Teaching Rushmore:

Three times a week I have movie classes with three different groups. Although I was encouraged to play films that portray American or British values (To Kill a Mockingbird, Twelve Angry Men, My Fair Lady), I decided to balk at tradition and show something a little more contemporary. My students are in the third year where the topics for the semester are Theatre and Education. What could be better than a movie about a 15 year-old who writes plays?

Most of the kids like it, mostly for the drama with Ms. Cross and Max (my classes are about 90% female). They get most of the jokes and are, I hope, learning grammar and vocabulary. Some moments they just don't understand, in particular the conflict between Max and Dirk and Magnus. The lynchpin to this (for those of you who have not seen the movie) is that Max claims that Dirk's mom has given him a hand-job. A lot of the movie won't make sense if you don't know that word. This brings me to class today, where I felt a little like a dad with his 9 year-old son, trying to explain what a hand-job is without being too specific and while trying to avoid gestures. "It's something you do with your hand in a bed or a car, really anywhere. And it's a man, or in this case a boy, and a woman and they're touching.... Let's just say that Max said something bad about Dirk's mom." I suppose that this was enough. Maybe some of the girls really did understand and will let the others know in hushed whispers. Otherwise, I guess they'll never be able to get jobs making overdub scripts for porn.