The attention deficit that our students suffer from today is widely documented. It comes up against a somewhat archaic model, that of the CEGEP, which is close to the factory where we summon, even in the regions, students at 8 a.m. for three-hour courses while their brain continues to develop in the arms of Morpheus. It’s a curious mise en abyss that occurs when I talk to them about Michel Foucault, the barracks, the hospitals, and his schedules, biopower and its restrictive dynamics.
This is without forgetting that their presence in the world is brightened up by a screen, that of their phone or their computer, it depends (sometimes both at the same time!) and where a teacher literally becomes a wallpaper . In addition to abundant images (films, social networks), there is the sound that passes through the wearing of headphones (discreet or not, it is sometimes headphones with noise reduction!) which distill the soundtrack of their lives, reducing my role to that of a mime.
The most charming thing is when the students remove an earphone out of politeness when they ask me a question to signify a sudden awareness, a brief return to reality. Not sure this is what Hannah Arendt meant by “ensuring the continuity of the world”.
Entertainment
How then can we teach well in these conditions? Why not ban all these objects at the college level, you ask? No, the educational path suggested by specialists is often that of entertainment. Compete with him by imitating him. What can I learn from entertainment, in this case cinema, that I can integrate into my classes so that I too can capture their attention for three hours?
I will retain, here, three models of long films which were financial successes on their scale: Oppenheimer, barbie And Impossible mission.
The first, Oppenheimer, is undoubtedly the most difficult and the one that most closely resembles a lecture on the “father” of the atomic bomb, where black and white and color are mixed in order to modulate the perspective of the protagonist. The whole thing is quite verbose. Christopher Nolan, the director, often says that you have to trust the intelligence of the viewer. It is a risky, voluble model, where the temporal back and forth is difficult to recreate in a course. On the other hand, I already have the impression that students see me in black and white, so I am halfway there.
The second is the model barbie, a somewhat heavy fable (let’s be frank) about the patriarchy, which perfectly masters the art of saying the same thing in ten not-so-different ways. It is aimed at a deliberately and commercially broad audience (the famous 7 to 77 year olds). In this case, redundancy really has educational virtues, but using devices like dancing or singing in class would require me to turn into a Minister of Education and I really don’t want to go there.
Finally, the last one, Impossible mission and the adventures of Ethan Hunt (part 7), is undoubtedly the framework best suited to an audience suffering from attention deficit. This film indeed achieves the feat of being presented in its entirety in an opening credits and can be understood by anyone, whether present or absent from the theater. It essentially functions as an algorithmic model that condenses the message to summarize it visually and orally, playing the role of both actor and oracle.
A film about artificial intelligence, probably written by artificial intelligence, which shows us everything that is going to happen: opening credits with musical background which shows everything that is coming, oral presentation of the synopsis and expected actions of the characters TED Talk version, then setting up action scenes under the metaphor of a human game of Tetris.
And not to conclude, the film announces a sequel so that we are sure to see each other again. Of the three models chosen, this is the one that would optimize my work. Of the three, it is the one that brought in the least money, but of the three, it is the only one that clearly calls for an impossibility.