Dead Poets

One: I dislike being told something I like is dumb. I don't mind if people don't like what I like, or are prepared to argue about the merits of something, but I hate the snobby sneer of superiority: "Oh, you like that?" I have a very strong sense of myself so I know that if I like something then I REALLY like it, it hits some chord in me and makes it ring. It is impossible to have bad taste about things that mean a lot to you personally. To thine own self be true.

Two: Dead Poets Society. Love it. It was a big hit and then at some point everyone seems to have turned on it. People say its manipulative. I've never understood this criticism of a piece of art. Art is manipulative. (I've just noticed that the word manipulative sounds a little bit sexy if you drawl your way through the second half... maybe because the lips go into the shape of a kiss when you start out on the "pu" sound.)

Three: I think part of being a teacher is being inspiring. There are two scenes that inspire me to teach better in this movie. The first is when he has the students read out what the definition of good poetry is and then gets them to tear it out of their books. The second, and far more powerful, is the scene we are now supposed to sneer at: the carpe diem scene. I shamelessly ripped off part of this scene in my class the other day. "In 3,000 years when they clear the mud off Wellington what will they find of us?" My Year 9s looked back at me blankly. "Tyler's rugby cup? Emily's favourite book? We are food for worms..." There is a real power in that scene - it comes out of looking at those photos. How mighty and confident those young men look. How time cuts us down to size. Resist, laugh, sing, be different, be happy - sometimes I want to shake all of my students until they agree.

Four: And it captures the way that good teachers are often odd people. When we see the teacher alone in his room we realise that teaching really is his life, and he is a bit odd, and a lot of things have happened to him.

Five: And, finally, it gets the white heat of youth. That can lead to wonderful things and terrible things. The final twist of feeling sympathy for the father when he discovers the body... how awful, I can't imagine anything more awful than that, and you realise that the father loves, LOVES, his son more than anything. How perverse love can be. The great creater, and the great destroyer of things.