The Bowling for Columbine Teachers’ Guide is chock full of ways to use Michael Moore’s movie to “help students develop critical thinking skills, historical analysis, and open their minds on many universal issues.” Or so it says. Brenda of Isomorphisms spotlights a few howlers:
7. Michael Moore asks the Lockheed manager if kids think, “Dad goes off to the factory every day and builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction. What’s the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?” The Lockheed manager suggests that there is not a connection. In a persuasive essay, support a thesis in which you argue whether Moore’s statement of a connection makes sense.
Here’s a three-word essay: No, it doesn’t.
Just for starters, Columbine’s Lockheed plant doesn’t make weapons; it makes rockets that boost satellites into orbit.
10. An underlying theme in the film is the issue of white racism and how this racism has spawned fear. Using specific examples from the film as well as other research, agree or disagree with the concept that racism in our country leads to fear.
Doesn’t fear lead to racism? And, since almost all the Columbine victims were white, why is racism relevant? For that matter, why is fear relevant? The murderers didn’t act in self-defense.
My daughter’s college US History class showed Roger and Me. Her summary (in my words): “A very funny load of crap”.
It irritates me a lot that any teacher would choose to show a Michael Moore film in what is supposedly an academic class.
I watched this film for the third time over Thanksgiving Break with my family…it sure got us talking, and I think that’s the point of it.
You’re right that Moore goes a little over the top in his challenge to gun culture — and the online “teacher’s guide” is clearly biased in favor of his views. But I’d guess most teachers are smart enough to see through all that. The problem for me isn’t teaching the film, but it begs the question: how political can you get in the classroom?
I’ve been thinking about using this film in my Media and Society courses, because I think his point about “fear” is actually an accurate and complex one — and the stakes are high. I want to see what the generation of Columbine thinks about all this, and so the film can generate conversation. Although the assertions and correlations Moore seems to make are often quite hasty, his point that we are living in a culture of fear is something I think students want to talk about. In my opinon, fear is relevant to the film’s themes because the Columbine killers were so saturated by fear that they were enthralled by it, that they lusted after the aura of power that the mediascape glows with…and wanted to instill it in others. They were radical by-products of our mainstream culture, not “lone wolf” crazy gunmen, and so I think fear is very relevant. Fear is what stopped the cops from rushing the school and saving the kids of Columbine, too, as Moore asserts in the “special features” speech on the DVD (which is far more political than the film is, I think). But yes, the teacher’s guide is a sort of propaganda and seems to ask students to set aside their critical thinking when they write to some degree.
I wonder if Arnzen would be as willing to overlook errors, etc if the message was “right wing”.
Actually, I don’t.
Mike,
> You’re right that Moore goes a little over the top
A little is all you’re willing to admit? Good grief, man, he spliced together parts of completely different speeches and presented them as if they were right after Columbine just to make one of his targets look bad. You teach “Media and Society” and are not enormously troubled by this practice in something that (falsly) bills itself as a documentary? Gack!
But maybe we shouldn’t expect more from someone who mouths intellectial nullities such as “the generation of Columbine”.
Wow. Look, I trust that my college-aged students are probably just as able to detect BS as you guys are and using a film like this to detect it is a productive thing. The questions you raise are the same sorts of things I might raise myself in the classroom to get students talking… my point is that raising questions like these and stimulating debate is something I try to do in my classes and I think this movie might accomplish that in an interesting way (just like it seems to be doing here). It isn’t about my own agenda. I show a film like this as I would any kind of film: as a text to pick apart and talk about. We’d analyze Moore’s rhetoric, discuss the film’s truth value or false tactics, talk about the editing strategies that fool us or lead us to considering a point-of-view, and talk about issues like gun contol, school violence, scare tactics in media, etc.
And I see nothing wrong with saying “generation of Columbine” which is what today’s freshman and sophomores are: students who grew up with metal detectors at the gates, distrust from elders, and a daily dose of fear of another class shooting from their peers.
Everything is racism. There is nothing but racism. 24/7, 365 days a year, life is nothing but racism and more racism.
And, if you don’t believe that, you are a racist.
One thing I remember from HS is that any classes where they showed movies were a piece of cake and a waste of time. They were what lazy teachers did to get out of teaching. I’d say if you were presenting crockumentary films that certainly reinforces that premise.
Joanne,
Really now, fisking a Michael Moore Teacher’s Guide is like shooting goldfish in a glass bowl…with a 125 mm cannon…as for Mr. Arnzen, why not try something a little different - why not give them Mein Kampf and ask them to write on the topic, “Analyze whether Jews are or are not a mortal threat to German society” - that makes about as much sense as asking them to debate Michael Moore.
