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Contributing Editor Stefania Pomponi Butler blogs CityMama and contributes to KimchiMamas
Maybe it's because I am a former inner-city school teacher, or maybe it's because I can still remember the lessons that certain impactful teachers taught me, but I love documentaries about students learning. I love watching their eyes light up when they are in the midst of an involved project and the look of pride on their faces when the project is complete and they can finally talk about what they learned and how they learned it.
Paper Clips is a powerful film not only about students learning (and creating something amazing in the process), but about how a team of dedicated teachers set out to literally change the world, one poor, rural, Southern student at a time.
From Netflix:
Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee is the setting for this documentary about an extraordinary experiment in Holocaust education. Struggling to grasp the concept of 6 million Holocaust victims, the students decide to collect 6 million paper clips to better understand the enormity of the calamity. The film details how the students met Holocaust survivors from around the world and how the experience transformed them and their community.
This movie is especially timely in light of Mel Gibson's recent DUI bust where he made despicable anti-Semitic statements to the arresting officers. He has admitted making them and is asking the Jewish community to "help him heal." Perhaps he should start by watching Paper Clips.
Viewing the movie from a teacher's perspective was a powerful experience. Here was an example of project-based, cross-curricular learning at its finest. Students used math to calculate the number and weight of the clips, language arts skills to write about the project, critical thinking skills to discuss how to catalog the clips, what to do with them, and how to honor the memory of all those who died. And underneath it all, the history.
How to make these (not-so-) ordinary students understand the horrors of the Holocaust even though it happened long before those students and their parents (and, perhaps, even their grandparents) were born? That was the question that these teachers faced. Coming up with collecting the paper clips—a symbol of Nazi resistance—was the students' idea. How they went about collecting them and who helped along the way was fascinating.
Also fascinating was how atuned to the concepts of stereotyping, ignorance, and racism the teachers and students were. They realized full-well that as residents of a poor, rural, Tennessee town (with just two stop lights) that they were themselves stereotyped by others who would wonder about the validity of the project. The teachers, especially, were keenly aware of their community's culture of racism and how painful it is to grow up hearing racial epithets being casually tossed about by people you love.
This context of pain and hurt and the desire to help the children in their community break the cycle certainly informs their teaching.
The fact that the teachers did not try to diminish or sanitize the evil perpetrated by the Nazi regime was not just commendable, it was right. There is no doubt in my mind: this project changed the students who participated forever. And when you ponder what those students will teach their friends and eventually their children about what they learned, the world becomes a more hopeful place.
I can't remember the last time I was so touched by a movie. Paper Clips is one of the most provocative and important films I have ever seen. The one thing I can say about this movie is: you'll never look at a paper clip the same way again.
Paper Clips (2004) Directed by Elliot Berlin. Rated G.
