it that way either. So here's what I told them to do. I told them the secret word that I had found and I said first one to find it, bring it up here Jolly Rancher. Okay, list, a little two cent reward. Jolly Rancher. All right, well, they love that.
Speaker 1:They immediately went to work on trying to find the word search. In fact, it only took one of them probably a couple of minutes to find it. I thought it would be harder than that. Then I also said all right for the rest of you, the first one to find 10 words, that's on the list, you get the next Jolly Rancher, and they immediately went to work again. That one took longer. There was about 20 words total and I knew not to just say find all 20, because then it becomes a Bit overwhelming because it seems like there's always a word or two that you struggle with. But I said I found the next ten words and they did that another jolly rancher. So that system worked out well.
Speaker 1:I shared some trivia questions. These happen to be holiday related. In fact I'll share this one with you because we kind of had a I don't know if you call it a record, that's, you know you call it everything a record back when I played records. But I Read this week that the song that was recorded in 1958 called Rockin around the Christmas tree with, recorded by Brenda Lee, you know it, especially in the down low days it hits the charts every December over and over. Each December the downloads bring it back into the billboard charts again. Well, this was the first year that it actually went all the way to number one. So the song was published in 1958, has Re-entered the charts several years after that, but this is the first year it went to number one. Now the Mariah Carey song All I want for Christmas is you Goes up to number one quite often each December. So that was an interesting trivia question. I asked that for another jolly rancher.
Speaker 1:So here's what I'm saying about old dislike movies. But the only movie I ever showed the kids that they liked and I probably wasn't supposed to show it it was when I was a full-time sub. It was a Godzilla. It was a new Godzilla movie. I remember the name of it. That one actually held their attention. I did watch it Before I showed it to them to make sure I didn't think it was too bad. There wasn't any bad language. There wasn't any. There was Violence from a standpoint of monsters fighting, but there wasn't really any Blood type situation. So I showed it. Nobody ever said anything about it. The principal never said anything to me. I guess I thought that that was one of those. I would just going choose to Ask for forgiveness instead of permission. It's the only movie I've ever seen that work, movies that are great, movies that kids love, movies that kids say they love. They don't want you to show them that movie when they could be hanging out doing things with their friends in that classroom. So here's what I would say when you're given a movie to watch.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, I am not talking about educational movies, or even YouTube series, maybe off the history channel, that a teacher wants you to show. That's different. I'm talking about entertainment type movies. I think last year, the one that the Band director had me show was Christmas Chronicles. I actually liked that one. I hadn't seen that one before. We showed that, and my preference now, though, would be if I've got an alternative, I'm going to use a more entertaining alternative, something that they could actually compete with and have fun. Life's not always a competition, but with me, I love competition. They love competition. They like it when I like, even when I teach math class. If I have two of them, go up to the board at a time and give them a problem to solve. They like that kind of stuff. In fact, I will tell you this next week, I'm going to try to record an Instagram Same account as this substitute teacher's lounge video this week, so be watching for that. It's math related, but it's more just something to do to have fun in class, so if you've got an option, I will tell you this.
Speaker 1:My observation over the last six years is that kids aren't that crazy about movies. In fact, if it's a dark environment because you have to turn some of the lights off for the movie, then you're worried about if you can see behavior problems, even if you can see things that shouldn't be going on problems. I'll just leave that statement just as I said it and let you interpret it any way you want to. It's just harder to keep an eye on things. Maybe some substitute teachers don't care to keep an eye on things, but I dislike showing the movies because I think it makes a much more disorganized classroom environment and that's why I do it the way I do it.
Speaker 1:I will tell you over the next few weeks, probably the next four weeks, what I'm going to try to do is I've got a very busy few weeks coming up, between some family things I'm taking care of and then some vacation I'm taking care of. I'm going to go back into the archives and I'm going to find four of our best shows and rerun them, and the reason being I just don't. I don't want to take a cop out, but again, if I don't have much time to record, I don't want to give you a less than effective show either. So I'm going to go back and see what some of the favorite episodes. I know how many listeners we've gained on this podcast in the last, say, two and a half years, but the podcast has been going for over four years, so that means that a lot of you haven't heard, unless you chose to go back and listen to them. A lot of you haven't heard some of the better episodes from or I won't say it like that, it doesn't necessarily better Maybe even the title is what made people listen to it more. A lot of them will be on discipline, because that seems to get the most attention.
Speaker 1:But I'm going to go back. I'm going to pick four of those. We're going to replay those over the next four weeks. I will do some type of short introduction at the beginning of each one just to let everybody know what's going on, because I'm sure there will be some references that might be in there. That makes it obvious that this was recorded recently. But I want you to be able to handle certain disciplinary issues. I want you to be able to handle certain resource issues, and those are a lot of the topics that seem to come up from time to time. So that's what we'll play over the next four weeks. So enjoy the holidays, we're probably back at it the first week of January. I've got two basketball games to attend. That week I've got volleyball to referee, middle school volleyball to referee that week. I've got substitute teaching that week and then vacation afterwards. So busy, few weeks coming up. So enjoy the holidays and I'll see you again next year.