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Chapter 7: Lights, Camera, Action!

 

Some point in the last hundred years, people got to thinking that you don’t actually need to teach gifted kids, but that they’ll figure things out on their own. This is the reason jobs like mine exist. 

 

Actually, extend this beyond gifted kids and apply it to everyone: Kids won’t learn if no one teaches them. Imagine that. Let’s go back in time to when I started to figure this out for the first time. Here’s the story of the infamous Waving Grass Middle School Movie Making Class.

 

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I don’t like study halls. 

 

I do like movies. 

 

This would prove to be a deadly combination. 

 

When I approached my principal and asked if I could teach a movie making class instead of a study hall, little did she know what she was enabling. 

 

When I told the librarian our goal was to make a 45-minute film, she advised me, “Maybe stick to twenty.”

 

When I asked for time in our auditorium to screen the film for the community, our assistant principal asked, “What kind of… quality… are we looking at here?”

 

With two camcorders, a creaky tripod, and the cheapest shotgun mic and boom I could find, my small band of eighth graders produced the 45-minute film about a student crime-fighting unit who gets in over their heads when the villain releases a deadly virus into the school.💭 The basic ploy of this may have been borrowed from an episode of Burn Notice. I played “Mr. Dushkin,” a name I got from a child who kept calling me that when I managed the city pool in the summers. I wrote the script after being unable to find a suitable script for which I wouldn’t have to pay royalties out of my nonexistent budget. 

 

Now, though I am a teacher, I don’t actually like people teaching me things. I’m the sort of guy who buys IKEA furniture and likes the challenge of assembling it without looking at the instructions (let’s not talk about the screws left over when I’m done). The thing that makes my job harder many days is that most people are not like me. 

 

During the first period of the first day of the 2015 school year, the cast assembled around a long table to read a script written just for them. They laughed at the jokes, smiled with glee when one of the investigators got to punch and knock out a villain about three times her size. 

 

I first realized there was a problem when, while teaching my editors how to sync sound waveforms to video frames, an assistant director burst through the door, crying while holding a slate in her hand labeled Take 93 or some equally astronomical number.💭 I remember telling the cast that taking more than three takes for a shot meant they didn't know their part the way they should. Turns out, while filming the scene next door, there was a whole lot of yelling, a whole lot of people trying to do each other’s jobs, very little acting and even less actual filming. 💭 The bloopers, however, were gold, and still available on YouTube.

 

I had given them basic instruction on how to work the equipment and then set them loose to film the scene, patting myself on the back for the learning experience they would get while they “just figured it out.”

 

“Kids can do amazing things,” I’ve been told, “if we just get out of their way.” I learned to disagree with that, to an extent. For the seven years of this movie making class, I didn’t just get out of their way. I taught, and I taught hard. I got out of their way only once they were ready, and as soon as they were ready. 

 

Letting them go film a scene independently before they knew how to use the camera, sound recorder, microphone system, or how to operate as a unit was a recipe for fighting, hurt feelings, and a wasted day of accomplishing nothing. 

 

For better or for worse, kids learn by making mistakes. It was time to go back and learn how to work together and problem-solve when things go wrong. The upside was, now, they had plenty of experience with things going wrong from which we could learn!

 

Within a few weeks of me gradually releasing control, the assistant directors could take their own camera and sound crew to their own location with their own scene and shoot triangle coverage completely independently. The editors could grab a drive filled with video and sound files for their scenes and put together their own artistic cut of the film. Somewhere, among 93 takes, was 25 seconds of usable material!

 

We built a set out of cardboard boxes painted with leftover paint. It fell down literally the moment I yelled “cut” on our last take of our last scene. We couldn’t have timed that better!

 

Kids can do amazing things if we get out of the way once they’re ready. The intersection of the art and skill of teaching is looking for the moments when they show they’re ready.

 

By the end of the semester, we screened the film for the community in our theater, and by charging admission, raised over a thousand dollars for us to keep doing it the next year! And the next, and the next and the seven years next! It grew so much that I had to start a second class for seventh graders to produce shorts of a few minutes in length. 

 

We produced goofball farces in which a student who is mistaken for a substitute teacher rolls with it. We produced a “The Office”-style mocumentary where a student-run TV station melts down (for this, I was congratulated by a former student because, quote, my "writing is getting better." That meant a lot to me coming from a sophomore. 

 

We produced the fantasy and adventure, where the fictional villains all the characters wrote - like a dark jedi and a mob boss - came to life and began wreaking havoc in the school. 

 

I returned to my role as Mr. Dushkin in the fifth year, giving our original cast (now high school seniors) cameos in a sequel to our first film, where the new villain was a hacker who locked down the school. 

 

We won the state-level Award of Excellence from the Iowa Motion Picture Association for our noir-horror, produced in the midst of COVID when we never knew when a cast or crew member would be quarantined and absent for two weeks. 

 

Finally, we ended the movie making era with another fantasy, the story of a girl pretending to be a magical sorceress having to lead the fight against an actual magical sorceress, also winning a prestigious Award of Achievement from the Iowa Motion Picture Association. 💭 We went out with a bang by making the bloopers for this one the best of all.

 

The best part of this whole process? It was actually a year after I left. I returned to watch student-directed one-acts at the high school, and the short plays written and directed by my former students had me laughing out loud the entire evening. “If life were supposed to be easy,” one of their characters announced, “I’d still have custody of my kids!”

 

In one of our later films, I chatted with the assistant director. “How do you think we should set up this scene?” I asked him. He played out a couple of ways it could go and then decided on one. “Okay,” I said, and pointed to the cast. “Go tell them.”

 

It’s so rare to be able to tell the very moment of authentic change in a person, but he changed that day in that moment. As he walked over and started explaining his vision to the cast and cameraman, I saw him become a take-charge leader capable of determining what he wants and getting people on board. Like Spielberg, he walked the cast through blocking, walked them through their eyelines, and directed the camera as if it were a character.

 

Once he was ready, I got out of his way. 

 

“We are what they grow beyond,” Yoda tells Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. “That is the true burden of all masters.” That is the true purpose of all teachers: help them grow beyond you. 

 

I miss making movies, but just like the kids, I grew beyond it. Now, the question is, how many places can we find to give kids the right experiences to help them grow beyond us? What talents and passions do we have among our teaching staff that we can share with the kids? I got to teach that class during a study hall, and any teacher could have taught any class they wanted at that time! So, why didn’t anyone? 

 

We’re more than math teachers; we’re masters and mentors. What can we do to help the kids grow beyond us?

 

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David Dubczak is an educator and writer documenting his final year in the classroom before transitioning into school administration. Follow David Dubczak - Writer on Facebook to keep up with semi-weekly posts. 

 

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