FTV: Showing Movies

 

     In each issue of a quarterly publication called The Planetary Report, the Planetary Society includes a trivia question.  Some are more challenging than others and everybody that emails in the correct answer has their name tossed into a random drawing for a free tee shirt.  Having sent in my entry religiously over the years, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a Planetary Radio themed shirt from the society when my name was plucked from the bin some years ago.  The question in the Winter Solstice 2025 issue was, “There were three astronauts who flew to the Moon twice during the Apollo program.  One of them never got to land on the Moon.  Who was it.?”

     If you are already wondering what Planetary Report trivia questions have to do with the title of this FTV,  let me explain.  When I delivered the December 2025 Planetary Report  to the Ontonagon Township Library (it has become my custom to donate them when I am done reading them), former student Abby Ollila was covering the checkout counter.  I asked her the same question as above.  Her first response was, “Apollo 11?” so I clarified that the answer would be the name of a specific astronaut.  “Hew was on Apollo 13, but I don’t remember his name – Tom Hanks played him in the movie Apollo 13.”  “Close enough”  I replied, “Hanks played Jim Lovell who also orbited the Moon on Apollo 8 over Christmas Eve of 1968.  He was from Milwaukee and passed away recently, no doubt why they used this for the trivia question.”

     When the Planetary Society media person acknowledged the receipt of my entry, I told her, “This was a pretty easy one.  I showed Apollo 13 to my JH classes for twenty years until I retired in 2018.”  Both she and Abby had the same reaction, “Oh, I love that movie.”  As regular readers of these FTV ramblings will note, it only takes an encounter like this to flip on my ‘wayback machine’ brain switch and begin dusting off memories of days gone by.  This trip took me back to my junior year ‘Methods of Teaching Class’ at Northern Michigan University.

     One of the boxes we had to get checked in our Methods class was demonstrating proficiency operating things like tape recorders, filmstrip projectors, and movie projectors.  We were told to make an appointment with the Audio-Visual Department in the library across the academic mall from the Science building.  The girl who watched me set up and operate all of these machines was a student employee who may or may not have actually understood how to do what she was watching me do.  When I set up a movie reel, she wondered out loud if a film could be run backwards, so I showed her it took just a simple flick of the switch.  Threading a reel of film through a projector wasn’t too hard, but if one was, shall we say, mechanically challenged, it could be an anxiety inducing procedure.  One of my Methods classmates admitted they had to go back and do the whole test again because the projector and reel to reel tape recorder gave them trouble.

     My student teaching mentor, Wayne, encouraged me to use film strips, overheads, slides, and movies during my time at Bothwell Middle School.  The cluster of eighth grade teachers I was assigned to (Math, English, Science, and Social Studies) would plan the four hour block of class time we had together each day.  If one of us had a movie to show, the whole cluster of a hundred and twenty students would push the movable barriers in our large open cluster aside and watch it all together.  We didn’t have to show the same movie four times and what class time we had left was evenly divided into four shortened periods.  I was put into a Social Studies class instead of a Science class (which was my original assignment).  This is probably why I have totally forgotten the one movie I was tasked with showing during my semester there.  Suffice to say the projector didn’t give me any problems..

     My first teaching job in Ontonagon had me teaching five sections of seventh grade Geography / Earth Science and one study hall.  When I found out there was an archive of movies available through the Intermediate School District office in Hancock, I got into the habit of finding at least one movie to show per month.  The listing for newer movies wasn’t large, but I managed to find some interesting topics.  A semi-comedic look at the glaciation of the Great Lakes set to Canadian folk music arranged for accordion called The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes was a memorable one.  In fact, it turned out to be such a hit, it is the one film I showed to my classes every year.  I showed it for so many years, I started with a film version, moved on to VHS video tape, DVD and finally, a version hosted on the internet.  I even managed to base one of the presentations I did for the Ontonagon County Historical Society on The Rise and Fall video.  If you have never seen it, do a quick search and watch it – I guarantee it won’t be a wasted twenty minutes of your time.

