Books and Movies

I think I read somewhere that we spend more time reading and watching movies than we ever have before. What are we doing less of? Talking! Interacting with people!

Today I was a hermit. I spent a good part of the day in front of my still-borrowed computer. (I didn't bite the bullet and buy a computer. My laptop crashed this summer, and we haven't replaced it yet.) I watched a movie when my son went to bed, and then I was reading a book.

The movie (since I have to tell you about that) was Paradise Now. It's a recent Arabic film about two young Palestinian men from Nablus who are chosen to be suicide bombers. They are named Khaled and Said. Khaled seems to be the more thoughtless and devoted martyr, and Said seems to be pensive and conflicted. There's a great opening scene with Said fixing a man's bumper. The man objects to Said's work, saying that the bumper is crooked. Said disagrees, but the man insists. Khaled intercedes and supports his friend. Said decides to use a level to prove that the bumper is straight. It shows instead that the bumper is crooked. The man argues that it proves his point. Said puts the level on the ground and points out that the ground is crooked, and the bumper matches the crookedness of the ground. The man is still insistent, so Khaled pulls out a heavy wrench and knocks the bumper halfway off. This gets Khaled fired, and it is that night that they discover that they are to be suicide bombers.

Said has a love interest in the movie, the daughter of a martyr, who is wealthy and who grew up in Morocco. She has strong feelings against the practice of suicide bombing, and she makes them known.

Without giving away too much, Khaled and Said's mission goes awry when an Israeli military truck comes by at a bad time. They are separated, and much of the middle part of the movie is Said and Khaled chasing each other around Nablus, bombs still strapped under their clothes, dressed in suits and clean-shaven as if for a Jewish wedding, trying not to spread the word that they are going to sneak into Tel Aviv and blow people up. They end up getting back together, at the end of the day, with some help from the love interest. And it looks like they won't be allowed to try again. But they both go, and . . . I won't give away the ending.

This movie has a lot of things going for it. I was interested from the beginning because of the fantastic subject. It also had an appeal because of its setting - and I'm someone who is interested in the conditions of the Palestinian people. And there are enough surprises and suspense to make it fly fast - it helps that it's less than 90 minutes long, too. It's a good movie, and I would recommend it, unless you hate subtitles. It's been my experience that you almost have to watch a movie with subtitles twice, because when you're focused on the words below the screen, you miss some of the action on the screen. It's hard to get involved in a conversation through subtitles because of the absence of the usual subtle awareness of facial expression, tone, and other visual and linguistic cues that an actor can use to enhance a scene.

The book I was reading was How the Brain Learns by David Sousa. It's great stuff, and exactly what I needed. I found it at Barnes and Noble, which gives teachers a discount. But it's a nice, practical guide to learning theory and how to employ what science knows about learning to maximize learning in my classroom. I want to be a more effective teacher, and this book is really helping me think about ways to change my classroom practices to do a better job. My Educational Psych class was a joke, and I've been wandering through a sea of library books trying to find something to supplement the abysmal understanding of development and learning theory that has been the confused base of my instruction thus far. Oh well. Better late than never. Today is the first day of the rest of my teaching life, right? Of course, to steal from American Beauty, that's true of every day. . . except the last. I just hope that I can steal without stealing the foreshadowing that went with the original line.

Back to work.