HAPPY TEACHER APPRECIATION WEEK! 8 Videos You Watched In School 1000 Times Because The School Only Had Three Tapes
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!
This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, when those who are in school try their best not to be the worst, and those out of school think back to the amazing teachers that made us the weird and wonderful versions of adults that we are today.
Teachers work incredibly hard. The amount of work they have to do and the flexibility they have was illustrated more than ever when we were in the middle of lockdown, trying to continue on as abnormally-normally as we could.
VERY SINCERELY - Thanks teachers!
Some of our fondest memories of teachers, however, are the days that they wouldn't teach. Anyone in grade school in the days before Smart-Boards and streaming services remembers the joyful noise of a giant TV and VCR on a rickety stand getting rolled across the linoleum floor into your classroom. That's right: one of our collective fondest memories of school? Watching movies.
(And we've all heard the John Mulaney joke - we know why teachers would come in and choose to "just show a video!" - And as an adult who now knows adult teachers, I am now well aware that they regard video days as lovely days, days of rest and refuge - so we're willing to bet the teachers think just as fondly of these videos as we do.)
Of course, youngest among us, who came into this world crying with pre-paid Netflix subscriptions, do not know the secondary struggle that accompanied the wonderful movie day. Any normal school had a finite selection of videos that they showed on rotation. Which you would end up on was anybodies guess, but, by the time you had graduated, you could probably recite each of them by heart.
Here are the eight videos we all watched in school give or take one thousand times.
1. Finding Nemo
Finding Nemo was a movie-day-indoor-recess-we-need-something-to-do classic in just about every school system across the country.
The wholesome tale of a clown fish named Nemo who gets separated from his father Marlin, and Marlin's brave quest across the sea to find his son is a video some how owned by every academic institution.
If the teacher landed on Finding Nemo, you knew it was going to be a good day!
2. Magic School Bus
Magic School Bus was another go-to. Whether it was to pass the time or to illustrate a point that had been gone over in class, there was an episode of Magic School Bus for everything.
I've been in multiple social situations in adult life where suddenly we all find ourselves talking about Miss Frizzle. Magic School Bus is one of the most consistent forms of education that we have.
3. Osmosis Jones
Osmosis Jones was a movie that we watched on repeat that was the perfect blend of entertaining, educational, and what-the-heck-was-that?
The star-studded cast including Chris Rock, Bill Murray, and Molly Shannon is part cartoon-part real life. Osmosis Jones, a cartoon voied by Chris Rock, fights off disease inside the body of Frank Detorre, played by Bill Murray, a real person.
Osmosis Jones is one of those classic school movies that you forget about until someone mentions it and everyone goes, "Ohhhhh yeah!"
4. Bill Nye the Science Guy
If this list is showing me anything, it's proving that science took a lot of movies to explain to us. Episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy were shown time and time again.
Bill Nye was like a real-life Miss Frizzle, going through science in a real way that was still exciting and fun to watch. Somehow we were all hooked on Bill Nye the Science Guy (even when our teacher had just explained the same thing!)
5. Romeo and Juliet
Really, this goes for any movie based on a book you read in class, but Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is one most of us were shown in school.
The second you're introduced to Shakespeare around the eighth or ninth grade, your teacher went to find you a copy of this film. (Alongside several warnings to continue behaving while more intimate scenes happened, because otherwise, "I WILL TURN THE MOVIE OFF!")
6. Cats the Musical
Everyone had that weird movie in your school that you and your classmates saw one hundred times, but was basically unrelated to anything, and when you mention that you watched this movie in school everyone around you is like, "huh? what?" but it is seared in your mind in a vivid way to the point at which you remember another Kindergartener sitting in the room in front of you during in-door recess falling asleep on the floor and every other kindergartener noticing after the lights came back on.........
.........that movie, for me, is the Broadway recording of Cats the Musical .
7. Fantasia
How could you possibly get through a school that had a music program without watching the incredible, musical Disney animation Fantasia.
(I'd like to quickly acknowledge that every school should have a music program, but that requires a major attitude shift about how our culture views the arts and I find it unlikely that I will be able to resolve that today.)
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is THE best broom animation in the world! (Fight me on it, I dare you!)
8. GATACA
And for number eight, I AM sneaking a High School movie on to this list, but GATACA is simply too iconic to leave off. There was a distinct period in the 20-teens when every high schooler who has ever taken a biology class found themselves watching this DNA-defying film - Once again proving that, no matter how old you are, science needs movies.
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to educators everywhere - we hope this brought back some pleasant memories for you!
