Throughout my thirty years of teaching, I have used films often in the classroom and have usually been quite happy with the results.  These are some of the things I've learned:

1. A movie is new if a child has not seen it before.  At a screening of Buster Keaton's silent classic The General, during a Thespian Convention in Tampa, I was beseiged by teenagers who didn't know me, but who had enjoyed the film so much, they just had to talk about it.

2. All movies before 1968 had to adhere to a strict code of film censorship and can therefore be assumed to have a G rating.  This is important if you are teaching in a community which monitors the ratings of films being used in class.

    Both of the above have led me to the past in search of excellent movies for school.  Why teach the overdone Clash of the Titans when Jason and the Argonauts can cover the same material?  Why use the R-rated Excalibur or the popular First Knight when you can teach the same thing with Knights of the Round Table?  There's a remake of It's a Wonderful Life that's in color and more politically correct than the original, but nobody can top James Stewart's brilliant original performance.  Is there a better film to portray teenaged angst than Rebel Without a Cause (which, incidentally, can be used to teach the unities in Greek Tragedy)? Hip teachers today can teach a terrific Titanic lesson with the 1960 film, A Night to Remember.

3. A movie should not be a redundancy.  Why show the movie version of a book the class has just read?  It's much better to broaden the children's experience by allowing comparisons.  When my class read Great Expectations, we compared it to the movie version of Les Miserables, which was written at about the same time, by an author of equal popularity, which included many similar characters.  I also used Godfather II with Macbeth, because they shared the idea of a man whose violent acts led to the loss of his family.  Another great pair is the excellent movie version of Anne of Green Gables and Betsy Byars' terrific novel, The Summer of the Swans.

4. Most children will view far more movies in their lives than read books.  They should be taught how to "read" films, to appreciate visual subtlety, acting, symbolism, etc. They also need to develop the same taste in film choice that we hope to teach in reading.  Teachers must overcome that built-in snobbery that says books are better than movies.  Let's face the facts: the ratio of trash to greatness is the same in all the arts.  How many forgotten Salieris are there to compare to the Ed Woods?  How many romance novels can be compared to films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-rama?  There is good art and bad art.  Part of a teacher's job to to help children develop good taste in art.

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