I really wanted to do this for sometime now, since we discussed the accuracy of historical movies. And I’ve actually retype this to be less detailed. But the first part a short and rather silly, but it feeds into the final part.
When I was in the methods class for teaching English, a class where they teach you how to teach, we were assigned to watch as many TV shows, and movies of our teaching as possible. Our instructor said that although all parents have been students at one time , they seem to feel that schools are like those on television. He was right. Parents felt that they can come to school at any time and see a teacher or principal and they could actually have some say about what goes on in classrooms. They’re also taught that class sizes are never more than 10 students and periods. Do not last more than 10 minutes..
Here is the hard part. My conclusion is just that people will except what they see in the movies is true and there is no further research or reading or anything.
Although I was an English teacher, in April 1978, I was assigned to teach four of my classes the Holocaust, which was going to be a multi part miniseries on TV. Was hy I was chosen is actually a difficult part of this…some people did not want this story to be told.
I had a neighbor, Mr. Willis, who was in his 70s and was a survivor of the Holocaust. He lost his wife and children and other relatives. He was very upset about how inaccurate it was. And he volunteered to come to my school to talk to the children.
I combine my for junior high school classes and they listen to him very intently. I won’t get into it too much. It’s painful. To keep viewers tuned for 5 nights they had soap opera moments a family, struggling to see each other. Mr. Willis explained that once you got to a concentration camp, you never saw your family again.. and because this was TV, which had great censorship, you couldn’t see the cruelty, violence, and starvation that people were going through.
I did not know this till much later, but three groups of people came to the school demanding to see me in the principal and complaining about the show and what was going on in my class.
The first group,just felt that this was too painful a thing to get into and it should not be taught in school.
A second group felt that although this was history, it happened a long time ago and should not be brought up
A third group, believe it, or not, contended that this never happened, and even Mr. Willis was a fraud.
Again, I didn’t hear about this until much much later. But if Mr. Willis had not come up, my students would not have learned the truth about the holocaust. In addition, many of the other students in the school, kept asking my students about what went on
So what I learned from this is that most people will take the movie for fact and not do any research for many many reasons. And starting then that began to bother me because so many movies say “Based on a True Story.”
I left out a lot of details here, including which ethnic groups complained. But if you ever wanna hear it, I have a concluding story that is very funny and uplifting. And it involves Reggie Jackson, kind of.
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