The Appreciator

Let me share a question I’ve asked myself recently: to what extent should teachers cater to student interest?

Perhaps I should give some background. With every unit in our film class, my students watch an entire movie and then write a review of the film where they evaluate the film based on the criteria from the chapter. With our most recent chapter (that focused on narrative structure), I had to decide between a few movies – The Sixth Sense (a film that most of my students already saw), Memento (a film that many of my students watched as part of psychology class), and Annie Hall (a film I was confident that none of my students saw, despite it’s “classic” status).

I ended up choosing Annie Hall because I wanted to show something different – we’ve watched a lot of violent movies (The Departed, Gladiator, etc) and Annie Hall provided that variety. Additionally, I wanted to show a movie that the students were not familiar with so that they could evaluate how well the scattered narrative structure worked to tell Alvy and Annie’s story.

However, I fear that the opposite happened. I’m confident enough to say that Annie Hall was certainly not the most liked movie that my class watched (several students indicated that they “hated it” as well). Obviously, I didn’t plan on showing the movie because my students would hate it, but I was disappointed that they seemed to labor through it’s 93 minutes. While I imagined that the movie (as with many Woody Allen movies) would elicit “love it or hate it” reactions, I didn’t expect the vocal signs of disapproval from my normally silent students (we meet first thing in the morning, not the ideal time to sit in a dark room and watch movies).

I have not received their reviews yet, so I can’t tell if this dislike (to be fair, a few students told me that they enjoyed it) will translate into poorly written analysis of the film’s narrative structure. Certainly, I don’t expect all of my students to like every film (nor should they – I frequently tell my students that they should have personal standards for what they like and don’t like) but I hope that their dislike of Woody Allen’s neurotic on screen persona didn’t mean that they “turned off” the film and didn’t learn anything.

The only reason that I raise this question is that with the previous chapter (Editing), I showed what I think was the best received film (The Departed) as well as the best group of reviews that the class submitted all year. At first, I chalked it up to my students “getting the hang of” writing reviews (and reacting to the frequent “use the material from the chapter” comments on their papers), but now I wonder if the exceptional reviews were related to the number of students that “liked” the movie.

So, returning to my question, am I being paranoid (perhaps watching Alvy Singer’s on-screen mental breakdown inspired one of my own) or do I have a right to second guess my choice? Sure, I know that students tend to learn more when they have fun, but certainly there’s a balance between meeting the students interests and expanding (or challenging) their interests with challenging material.

Right?