About a month or so ago I planned to show my personal finance class a movie about the stock market. I had them competing in a stock market simulation, and so it went nicely with what they were learning about in class. To be clear, this was not a documentary, it was a movie – “Wallstreet: Money Never Sleeps“, which is the sequel to the Wallstreet movie made in 1987 with Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen. It’s a good movie, I really liked it and was excited to share it with my students. So you can imagine how disheartening it was when I saw a couple students with their heads down during the movie, and one that was actually choosing to read a book instead.

When I asked the boy reading the book to put it away, he looked at me and asked “Oh, I have to watch the movie?” I was speechless. I thought the students would enjoy a break from the regular class routine, but here was this student that saw it as optional. I told him that yes, he was expected to watch it, as it was an opportunity to apply what they had been learning in understanding the plot of the movie. I even paused it a few times to make sure that the class was following what was happening and connecting it to things they had learned about.

It made me feel better when I heard a student say to one of his classmates as they filed out of the room “I want to know what happens, this is actually a good movie”. I guess they don’t expect the movies shown in school to be any good.

I showed the movie “The Imitation Game” (about Alan Turing – creator of one of the first computers during WWII) to my computer science class and they seemed to enjoy it. I even had a student ask to borrow it because he missed one of the classes that we watched it.