Everything is racism. There is nothing but racism. 24/7, 365 days a year, life is nothing but racism and more racism.
Stephen,
Okay, I believe that. So I’m not racist. But wait, that would mean that life isn’t just racism, because I’m not racist… oh no, then I can’t believe that… so I must be racist…
PJ, Stephen
This ties in well with the above topic. The fact is, we are all racists. We are guilty of original-racism. But liberals were sent here to save us, and if you accept Hillary as your next president, all sins will be forgiven. And in time we will create a diverse, multi-cultural, tolerant, heaven-on-earth.
Back on topic, I don’t see the difference between using “Bowling for Columbine” as an authoritative document, or using the one-sided texts that I was exposed to (Michael Harrington, Malcom X, etc.). In either case, the teacher thinks its true, the students invest time in the material and come to belive that its true, the students hit the real world and have to rethink everything. At least with Michael Moore, they will see his Oscars performance and say “Wow, that guy’s a dumb-ass. Maybe he’s a liar, too.”
I note that Arzen didn’t bother to tell us that he’d use something with the same sorts of errors, only going the other way.
Funny thing, ‘Bowling for Columbine’ isn’t a film about Columbine. It is only the vehicle Moore uses for raising the question - What makes us such a violent society?
“Bowling for Columbine” is an alternately humourous and horrifying film about the United States. It is a film about the state of the Union, about the violent soul of America.”
The clips that he uses to express his central question are not all related to what explicitly happened at Columbine. Why is it so important to have it be about Columbine? Because it uses the Columbine tragedy?
Something truly ‘objective’, adhering only to the facts that relate to Columbine would be a rendition of what we already know - without any further meaning. Facts carry no meaning save for what meanings we give them.
His documentary is on the question that so many of us asked in the aftermath ‘How could this happen?’, and not on what happened.
The rest of us would do well to consider how information is constructed in time and the medium in which it is presented. In a film, how would one actually show the 10 days that passed after the Columbine incident and the NRA meeting that took place nearby. Is it really about Columbine and the meeting? Or about the NRA and our right to bear arms?
Is it about the state of Michigan, banking, the militia, Timothy McVeigh and his brother, welfare to work programs, Charleton Heston, etc.? What do these things have to do with Columbine afterall?
Is it a crucial difference that if one works for Lockeheed that one works in the plant that does not make missiles, even though another plant somewhere else does? One still works for Lockeheed, no?
Can one actually make a documentary about a question?
If not, does someone have another name for this kind of film?
As an aside - there is also alot of grief about how close in a paragraph Bush used the words Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and Weapons of Mass Destruction. What’s the difference in the outcry?
Moore uses documentary methods to explore the larger question. It is not a documentary about Columbine.
Is that why so many people think it false? They wanted it to be about Columbine?
Tim Blair
Ben Fritz
David T. Hardy
Mike,
> I trust that my college-aged students are probably just as able to detect BS as you guys are
No doubt, but if you read my post carefully, you won’t find the slightest hint of a complaint that you used the film in class, but only at your belittling Moore’s conflation of documentary and propoganda genres.
Mike,
And further re:
> And I see nothing wrong with saying “generation
> of Columbine” which is what today’s freshman and
> sophomores are: students who grew up with metal
> detectors at the gates, distrust from elders,
> and a daily dose of fear of another class
> shooting from their peers.
What’s so intellectually lazy about this is that this applies to only some of today’s college students. There are plenty of places where Zero Tolerance and insane fear have not taken hold, and where the kids (rightly) view what happened at Columbine as a sad freak occurance.
I think the movie’s hilarious. There’s a lot of irony in Moore’s use of fear in the media - after all, Moore is guilty of the same sin. Seriously, when that gelatinous sack of crap starts bellowing about how the media only presents one side of a story to cause people to overreact to situations that don’t even exist, I laugh so hard I cry.
Further, college students are hardly able to see through the BS, since it is presented as Absolute Truth. Heck, I know plenty of professors who think Michael Moore is telling the Absolute Truth in that movie - I don’t see how anyone can reasonably expect most college students to see through it. And even if you point out the far-too-numerous discrepancies in the film, most Moorists will simply dismiss them as “necessary to get the point across.” Whatever.
Bugger that -
Where’s my gun?
Mike sez,”Although the assertions and correlations Moore seems to make are often quite hasty, his point that we are living in a culture of fear is something I think students want to talk about.”
I’d love to know more about this so-called “culture of fear” I keep hearing about from certain members of the intelligensia. I’ve not seen it, and I wonder where it might be located, metaphorically or otherwise.
