Welcome back, Wolf Pack, to another Positive Cinematic Spotlight! We leave the horrors of October and Halloween, heading enthusiastically to both election day and Thanksgiving. As we transition into a politically uncertain election and the ever constant family mooring of Thanksgiving, we turn our attention to the 1986 hit Stand by Me. Stand by Me is a movie based on a Stephen King novella called The Body published in the collection Different Seasons. In the collection, published in 1982, King presents 4 tales related to the four seasons. The Body carried the subtitle, “Fall from Innocence”, connecting the tale to Fall. In the story, 4 friends, Gordie, Chris, Vern, and Teddy go on an adventure to find the body of a peer who had been reported missing, and Vern’s brother supposedly found. With school starting soon, the 12 year olds are happy for one last adventure and the hope of being named heroes for finding the missing child.
As you would expect, this is a coming of age story. Each of the friends have a backstory which makes their development into adulthood a matter of struggle and hardship. We also learn that the boys will not be able to hang out as much as, upon entering junior high, Gordie will be put into college courses while Chris, Teddy, and Vern will be in the “shop classes.” What resonates with me is how other people’s opinions of the boys are integral to their own idea of who they are. As preteens, the four boys place a lot of value in what others say, and especially powerful is the opinion of the adults in their lives. When Chris laments “It's what everyone thinks of my family in this town. It's what they think of me. I'm just one of those low-life Chambers kids,” rather than resolve himself to prove everyone wrong, he just accepts his label and lives to those expectations. Gordie, the narrator of the story, is a creative and skilled writer, entertaining his friends with his tales. But his father’s criticisms of his focus on writing, rather than athletics, and the prospect of losing touch with his friends, drives Gordie to say he wouldn’t take the college courses. Teddy’s father, admitted into a mental care facility after abusing his son, leads locals to view Teddy as equally mentally unbalanced. The opinions of adults greatly influences the characters, often limiting their view of their future. It’s easy to sit and question their unwillingness to fight the presumptions and judgments of others, but we can also see why children might just accept the opinions of others, especially adults, as fact. When Chris tries to undo a choice he made, stealing the milk money from the school, the teacher he confided in and returned the money to never returned it, instead keeping the money to buy herself new clothes, and leaving Chris to suffer the consequences. If an attempt at redemption rewards them with unjust consequences, then there’s little drive to try and break out of the limitations placed on them by others.
As teachers, we need to do nothing but encourage our students to see their future as a setting which they are building daily and which can become anything they wish it to be. And at no point should a decision become a permanent fixture of their future. They should be able to look at their decisions, see how that decision looks in the future, and decide to alter the impact of that decision. “Time heals all wounds” is an old idiom suggesting that the further in the past the offense, less damage and hurt feelings remain. It’s an idea that many disagree with, and while I know it’s not a universal cure, I also see merit in the idea. We need to let students move beyond bad decisions rather than be reminded of them. By looking at each decision of a student’s as an individual moment, we can show students that they can decide who they are going to be, not feel like they are doomed to always be “the troublemaker”, “the class clown”, “the disappointment.” Certainly, from an administrative disciplinary perspective, there
