16 mm in the classroom

[Nick Vermeirsch]

Ciao! Every year, i take my film projector to the classroom where i teach. Today was again a good moment to show the young people what real film is, how a projector works, and finally watch some fragments together. I teach maths in senior high school, so this was also the topic of the films we watched: 'Mathematics for tomorrow' (1968) and 'Dimensions' (1970). Greets from Belgium!

[Dominique De Bast]

You're fantastic!

[Steve Klare]

It's a good thing!

-a lot of teenage kids this will go right over their heads, but some few of them will see something like this and be inspired by it. It won't absolutely lead them to collecting films, but maybe to an interest in cinema, or electronics (-and the math that goes along with it), or pre-2000AD history or even just give them the feeling that their teacher is an interesting guy and maybe worth listening to.

I was one of those kids! (Maybe I should count as TWO of 'em!) I took metal shop in Junior High. The teacher held an extra-help session after school a couple of days a week for the kids that were struggling with their projects. I was doing fine but I went anyway.

I have the classic North American educator's 16mm machine: Kodak Pageant. -built as if they expected it to work even after falling off a building! Every school I went to right up to college level had a room full of these somewhere on steel carts and seeing one at the back of the room was always good for a burst of endorphins when I walked into class. Mine is still marked for a college in Wisconsin.

I want to find some really hokey black and white sex-education film someday ("Julie thinks Ron is a swell guy, but she'd rather go to the malt shop with him if he'd shower more."). The friends we invite over for movies are right around our age: they'll get a laugh out of it too!

[Douglas Meltzer]

That's great, Nick. I remember being shown science films in class, but never a math movie!

[Dave Bickford]

When was in school, I loved it when they delivered the movie projector to the classroom! I was also one of the Audio/Visual nerds in high school. My school had a few Bell & Howell "Specialist" projectors. They had one RCA projector too.

[Steve Klare]

The one I will always remember is Mrs. Woodhouse: my English teacher in 11th and 12th grades. Her mission was to boost her department's Regents Exam grades and stay in good standing with the District and the State. Her strategy was to make the kids listen! She was dramatic, funny and not afraid to push the kids' buttons to hold their attention. For example, she did a unit on the history and meaning of the Top-5 Dirty Words! "OK, we're going to learn all about '%$#@' today! Before I start: notebooks closed, pens down!" (This was not on the final!)

She was a very effective teacher, but how she managed to retire at a normal age seems a miracle! In any case: English class was never boring!

Of course, every year of high school English, we had one Shakespeare play. This could be pretty dry stuff for a barely post-pubescent teenage kid, but Mrs. W. applied her magic and brought it to violent, sexy, vigorous life! It's entirely possible that because of the way she taught it, we actually experienced it a lot more the way Shakespeare intended it all along: not people in odd clothing speaking old gibberish but flawed human beings with real life problems living through less than ideal circumstances.

When it came to Macbeth, the card she played was Roman Polanski's feature. This was funded by Playboy's Hugh Hefner and because of it, I literally saw an X-rated film (Nudity+Violence) in High School! (...I WAS a Senior at the time!).

Getting back to the "film" part of this: this of course was a multi-reel feature. Mrs. Woodhouse herself stood at the helm and ran that Pageant. This was not a film-collector like us: just somebody doing her job with the tools she had at hand. Just maybe when VHS showed up a couple of years later she didn't mind at all! (I have a couple of present-day teacher friends and I keep offering to teach them these ways of the ancients!)

As a parent, I just may have freaked out a little having a teacher showing my kid a movie with heads getting lopped off and so much skin (...etc.), but then again that June I did get a 91 on the English Regents...

-maybe she was right after all!

[Brian Fretwell]

I'm sure I saw "Donald in Mathemagic Land" at school. It may have been a "Last day of term" film rayher than in a class.

[Steve Klare]

I have a Disney film about Electrical Safety with Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. As bad as this sounds, it's even worse! It's not even drawn animation, but pretty lame stop-motion. (Looks like they went to the gift shop and borrowed some plush toys.)

-It's kind of a dud! I think the best part of the whole thing is the Disney can it came in. The real tragedy is it's a nice print! All the other things this film could have been!

Such a serious subject really doesn't come across when they try to make it "cute"! I attended a lecture on Electrical Safety about a year ago by a young Electrician who'd spent a couple of months hospitalized for third degree burns: That drove the point home!

(Maybe Roman Polanski should make an Electrical Safety film!)

[Ken Finch]

As an ex secondary school teacher I used films extensively in the classroom as did many of my colleagues. I trained “ visual aids” monitors to move the equipment from room to room when required. In the days before self threading projectors, teachers had to have a visual aids proficiency course before being allowed to use them. Most local authorities had an educational film library. In London and Kent, the majority of schools had Bell and Howell 600 series machines, later replaced with Elf\Eiki . The school I was taught in 1946 had a Carpenter. Most local authorities disposed of their films and projectors and replaced them with VHS. These days it’s interactive white boards and computers in every classroom!!

[Steve Klare]

Yes,

I went back to my high school a few years after I graduated and every classroom had a media cart with a TV and a VCR, permanently in place. As much as I love showing film in my off-time, the prospect of not having to deal with borrowing a projector and dealing with 16mm film-handling on the job would be a relief: just one small(-ish) cassette in your briefcase and you are good to go!

I had a history professor in college a few years later who was a photographer in his off-time: he still insisted on 16mm. (-what a great class!)

My high school had the one driving simulator for the entire school district. It was maybe twenty 1960s-era Chrysler dashboards with steering wheels and brake and gas pedals arrayed between a projector and a wide screen. (-there was also a clutch pedal, but it was locked out!) There was some sort of control system that went along with the film: the gauges and speedometer reacted to the situation on screen. The horn button caused a faint "beep!" to not disturb the rest of the school.

It was 16mm, and as I figured out around the time I joined this Forum: 'scope!

We were in there one day after a couple of weeks instruction, and they decided it was time to challenge us a little. We were happily motoring along in our classic Chryslers when all of a sudden we had a blowout: every last kid in the room stomped on the brakes, which especially before anti-lock brakes would have put the car in a spin! The teacher chewed us out, rewound the film, and we tried it again!

Same film, a couple of minutes later: a pedestrian ran out between two parked cars. We were faced with the instantaneous choice of steering right and ramming a parked car or keeping straight and mowing down the human being.

(-it was NOT a great day for Pedestrians...or Driver Education Teachers!)
.

[Steve Klare]

If you think of it, my High School missed a golden opportunity here:

-all they needed was a 16mm 'scope feature and a popcorn maker and they could have turned that Driving Simulator room into a funky indoor drive-in movie theater! People could have sat in the "cars" and taken in a movie!

(How being a film collector changes how you see the world!)

If they did this after school, I would have taken the late bus for sure!

This is back during the era when 16mm rental houses were still common: because a friend's Mom worked for one, a bunch of us saw Superman down in their basement one Saturday night. She had a deal there: one feature for one night per month, including a projector and tripod screen.