Fifth Grade School Film

During my fifth grade in elementary school (in early 1967), a film crew paid us a visit for a few days. They were going to make a documentary of my super-duper, innovative "exploding star" of a school and we were all going to be stars as well! Oh well, make that three of us: two sixth-grade boys (Gar and Rick) and Sandy, a fifth-grade girl. Microphones were installed on them and they were followed around with a camera crew to record how a typical day was for students at this marvelous institution. I remember this pretty vividly, as Henry, a classmate with whom I chummed back then, would take a perverse pleasure in sneaking up behind Sandy (who wore a microphone tucked inside her skirt) and saying idiotic things just to sabotage the filming (as well as surreptitiously trying to appear in the movie).

Apparently, my friend's efforts were not enough to stop educational journalism at its finest, and the filming was finally finished. A few months later, our whole class was called to an assembly, and we were treated to the final product.

We were told that this movie about our school was going to be shown soon on TV. But we were all going to be treated to a sneak preview. The movie began by showing Debra, another fifth-grader, sitting staring vacantly at her fingernails, each of which she had painstakingly adorned with gummed reinforcements. Everyone in the assembly erupted in good-natured laughter at that, and other rather random scenes of student "activity" were shown. Eventually, the three aforementioned students, the focus of the film, were featured and we followed the action, all of us proud that we were so honored and special to have a movie made about our school. And we all looked for ourselves in the movie. Funny though: as much as my friend Henry had tried to get filmed, it appeared that he never made the final cut!

I remember, a few years later, once seeing this film on television. And it wasn't at all honoring to my old school, after all. There were people on it criticizing the idea of just letting students going off willy-nilly at school studying at their own pace, with teachers more in the background instead of the forefront of the learning process. And, looking back, I sadly tended to (and still do) agree with that viewpoint. But I also had classmates who thrived in that type of academic environment, so I suppose that it's a terribly subjective matter to analyze. Besides, it wasn't all chaotic there; there were structured classes sprinkled in among the "free-for-all" times.