Lessons From The Movies

Well, the holiday season is officially here and if you have kids, they probably have at least two days off school this week for Thanksgiving. Then winter break is coming up. With all that time off school, how can you, a responsible parent, sneak extra lessons into their day? By showing them scenes from movies that take place in classrooms, of course!

Okay maybe you don’t have kids. And kids deserve to relax during the holidays. But I needed an introduction to the newsletter. Just go with it.

I’ve rounded up 10 class lessons from movies, grouped by subject. See if you can identify what movie each lesson is from. Answers are at the end.

SUBJECT: MATH

1) “Parenthesis means multiply. Every time you see this, you multiply. A negative times a negative equals a positive. A negative times a negative equals a positive. Say it. A negative times a negative equals a positive.”

SUBJECT: SCIENCE

2) “The parts of a flower are so constructed that very, very often the wind will cause pollination. If not, then a bee or any other nectar-gathering creature can create the same situation. Yes, anything that gets the pollen to the pistil’s right on the list. I’ll try to make it crystal clear. A flower’s insatiable passion turns its life into a circus of debauchery! Now you see just how the stamen gets its lusty dust on to the stigma and why this frenzied chlorophyllous orgy starts each spring is no enigma. We call this quest for satisfaction a what, class?”

3) “Archeology is the search for fact. Not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Doctor Tyree’s Philosophy class is right down the hall. So forget any ideas you’ve got about lost cities, exotic travel, and digging up the world. We do not follow maps to buried treasure and X never, ever, marks the spot. Seventy percent of all archaeology is done in the library. Research. Reading.”

4) “For many days before the end of our Earth, people will look into the night sky and notice a star, increasingly bright and increasingly near. As this star approaches us, the weather will change. The great polar fields of the north and south will rot and divide, and the seas will turn warmer.”

SUBJECT: HISTORY

5) “You remember that thing we had about 30 years ago called the Korean conflict? And how we failed to achieve victory? How come we didn’t cross the 38th parallel and push those rice-eaters back to the Great Wall of China then take the fucking wall apart brick by brick and nuke them back into the fucking stone age forever? Tell me why! How come? Say it! Say it!”

6) “Three weeks we’ve been talking about the Platt Amendment. What are you people? On dope? A piece of legislation was introduced into Congress by Senator John Platt. It was passed in 1906. This amendment to our Constitution has a profound impact upon all of our daily lives.”

7) “In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?… Raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.”

SUBJECT: MUSIC

8) “In this life, you can’t win. Yeah, you can try, but in the end you’re just gonna lose, big time, because the world is run by the Man. The Man, oh, you don’t know the Man. He’s everywhere. In the White House. Down the hall. Ms. Mullins, she’s the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, he’s burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man. It was called rock ‘n roll, but guess what, oh no, the Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV! So don’t waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome ‘cause the Man is just gonna call you a fat washed up loser and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just GIVE UP!”

9) “You can’t dance to Mr. Beethoven. Can you tell me why, Mr. Manfield? Because the Beethoven piece doesn’t use a constant rhythm or tempo. Madonna is 4/4 time all the way through. The melody changes but the rhythm is constant. So you can dance to it. The quartet changes both melodically and rhythmically. I’m going to play them again. Listen for this.”

SUBJECT: LITERATURE

10) “Excrement. That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. We’re not laying pipe, we’re talking about poetry. I mean, how can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? I like Byron, I give him a 42, but I can’t dance to it. Now I want you rip out that page. Go on, rip out the entire page. You heard me, rip it out. Rip it out!”

EXTRA CREDIT: PLAYTIME

11) “Now we’re going to do something extremely fun. We’re going to play a game called ‘Who is my daddy and what does he do?’”

Okay, pencils down. Trade answer sheets with your neighbor to correct each other. Here are the answers:

1) Stand and Deliver; 2) Grease 2; 3) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 4) Rebel Without A Cause; 5) Back to School; 6) Fast Times at Ridgemont High; 7) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; 8) School of Rock; 9) Running on Empty; 10) Dead Poets Society; 11) Kindergarten Cop

Okay, number four is a bit of a cheat because they were on a field trip and not in a classroom, so if you got that one right give yourself an extra point.

So how’d you do? This was actually a reprint of a post I wrote way back in 2008, which explains why there aren’t any more recent movies quoted, but I stumbled across it the other day and thought it was worth a reshare. It also seemed fitting to me that a few months ago I wrote about filmstrips in classrooms, so now I’d write about classrooms in films.

If you enjoyed that and you like games, have you played my daily puzzle Gisnep? The number of regular daily players went up a bit as people sought out alternative games to play during the recent NY Times puzzle strike. But I’m open to ideas on how to get even more people to discover it!

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned that you can support this newsletter with a paid subscription or a one-time donation. So I figure I should mention that.

Thanks as always for reading. See you next time!

David