... it's much easier to teach a class during which students are watching a movie ...

Here is what a few of my graduate students wrote in 2002, in response to the question Why do you get up in the morning?: Shin Toyokawa, Mieko Higashinaka, Will Dykstra.

Steven Garber writes (in The Fabric of Faithfulness, pp. 15, 45-46):

Why do you get up in the morning? For nearly twenty years I have been teaching university students in many different kinds of settings - both those laboring away at secular-spirited institutions and those within Christ-centered colleges and universities, both undergraduates and graduate students, both within the classroom as a professor and outside as a campus minister - and in a variety of ways I have asked this question. It gets at the relationship between what one believes about the world and how one lives in the world, particularly as that dynamic interaction is being formed as young people begin to move out of their parents' worlds and worldviews and take up their own convictions as frameworks within which to live and move and have their being. But it also focuses a student's attention, asking for a good reason to get up - beyond the call of the cafeteria or the classroom.

At heart that more playful question is rooted in more substantive ones: Which commitments will give shape to my life? Is my life about something that matters? What do I really care about?

[...]

The question of telos is a question about one's "end." The Westminster Catechism asks, "What is the chief end of man?" In our time, it might sound more like this: What is the purpose of life? What is human existence all about, anyway? Or, as I ask my students, Why do you get up in the morning? Telos takes that beyond the trivial and asks one to have a reason for getting up, a reason for being, that can be sustained over the course of life and can meaningfuly direct one's personal and public responsibilities. Do you have a telos sufficient, personally and politically, to orient your praxis over the course of life?

So? Why do you get up in the morning?

Tomorrow evening is the second meeting of the Introduction to Philosophy Class I teach at Redeemer University College, and we will be watching the movie Finding Forrester. (If I had my druthers, we'd be watching Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard, but it is too long. Stanley Kaufmann writes that "Like great masters in other arts, Kurosawa is not 'better than' others in his field: he is, at his best, incomparable.")

Here are a few reviews of Finding Forrester: Hollywood Jesus, The Phantom Tollbooth, Spotlight on the movies, and Cinema In Focus. Sadly, nothing I can find at Chiaroscuro, and nothing by Stanley Kauffmann.

We are watching this movie to jumpstart our imaginations as we prepare to read chapter 6 ("Masters, Mentors & Moral Meaning") in Steven Garber's Fabric of Faithfulness. Garber writes (p. 129):

As I listened to the voices of those who still believe in a coherent world and the possibility of a coherent life, another characteristic - after the forming of a worldview - was that they found a mentor during their university years whose wisdom and experience gave flesh and bone to the notion of "the good life" which was developing in the student's heart and mind. Professors, professionals, pastors all served as older friends whose cares and commitments incarnated the substance of the worldview which the student was learning to embrace.

What I am trying to do with the reading and the movie is to raise the basic question of character: Who am I? What kind of a person am I? What configuration of habitual virtues and vices, and practices, shape my character? Why am I the way I am? How did I become who I now am? Whom do I emulate? Who are my mentors? Who are my heroes? Can I change? Should I change?

A helpful overview of the characters, story, and key ideas in Wit can be found in the Madison Repertory Theatre Audience Guide. For good questions to think about, see the Faber & Faber Teachers' Guide to Wit: pdf/html.