     When the Junior High students moved over to the High School building in the fall of 1983, the first thing I did was check out the film projectors on hand.  I do not think that I over did it when it came to using movies in class, but I took some ribbing from some of my older colleagues.  When French teacher Dave Morin would see me toting a film canister, he would say, “Hey, Cecil B. DeMillimaki, what are you showing this week?”  My own kids were born in 1981 and 1984, so I can date the next big advancement in classroom technology to around 1986.  I found out the AV department now had their first VHS recorder and player on their shelves.  There were so many excellent educational programs beginning to show up on WNMU TV 13 (NMU’s educational TV channel), I asked if I could take it home to record some shows to use in class.  The district didn’t have cable access to the classrooms yet, otherwise I could have recorded the programs I wanted at school.  A couple of stores in town had just started stocking a few VHS tapes so if I happened to have the machine at home to record something, I would pick up a newer movie or record a program for our kids to watch at home.  When they were still very young, one of the shows they used to like (Today’s Special) featured a manikin who would come to life and interact with his human friend.  Having several episodes of these programs on tape was a fun change of pace for the kids in those pre-computer / internet days.

     The programs I used the most in class were PBS creations like NOVA.  If there was a hot topic going on in the world of Science, NOVA was always on the cutting edge helping to explain the newest thing.  The second most used video in my archives was all about the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.  The written descriptions of the absolute devastation caused by the blast that removed a good chunk of the mountain’s peak just do not do the event justice.  The before and after shots of the Spirit Lake recreational area were telling.  The crusty old owner of the Spirit Lake Lodge, Harry Truman, would only appear on film before the big bang.  I would always stop the video on the screen showing the surface of Spirit Lake covered by floating logs and debris after St. Helen’s blew its top.  “Somewhere under all of that lies Harry Truman and the lodge he refused to evacuate because the government wasn’t going to tell him what to do” I would tell them.

     When Homer Hickam’s book Rocket Boys (1998) was turned into the movie October Sky (1999) starring Jake Gyllenhaal, I had a dilemma:  Apollo 13 had become my ‘go to’ video to share as part of my eighth grade astronomy unit.  It was a perfect filler just before the first semester ended.  October Sky was just too good to pass up, so it became my traditional ‘three days until Christmas break’ video.  Laura Dern (in her pre-Jurrasic Park days) and Chris Cooper were fabulous in this true life story. Young Homer grew up and became fascinated by rockets when Sputnik became the first artificial Earth satellite in 1958.  He eventually penned three books about his years growing up in Coalwood, West Virginia and ended up working for NASA.  Later versions of Rocket Boys were retitled October Sky to better identify with the very popular movie.

     There was one thing I had to explain to my students before I showed them either of these films.  True life stories that take years to evolve are hard to cram into an hour and a half or two hour movie.  Certain ‘liberties’ must be taken to make sure the story is told within that time frame without altering the true events that happened.  For example, in Apollo 13, the scene where Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) tells his wife, “Alan Shepard’s ear problem has flared up and my crew has been moved up in the rotation to take the Apollo 13 flight.”  In reality, Shepard had just had his inner ear problem corrected surgically but it was NASA who wanted him to have more time to train properly for his flight, thus the switch in crews between Apollo 13 and 14.

     Along with the adjustments in certain facts and events to make the movie flow in a sensible manner, I would mention the reaction the movie had on the people who were actually there during the mission.  When Apollo 13 was screened for the very NASA people depicted in the movie, they were asked for their comments about anything that they saw in the movie that might not be quite right.  The movie’s producers held their breath, figuring if they didn’t get it right, the NASA folks would savage them for every little mistake.  Instead, they got observations like, “The license plate on Jim Lovell’s Corvette was not used until the late 1970s” and “The logo on the back of the launch tower closeout crew is incorrect – that wasn’t used until later.”  When the producers finally pressed the NASA folks to tell them what they thought about the movie itself, they were delightfully surprised:  “Oh the movie is great – as close to showing the real thing as you could get.”

