Messing Around with "The Help"

The Help.  And no, it's not about making babies with former governor Schwarzenegger. 

Have I read the book?  Do I have plans on seeing the movie?   Now the mere fact that my mother-in-law likes The Help should have been damning enough.  But I digress. Let me explain, in a very roundabout way, why I will not see The Help.

Truth be told, the issue of whether or not someone can opine about whether or not they'd see a film based upon a book they've not read is moot, in my opinion.  But it's not easy for anyone who is a teacher to readily dismiss either, simply because in some respects, the movement of source material from book form to movie form is something that, at times, we deal with in classrooms each and every year.  If you think about the "Harry Potter" films, the recent release of "Mr. Popper's Penguins" this summer, or last year's "Where the Wild Things Are", inevitably, for teachers, there is the struggle between trying to work between literature appreciation of the source material and a student's understanding of it, and then, how it competes with the movie version of the story--particularly if an author's vision of a specific character runs up how a film chooses to portray a character on film, especially given the actor chosen.  Think this versus this.

A "U" Grade

While procrastinating in the middle of working on another blog post that I swore I would eventually post, I took advantage of a rare chance one morning this week to actually read the morning paper in the AM hours.  I have been paying only ancillary attention to the murder trial in Chatsworth regarding a middle schooler's murder of his classmate in Oxnard in 2008.

Yes, a nightmare for these two families that I couldn't even begin to fathom.  But of greater concern to me, what caused me to react beyond the simply recognition of pity for the circumstances, was this note from the article:

One teacher after another has testified in the murder trial about their deep worries that King's feminine attire and taunting behavior could provoke problems — and that E.O. Green Junior High administrators ignored them.

It wasn't just that King, 15, had begun wearing makeup and women's spiked-heeled boots, witnesses testified. It was that he seemed to relish making the boys squirm at his newly feminized appearance and was taunting them with comments like "I know you want me."

"They wanted to beat Larry up for what he was doing to them and they came to me because I wanted to keep them out of trouble,'' E.O. Green teacher Jill Ekman testified. "I told them that I would work on getting assistance from the office and we would work this out."