A Band, on the First Day of School

Sixth grade begins with a room full of people trying to figure out where they stand.

For many of them it’s the first year of middle school — a bigger building, a new schedule, faces they’ve never seen, and the quiet, constant question every eleven-year-old is asking under the surface: where do I fit here, and who am I allowed to be? I have found that the first days of the year are less about content than about answering that question, and that a story can begin to answer it in a way a syllabus can’t.

The movie I reach for is School of Rock — Richard Linklater’s 2003 comedy with Jack Black. (It’s rated PG-13; I preview it and check it against school policy before showing it, and you’ll want to as well.) It’s loud and it’s very funny, and underneath the noise it is about something I want my students thinking about from the first week: what happens when a group of kids stops performing for each other and starts making something together.

The setup is almost too silly to carry weight, and then it does.

Dewey Finn is a failed rocker who takes a substitute job he has no business taking, and turns a class of straight-A rule-followers into a rock band. He is unqualified by every measure a school would recognize. But he does the one thing I think good teaching depends on: he looks at a student and sees a capacity the student hasn’t noticed yet, and he says so out loud before they’re ready to believe it.

The moment I always wait for is Tomika, the shy girl who won’t speak, asking Dewey privately if she can sing — and then singing. Nothing about her situation has changed. What’s changed is that someone made it safe to try, and took what came out seriously. I want my students to see that scene early in the year, because it’s the whole bargain I’m trying to make with them, dramatized in ninety seconds.

I don’t show the film to teach film, and I’m honest with the class about that.

I show it because the band is a metaphor a sixth grader grasps at once. A class works the way a band does: only when everyone plays their part and trusts the others to play theirs — the drummer isn’t less than the singer, the kid running lights isn’t less than the guitarist. Sixth graders arrive convinced they have to choose between standing out and fitting in. What the film lets me say, without lecturing, is that the choice is false: the band needs them to be exactly themselves and to belong to something. Both, at once.

That’s the conversation I’m after in the first weeks — not a lesson about the movie, but a shared reference the class can keep using. When we talk later about how we work together, we have Dewey’s band to point back to.

If it’s useful, here is what I do with the film once we’ve watched it:

None of it needs elaborate materials. What it needs is the willingness to spend the first days of the year on how students are going to be together, before we ask them to work.

If you’d like the activities ready to go — built for a sixth-grade class just stepping into middle school — I’ve put together a resource that follows the progression above, so you can focus on your students and not on assembling the scaffolding.

You can find it here:

And I’d genuinely like to know: have you ever opened a school year with a movie? Tell me what you reach for — I’m always adding to the list.

Warmly,

Chiara

If you like opening a unit with a film that does this kind of work, two others I come back to:

• Building classroom community with Remember the Titans — a team forced together across every line that divided them, and the reflection activity I build from it.
• The teacher I want to become, and why I show my students Les Choristes — a quieter film about a man who reaches a difficult group by refusing to give up on them.

You’ll find these and more under Movies in the Classroom.