      During the four decades I worked to coordinate the annual Junior High Student Council Halloween Carnival, I had to find a way to keep my classes busy on the day we had to set up the cafetorium for Halloween night.  It became clear that the two hours between the close of school until the doors opened for the carnival were not sufficient.  I requested a sub for my afternoon classes so the JHSC could have some extra time to get things set up.  The question became, “Exactly what kind of lesson plan can I leave for a substitute teacher on Halloween?”  The answer arrived in the form of The Simpson’s Halloween episodes.  I was not a big fan of Bart Simpson when he first came on the scene, but the sophisticated humor employed to tell some of the classic spooky tales they parodied drew me in.  Thus another annual tradition began – I would record the Simpson’s Halloween Special each year and then show that to my classes.

     As the use of outside video became more widespread, we had several discussions over the years about what was appropriate to show to students in a school setting.  It was at one of these meetings that a colleague pointed out they had heard objections about me using The Simpsons videos in class.  When pressed to provide a specific name or names to the objections, they finally admitted they were the ones who didn’t think it was appropriate.  I pointed out that these episodes were only shown to my eighth grade students who were a) old enough to understand the humor, and b) already watching the show at home.  As long as there were never any official complaints registered, the practice carried on until I retired.

     Seventh grade students are in that buffer zone between being ‘elementary kids’ and ‘junior high kids transitioning to high school’.  On Halloween, they would be shown It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown! and nobody ever took issue with that TV special.  Over the last decade of my career, I added sixth grade Science to my duties.  I searched for a suitable holiday film for them and ended up digging up a golden oldie from my youth.  It was called Donald Duck in Mathamagic Land.  Seeing it again brought me right back to my elementary days when I first  got interested in Science.  Okay, it was put out in 1958 and was a little dated.  When they explained how math influences ‘modern music’, the animated clip that went along with it featured what can only be described as ‘big band jazz’.  Did the kids note the incongruity of calling an orchestra featuring blaring horns ‘modern music’?  Like me back in the day, they were probably too busy trying to decipher Donald’s dialog as delivered in his nasal burr.

     As the internet began to infiltrate education, my viewing habits began to evolve.  A former student teacher of mine sent me a whole set of Bill Nye the Science Guy episodes he had taped from Public Television.  I knew more about Mr. Wizard than Bill Nye, but I had never really thought about using the Bill Nye the Science Guy show with my classes.  As I picked through the titles, I found episodes that addressed very specific topics we covered in class so I cherry picked the ones that went along with stuff we were already studying.  When a class full of JH students chants ‘Bill, Bill, Bill’ along with the opening credit music, one can not help but notice they are engaged in the subject matter.

     With a projector attached to my main computer station, I was able to show clips about a lot of very timely topics.  These not only went along with our space units, they also served as current events lessons.  Dr. Bruce Betts from the Planetary Society was a great source of humorous snippets about astronomy topics.  It took a while for his evil alter ego ‘Ecurb’ to make sense – kind of like those Star Trek Mirror Universe screenplays that have the main characters play evil versions of themselves – but he did make the kids think.

     The internet was also a great way to share up to the minute news and coverage of the space program.  When I was in elementary school, we would all crowd into our little gymnasium and watch the early manned NASA liftoffs on a black and white TV set up on the stage.  The new millennium version of this is done in living color, often with live camera feeds being sent from the rockets themselves.  If time didn’t allow all my classes to see the event live, there were always multiple platforms that would post the launches for later viewing.

     In my early days, the topic of debate was ‘will TV ruin the minds of our youth?’  It seems they are saying the same thing about the internet and social media.  Watching NASA launches on TV got me interested in Science and began to form my life’s work before I even knew teaching Science would become my vocation.  Showing films, videos, and snippets from the internet were always tools I found very useful in my career.  Perhaps 3-D technology will be the next platform that will allow students to view their lessons in the middle of their classrooms and not just on projection screens or monitors.  Wouldn’t that be something?

Top Piece Video – Perhaps the best song written about ‘Movieland’ courtesy of Ray Davies and The Kinks – from One form the Road