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In English we watched Zeffirelli’s version of Romeo & Juliet. Our English teacher paniced a bit during the nude scene and held up a single, white sheet of paper to the screen (which hid nothing). :dubious: Afterward she reminded us that they did not have sex until after they were married.
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Hell, my freshman English class watched it, too, and I went to a Catholic high school run by nuns! The teacher just told us calmly that there would be nudity, but it’s NOT a big deal.
But! There was no remote for the VCR the library brought over, so she had a student walk up, fast forward to the scene and pause it so she could set up the context. Then the student would go back up and press play. Well, she overshot the beginning slightly and paused it right with bare ass paused on the screen! We were all howling as the student obliviously started back to her desk and the teacher frantically waved her back, hissing at us to shut up or Sister Hyacinth would hear the commotion and see moonlit-ass on the tv!
I was using as part of a series of recurring themes this semester. They had already done an exam on an article about a university that gives out a grade of FD for failure with dishonesty. We watched Bigger Stronger Faster first, which is about steroids, cheating, unfair advantages, pressure, competition, etc.
Election was a good one to segue into from that. I confess that I have not yet read the novel, but now I’m wondering if I would run into the same problem of students objecting to that as well as to the film. Sheesh. I swear this was never a problem until this year.
You ACTUALLY endorse using deceit to humiliate a young woman? :dubious: Granted, being quite sheltered, she probably isn’t familiar with the film, so will believe the professor when he says it’s appropriate. I’m shocked you actually believe he’ll get away with that stunt!
Have you even seen The King’s Speech? It should have been rated G or E. There is no sex, violence, drugs, or anything, and is an uplifting, innocent, sweet film about a man and his loving wife and his friendship with his speech therapist. There is, however, one scene where the King is undergoing speech therapy where he is told to repeat the word “fuck” in order to overcome his stuttering. So it was given an R-rating for no good reason. The movie is entirely appropriate, but mis-rated.
The point is not to humiliate the young woman but to illustrate the fallacy of rejecting a movie based solely on an arbitrary letter in front of it.
Frankly this whole thing smells like an urban legend to me. There is no specifics at all. All we have is a unnamed girl, at an unnamed school, taking an unnamed course from unnamed professor. We don’t know the names of any of the films or even if the course was required or not. I did some googling and couldn’t find any references to this except this very Straight Dope thread.
The whole thing strikes me as a psychology experiment to see how many people you can get to state a conclusion without actually telling them any facts.
Why would you think that? This isn’t a particularly unusual situation; I would guess that most professors who show films have encountered at least one student like this, at least if they work in the Bible Belt. (I certainly have, and I haven’t been teaching all that long.*) It’s also not weird or dramatic enough to make for a good urban legend.
In case anyone’s curious, I caved and I wish I hadn’t. The movie was the same sort of thing as The King’s Speech: rated R for swearing, but with no other objectionable content whatsoever, and the student said that she had seen an edited version in the past and wanted to know if that would be sufficient. I said OK. Of course, that opened the floodgates for a bunch of other students to assume that if they’d seen the movie in the past, they didn’t have to watch it again now, and it turned out that it was almost impossible to have any meaningful discussion about a film people had seen months or years before.
I would link everyone to the actual campus newspaper story if their website were up and running. It isn’t. I could scan the article for you and put the photos on Photobucket but someone would probably claim it’s all fake. Whatever. All I know is that it did happen, I know the dept. heads and deans involved, if not the student and professor, and I just had a very similar incident happen to me.
I am not in the Bible Belt. I am in So. Cal.
And is it really so hard to believe that this could happen, not just with a movie, but with a book or story assignment? I'm sure there are students out there objecting to all sorts of books for all sorts of reasons.
**etv78**, surely you are aware that a movie's rating tends to show up on the screen at some point early on when the DVD is played? How would it be misleading if they can SEE the freaking rating on the screen?
I find it completely believable. When I was working in the box office of a movie theater, some woman came up to me complaining that the movie Twins had swearing in it. Apparently, someone had said “shit” in the movie. I pointed out that the movie was PG, and that almost every movie that wasn’t G had at least some swearing in it. She was Outraged. I suggested that she restrict herself to G rated movies, and she was even more Outraged. I called the manager, who gave her a movie pass good for another show. I always hoped that she used it on a Disney movie or something.
Do you really believe that every college dean or dept. head is going to take such a whiny-ass complaint seriously? “S/he misled me about a film’s rating” does not qualify as a grievance as I understand the term, and it certainly isn’t worth pursuing.
Hell, we’ve had helicopterparents of college students show up in the dean’s office to demand that Professor so and so be fired because “he’s too demanding, he gives too much work, he gave my little darling a bad grade and now s/he’s upset, whaa whaa whaa.” Nothing happens. Why should it?
On the Confessions of a Community College Dean blog, the blogger reported that occasionally a student will come in to complain about a professor being gay. Dean’s response: “And what would you like me to do about it?” At that point, the student mutters, giggles nervously, and decides not to continue.
Not all complaints are given serious consideration.
Legend or not, it’s believable enough. Several years ago, the local media gave attention for a few days about a college professor (instructor, teacher, head cheese, whatever the title is) who routinely used profanity in his class. Not randomly, as one might suppose, but to emphasize certain points in his lecture. Still, one student complained and wanted the professor terminated, which the college refused to do. So she took it to the media, which made news but didn’t change anything. I don’t remember all the details. It was some college in SE Michigan, may have been UofM, or maybe even have just been Oakland University. And it had to be some 7-8 years ago.
Sorry that I don’t have all the details to satisfy everyone, but the point is that, while this particular instance might be legend, it’s well within the realm of reality. SOME students have even taken a failing grade in a class to court, and had it overturned by legal ruling.
I can’t say about this case, but I was in a class where the instructor used a clip from the opening of Clean and Sober. When a woman’s rear was shown, two Mormon students (both male) leapt up and left the room until the clip was over. Also, a professor friend was being threatened with a grievance because he had a required book about transsexuals and a student complained it was against her religion. The prof gave her an alternate assignment.
We were all howling as the student obliviously started back to her desk and the teacher frantically waved her back, hissing at us to shut up or Sister Hyacinth would hear the commotion and see moonlit-ass on the tv!