Teach Your Children Well

I have an image burned into my brain, as clear as a film: a Russian man crouched by a campfire takes a dead rabbit and strips the skin from its body in one brief moment, with a terrible, tearing sound. He was a peasant, and he was starving. To a child raised on tales of gentle bunny rabbits, that brutal image, from the 1971 film, Nicholas and Alexandra, sparked my interest in the Russian Revolution.

Thirty-two years later, after seeing Reds, and Dr. Zhivago, and reading several books set in Russia, I went to Russia with a choir, to sing Handel's Messiah, and met my daughter at her orphanage. Life has never been the same since then.

Movies have a powerful emotional and intellectual effect on us. Sometimes it takes years before we can understand the exact way they affected us, but it's there. I was still frightened by the witch in The Wizard of Oz, as a teenager. (Of course, I was too "cool" to admit it.)   In college, I saw The Graduate at the Student Union. I had seen it before, and never thought it was a very good movie. Suddenly, being 20 years old and facing my own graduation in the near future, it spoke to me. I stumbled home across campus, crying like a baby. Seeing Gene Kelly dancing in Singin' In the Rain drives away all anxiety and gives me moment of quiet joy, even today. Seeing Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple embracing her sister at the end of the movie, after being separated for many years, brings torrents of tears from me.

I saw the movie City of Angels shortly after my father died, and it shook me terribly. When there was a snippet of the old song "Hey Bop A Re Bop" played in one scene, I lost it and started crying. My father used to sing that around the house when I was a kid. It was like he was in the movie theater with me, saying Hey, I'm here.

I bring up all these memories, to explain why my children and I watch movies every night instead of television shows. So much of what's on TV now is just melodramatic junk. I cannot bear for my kids to watch it. I particularly hate so-called "reality" shows -they are all show, no reality. So I stick to movies.

I carefully select movies that have some sort of meaning or message - most of the time. Then there's the occasional Jackie Chan movie.

My children speak English as a second language. Teaching them history is a real chore. So I started teaching them without them knowing it, showing them movies with historical significance, quite deliberately. I own movies like Braveheart, Apollo 13, and The Road to Wellville.

I recently showed them The Blue and the Gray, an old miniseries, to teach them about the Civil War. I realized early on that it doesn't depict the war very accurately, and the acting is wooden, but they were intrigued. We are working on The Winds of War, right now. Again, it's not great filmmaking, but it doesn't matter. They like the story, they will remember some of the images, and they will start to build a foundation of knowledge.

I was fortunate to have a father who loved history, and helped us appreciate it. We were hauled to every Civil War battlefield in Georgia and Tennessee for all of our childhoods. I've read hundreds of those historical markers by the roadside. I revere history, because while there are facts and photos, there's also the mystery to uncover. What was it REALLY like, back then?!

If you want your kids to remember things, SHOW them. The old cliche, a picture is worth a thousand words, is so true. The sight of Mel Gibson being tortured in Braveheart is probably a bit too graphic for most parents, but I wanted my kids to see it. I paused the movie and explained WHY he was being tortured. I said there are sometimes beliefs which are worth dying for.

It's important to select good films or miniseries, then TALK to the children. Gauge the level of their knowledge, then fill in with what you know. Then when they have to read the dry old lesson in the history book, you can say "Hey, remember when we saw that movie Glory, about the black troops in the Civil War?" and so on.

Engage them in history as a series of personal stories, and you will hook them for life.

NOTE

I like Netflix because they have such a HUGE variety of films - everything from obscure documentaries to the latest hits. I also like the convenience of getting the movies out of the mailbox, and never having to set foot in Blockbuster.