We've entered the part of the semester when the eye-rolling gets intense among certain students in my film classes. It's the men, mostly, who object to the subject matter I'm forcing them to consider, and it's not all the men either but just a certain baseball-capped contingent of them. They know what they like and they know what they don't like, and they don't mind letting me know that they don't like musicals.
Yesterday I subjected my film classes to torture by talking about the history of musicals and making them watch short clips from The Jazz Singer, 42nd Street, Top Hat, and West Side Story, and in a week they'll be writing about Singin' in the Rain. They grimace and groan and want to know why: "Why can't we watch something we like?"
"Because Saw isn't a musical," I want to say, "and because we can't watch Fight Club or Superbad every day of the week." (Well, maybe they can, but I can't.) We could spend the hour identifying and repairing comma splices and run-on sentences, or we could take a nice little quiz on vocabulary terms from the textbook, but instead we're sitting in a dark room watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing and singing and falling in love while the rain pours down around the gazebo. What's not to like?
Yesterday's West Side Story clip portrayed the characters' attempt to use music to bring order to a chaotic situation, but in my classroom, musicals do just the opposite, inspiring an epidemic of squirming and grumbling and shuffling of papers. When music leaves my students cold, I want to snap my fingers and say "Play it cool, boys--real cool."
And I would--if I could just carry a tune.
1 comment:
Fred and Ginger had chemistry! and them some!
A geeky looking guy, but the man could dance! (And Ginger did it backwards and in high heels!)
One of my students is writing about how much she's learned and gained from musicals (though she likes them live). Maybe she could help them understand?
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