With B-track back in session, a daily silent reading period of 15-20 minutes in each of my classes means I’m able to tackle some of the random books I’ve been accumulating. Strange as it may seem, I get through a bit more leisure reading while I’m full-on teacher mode than while I’m off track with way more free time.

When I first read the description of The Film Club By David Gilmour, way back in December, I immediately preordered the book – the premise was good enough to be a must-read: Gilmour allows his 16 year old son to drop out of school with one simple caveat. The son has to watch three films a week with his father. This is the closest that the son gets to a legitimate education throughout his high school career.

While The Film Club spends more time than I’d prefer dealing with relationship issues: miserable breakups, growing pains, crazy girlfriends, and more miserable breakups, the discussions of the time spent watching film is entertaining.

As an educator, I was particularly interested in this early passage: “I didn’t waste any time. The next afternoon, I sat him down on the blue couch in the living room, me on the right, him on the left, pulled in the curtains, and showed him Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). I figured it was a good way to slide into European art films, which I knew were going to bore him until he learned how to watch them. It’s like learning a variation on regular grammar.”

Though I’ve only taught one official Film Studies class (an intersession course that ranged from Style Wars to Buster Keaton), film literacy and its necessary “grammar” are the skills I continue trying to develop in my 11th and 12th grade English classes. Likewise, the conflicted dissimilitude of Antoine Doinel is perpetually present in many of my seniors; standing on the precipice between student and not-student, these are students marinating in uncertainty. Maybe a screening of The 400 Blows is worth a shot?

In related news, Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys was a fun, silly yarn. I admittedly picked this up because I’m a sucker for the book design, but the book has me interested in pursuing Ruff’s previous books.

Currently really enjoying Chip Kidd’s The Learners (a sequel to the underrated The Cheese Monkeys). I suspect I’ll need to go back to the Beyond Pedagogy texts after this one, to stay on top of things.

Oh and I’m only a third of the way through Infinite Jest but the hyperbolic praise that the book’s garnered is becoming more solidified with each page read. (As I was looking up the book – I noticed that the current version of the text is only $6.29 on Amazon. Though not the edition I’m reading, this is an absolute steal. At slightly more than 1100 pages long, the cost breaks down to about sixty cents per hundred pages. I can ascertain it’s a text that will keep you busy and cerebrally entertained.)

Note: Though this isn’t technically a 101 post, it’s been tagged as such for personal reference. Pay no mind.