English Teachers Versus the Screen, Part 1

I got distracted in that last post! When I sat down at my computer, what I had intended to write about was the relationship between my highschool English teachers and, dun dun dun, the dreaded Screen.

I went to highschool in the nineties, and at the time, it was all the rage to bemoan the number of hours that children spent each day in front of the television. And the numbers were indeed scary: statistics were reporting that children were watching upwards of eight hours of television a day. While my own television habits weren’t that bad, if you tallied the time that the “idiot box” was on in my home, from early-morning news, to mealtime-watching, to late-night laugh-tracks, the second-hand screen-time may have added up to four hours a day, every single day. One-sixth of my life.

I was knowledgeable of the statistics back then - and why not? Those news shows certainly went on about them! And against this backdrop of shame, in a schedule that increasingly left me deprived of sleep, I had a growing awareness of the role television (and advertisements) played in depriving me of my life. And, increasingly, I rejected television, to the point that when I left for college, my screen time dropped away to almost nothing.

And against this backdrop of television, I continued to read, obsessively.

Sometimes my teachers had to tell me to stop reading under the desk. Yes, even my English teachers.

Anyway. . . Twice during my highschool experience I had English teachers make an impression on me regarding movies and television. The first was when one of them had a unit on movies. She brought in someone to talk to the class about editing decisions made in films. Woosh! That was the sound it made as the lesson went over my head. We were sent home with an assignment to watch a film and write about how it was edited. I chose Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and it was the first time I watched any movie without being lost in the movie. And, as far as I could tell, the experience was a failure: the one and only editing feature I was able to notice was an old-school wipe transition. I had to fudge quite a bit in my essay. And I was baffled as to what a movie had to do with English.

That assignment, at the time was a failure for me. But, but the very failure of the assignment made it memorable. And in remembering the experience, I was gradually awakened to the fact that there was another way to watch a movie, putting myself in a state of observation that was more active, deliberately looking for elements, deliberately listening to the writing of the dialog, deliberately not getting so engrossed in the action as to be blind to subtleties. Eventually, I would apply the lesson to books as well. Of all the subjects we touched on in that year of English, that was the one that had the most lasting effect. That may have been the three most profound things I learned in all of my English classes combined.

Stay tuned for part two!