I suspect it’s only real to the residents of Planet Fuzzy Bear.
Yes indeed, that old devil Carlton Heston who scheduled the NRA meeting years ago just to coincide with Columbine so all us dinosaurs could chuckle about the inovative use of firearms.
“Facts carry no meaning save for what meanings we give them.” - that statement has no meaning to this old engineer.
Only those who fear are with it.
If you don’t fear something, anything, you’re a fossil, probably suffering from testosterone poisoning and Western arrogance ™.
It’s actually better if you can’t explain what you fear. That takes you to the next level of sensitivity, and it’s even better if you express it publicly on a regular basis. Then everybody knows how wonderful you are.
Once, in a meeting, the leader remarked that it isn’t necessary to fear a particular change.
I said that I’d been afraid in the mid or late Seventies, but I couldn’t remember what it was about.
The leader’s attempt to invalidate our concerns; moral, ethical, esthetic, practical, by referring to them as “fear” fell apart.
I hope to have the opportunity to try it again, and I am hereby dropping any copyright I may have. Don’t be afraid to use it.
Several posters seem to think that presenting students with texts (print or visual) that have a point of view is “one-sided.” Frankly, I can’t think of anything worth reading or viewing that doesn’t have a strong viewpoint, a position worth grappling with.
In making my own choices of texts, videos, films and the like, I look for ones that will create tension between the texts and that will create tension with generally received opinion. Of course, I have a viewpoint too, so my sense of received opinion will differ from others.
An example: most of the received opinion on the Columbine shooters focused on youth culture and music. But the chief planner was mentally ill and suicidal. If we could understand what factors led him to want a spectacular, media-covered suicide, we might learn something useful. The point of critical inquiry is to learn what we don’t know, not to “balance” what we do know.
> Several posters seem to think that presenting students with texts (print or visual) that have a point of view is “one-sided.”
No. We’re pointing out that that people who pick texts with roughly the same point of view are biased.
WRT Moore, if you can’t make your argument without telling untruths, perhaps you need another argument, or maybe even another conclusion.
Sigh. Andy, you have created an argument out of thin air, which is par for the course for you. Who here has “pick[ed] texts with roughly the same point of view,” or advocated doing so? You have baselessly insulted Mike Arnzen, and when he didn’t respond to your pathetic attempt to start an argument, essentially said “See? I was right.” You weren’t.
if you can’t make your argument without telling untruths, perhaps you need another argument, or maybe even another conclusion.
Andy: Before you comment on how others make arguments, perhaps you should make one of your own first. You advance no positions in this thread and cite no evidence or source, just pot shot. What’s your point?
Although I personally think Michael Moore is a fatuous ass, I don’t have a problem with a teacher showing Moore’s movie to his class. There is not and cannot be anything wrong with a free exchange of ideas in our society. However, I think any serious academician has a responsibility to inform his/her young charges that there are countervailing arguments and that millions of their countrymen subscribe to them.
For example, with regard to the “culture of fear,” a responsible teacher would tell students that homicide rates in the United States have been declining for the past 20 years, while rising in countries with much tougher gun laws. That same responsible teacher would also note that studies have shown that a rise in fear directly correlates to the amount of TV viewing in which an individual engages, i.e., the more hours per day, the more fearful. No wonder, given the garbage on television.
Finally, the responsible teacher would acquaint students with the Constitution, esp. the Bill of Rights, and inform them that the right to bear arms enjoys equal protection along with the right to flannel mouth on matters regarding which one knows absolutely nothing whatsoever. Our hypothetical teacher might also want to note that many scholars believe the Second Amendment is the one designed to help ensure that the government doesn’t trample too much on the rest of the Constitution.
But that would take a responsible teacher instead of a propagandist.
‘I don’t have a problem with a teacher showing Moore’s movie to his class. ‘
Do you think there’s a justification for wasting the the students time on the taxpayers dime to show personal propaganda? The first thing a responsible teacher would have to say is that the movie falsely claims to be a documentary. Then what’s the justification for showing propaganda in class?
‘Moore uses documentary methods to explore the larger question.’
Staging events, splicing clips and repeating lies aren’t documentary methods, they’re classic propaganda methods.
Whether you agree with Moore or not if you condone the use of his film for education then call it what it is, which is propaganda. And I’m sorry, it promotes discussion but so would NRA training films and John Birch Society literature, and I doubt whether Mr. Moore’s supporters would be so equananimous as to advocate that they also be presented as educational tools. School is supposed to educate, not indoctrinate.
Jack, when you highlight one of my sentences to advance your argument, I would appreciate it if you would also acknowlege the rest of what I said. Talk about taking out of context.