First, I want to respond to one of the paragraphs on page 118. It is the first full paragraph and discusses how many different ways of showing and discussing a film in a class. A teacher may replay a certain scene or show the whole film before discussing. They may show a scene without the sound playing, asking students to imagine what they might hear. While this is ideal, how realistic is it really? If we are showing a movie in the classroom, most likely it is a way to kill some time (i.e., exam days, OGT week, and so on), as a reward for our students, or, in the best case scenario, because the film is related to the book we are reading. For example, students are reading Hamlet and are watching Brannagh's film version at the same time or after the reading. Watching film adaptations of Shakespeare is something that is common in the classroom, at least in my experience, because it helps students understand what is going on. But really, while we may be willing to take a couple of class periods to watch a movie, are we really going to spend a lot of time discussing that film when we have other things we have to cover? Sad to say but I really don't think so.
On a whole, I feel like this chapter is based on a film class or an English class that pretty much focused entirely on films, which is hard to believe. I don't feel like I got any information on how to incorporate watching films in my English class, beyond the mentioned method of helping students understand the literature. That's also sort of my issue with this book as a whole. I'm not really interested in how movies are made, so that aspect is out for me. I also feel like this book is meant for a class dedicated toward film, not classes that choose to utilize film to make their classrooms more technologically friendly. Maybe the study guide chapters are better; I don't really know because I've only skimmed through a couple. But so far, I don't find this book very useful for teaching secondary English.
The book does have some weak points, I agree, but if you really take the time to look at some films you will find them to be as complex as the most classic piece of literature. True that the majority of films being made today have no place in the classroom, under any circumstances. But films do contain most of the same elements as books and because of this I think it would be worth teaching at least one lesson using them. Even if it is simply to help students make a connection to something they are more familiar with than novels, which sadly is the case with some students.
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