This is not a movie review. This is a reminder to lead with wonder.
You teach a typically, rowdy class. You want to bring them to the attention of a movie released well before any of them were born. Write a question on the board, something that focuses their attention on you, or our personal experience to some aspect of the movie.
The chalkboard is wide enough to have the movie projected and the question written next to it. I put the chalk down and challenge them to read the question aloud by presenting my hand sliding underneath each word. I turn it into a repetitive gesture of an increasingly impassioned conductor getting his class to really grasp the question.
That question is:
Which actor did I (Danyk) see in the park?
It is enough. To be sure, they’ve already begun to watch the movie in the previous class. I’m just here to keep up appearances. Keep English a living language to share experience. It is no lie that sometime in 2003, ten years after the movie came out, I watched Lauryn Hill perform a solo show in a public park in Ottawa.
I tell them this after they’ve watched the movie. A moving one, I can’t stop tearing up at the same scenes even though I’ve seen it three times in two days.
The story I tell takes a minute. But the impression is lasting. The person teaching the class has made a human connection between a junior high school class of language learners and a movie about rough teens from a poor neighborhood trying to make the most of their woes by working together to show communal greatness.
