Hindsight

Hindsight:  Film Ramblings and other stuff

Day 2: Films with Educational themes:

The Corn is Green (1945) 

There is this lovely moment in this film that still makes me flush.  It is the moment when Miss Moffat a teacher of Welsh mining students reads an essay, randomly selected, and comes to sense that the writer of the work was something special.  Bette Davis plays Miss Moffat, so she is very much a presence, but it is the boy, Morgan,  the student who wrote the essay and whom Moffat  begins to tutor privately, that is the force behind this story.  

Throughout the film, Morgan often wonders why this Moffat pushes him to read Thomas Aquinas, and learn Greek and Latin, but then there is a point in the story where he tells her that now He understands her, now "we can talk."  She simply says "Yes."  This is another moment in the film that just gets me, in this brief exchange the whole concept of learning, the exchange of ideas is framed.  Miss Moffat has set up this school, against multiple odds, to teach the children and adults of a Welsh mining community some basic math and English.  When she comes upon Morgan, He is a bully, who works full time in the mines.  This film is certainly Corny at time, as are most of the film I love so, but there is the essence, the idea that learning can mean freedom, that  is lovely. It makes one ask, How many students like Morgan are slipping through our educational cracks, just because of class and lifeless home environments?   Luckily for me, I had a teacher who discovered my dyslexia in third grade.  Her name was Mrs Briske and she believed in me.  She knew I loved old movies, so she would find me the original books that informed the films. We would read passages from novels.   This is why I read "Great Expectations" long before high school.  Thank you Mrs Briske, and thank you to every other teacher like Miss Moffat, who keep trying to find the key to each students intellectual gifts and dreams.  The Corn is Green is a semi-autobiographical play by Welsh author Emlyn Williams, 

Here is the passage from the essay, that Morgan wrote: 

The mine is dark...if the light comes in the mine...the rivers in the mine will run fast with the voice of many women; the walls will fall in, and it will be the end of the world.  So the mine is dark, but when I walk through the Tan something, shaft, in the dark, I can touch with my hands the leaves on the trees, and underneath where the corn is green, there is a wind in the shaft, not carbon monoxide they talk about, it smell like the sea, only like as if the sea had fresh flowers lying about...and that is my holiday.