At some point or another you’ve seen a movie in class, whether it was in the middle of the semester or the end of the year. Your teachers might have told you how it connects to what you’re learning, but exactly how helpful is it?

Watching films in class can be better than a textbook or a lecture. The use of movies in class, if done correctly, can open students’ eyes and minds. Something as simple as taking notes during a film in class can enhance students’ learning in daily activity.

A good movie can make the student feel or have an idea of how important an era was or how important a lesson is. For example, watching the movie Selma, which portrayed Martin Luther King Jr’s campaign to secure equal voting rights through a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965, could give an idea of how much African-Americans suffered to get equal rights in a History class. Watching Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, a tragic story of two star crossed lovers whose deaths surround around their families feud, provides a modern take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and would be a good movie to watch in an English class. These types of movies can provide teachable moments and foster discussions beyond the books and they can highlight an important lesson the textbook never could.

But movies are time consuming. Both Selma and Romeo + Juliet are two hours or longer, so it takes time to watch the entire movie, about 2-3 days in class. Other movies can take up to a week to finish watching. A problem in my classes when watching movies was that teachers would stop the film often because students would be making too much noise. The consequence would be that an extra day of movie time would be added, which set the class back. It’s not just my class that would be set back either, my friends who had the same teacher would later tell me during lunch that they left off somewhere completely different than where my class left off. The classes became scattered and unorganized.

Also from what I noticed when watching films like documentaries students get distracted and lose focus very quickly. Teachers show documentaries a lot because they’re meant to be more informative and teachable than entertainment.  A documentary that I remember seeing in class twice was Building the Ancient City: Athens and Rome, which talked about the type of government, the battle strategies, the history, and daily lives of the Athens and Romans. Watching this documentary the second time was just as boring as it was the first time and my classmates reacted the same way, they were uninterested. I had a hard time understanding the film because of how it’s topics are scattered and I wish the teacher could have stopped the film and explained it. The fact is that films can’t excite or educate everyone like teachers think, can make them a waste of time. Not everyone is going to find everything in a class entertaining but when more than half the students are daydreaming it’s time to reconsider the lesson plan.

In what I’ve encountered, some teachers show multiple movies and documentaries during the school year. In some of my classes, I saw a movie at least once a month. This can’t be healthy in an educational facility. Some teachers would also show movies that had no connection to what we were learning, and on rare occasions these movies would have foul language or inappropriate activity. I remember teachers showing me movies like Forrest Gump, Crash and Invincible, all movies that had scenes that are not good for a class of teenagers to see. Forrest Gump and Invincible are both good movies to see, Forrest Gump has a lot of historical benefit, Invincible shows the importance of chasing your passions; however, they both have scenes that brings the worst out of immature children. Forrest Gump has a scene where Forrest needed to get into school and he wasn’t able to because he was too mentally challenged, that is until Forrest’s mother slept with the principal. In that scene you could hear the inappropriate sound that made the movie terrible for a class. Invincible had the same thing with a scene where a man and a woman kiss and they go into an apartment, implying that they have sex, my class went crazy after this scene. I found Crash to be the worst movie out of the three with scenes showing violence, drugs, drinking, smoking, swearing all things not suited for a class. I remember seeing this movie when I was in middle school and correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t teachers supposed to send permission slips for parents to sign if a movie is this inappropriate?

In my opinion, a movie can be shown efficiently in a classroom by presenting it to the students at the beginning of the lesson instead of the end, in order to give them a background to what they will be learning and having the students take notes throughout the movie or having worksheets prepared for the class to fill out. Also, stopping every once and awhile and explaining important parts of the movie that highlight the main topic of the lesson can help keep students focused and engaged. I think watching movies in class isn’t bad as long as it doesn’t become a habit and the films are shown with efficiency and a clear purpose.