As I write this, the first hearing in federal District Court in Indianapolis should be underway (presuming that these things start on time and aren’t finished all that quickly) in the matter of the expulsion of the four filmmakers from Knightstown High School . NUVO has an article on the subject in this week’s edition. Not surprisingly, the NUVO article has a few more details than the article that was printed in the Star back at the end of November.
There are some additional details about the content of the film, which I had not read of before, and the fact that the candy-ass teacher who raised the whole stink in the first place is a seventh-grade teacher at Knightstown Intermediate School, and he...wait...what did you just say?
Right, that the teacher who got this whole ball rolling is a seventh-grade teacher at a school the boys in question have not attended in two years, and whose classes they would not have taken in three years. (Sure, there could be other factors here - such as that the boys have friends or relatives who are in middle school and perhaps have to put up with him...or maybe he’s just such an annoyance to students that the students never forget how much they hated having him as their teacher.)
But here’s the point (assuming that the veracity of the article in NUVO can be trusted) - the kids who made the movie aren’t even in this guy’s class. If the information is true as I understand it, it’s been years since they were in his class - if they were ever in his class. You know what this sounds like to me - and perhaps you would forgive me for straying from the path of objective truth and sowing the seeds of conspiratorial subjectivity just a bit - it sounds like this is the kind of teacher who always makes the kids sit up straight, never lets them chew gum in class, and always, always assigns homework over the three-day weekends - like the kind of teacher who goes out of his way to make sure that the kids don’t like him.
Teachers who rule their classrooms with iron fists do so because they have convinced themselves that there must be discipline in the classroom first and foremost, and that everything else comes from that starting point - and these are not teachers who are admired by their students, because they are teachers who think that their brand of discipline, of classroom control, is just as good as actual teaching. It isn’t, though. I had some hard-asses when I was junior high and high school - and there’s a difference between a good teacher who is strict and a hard-ass who thinks being one also makes him or her a good teacher. Guess which one Clevenger probably is...
But anyway, back to the story in NUVO. I have a couple more nagging complaints. The first is the overabundance of the word “video” to describe the thing that the guys made that got Mr. Clevenger’s panties in a bunch in the first place. The correct word, the one that places the work the guys did in the proper context, is movie. Not video, not tape, not DVD. Movie. That qualifies as art, of a sort. Granted, I have not seen the movie, so I can’t actually say if it’s any good or not - but what we are talking about is a movie that these guys spent a long time working on because it’s a calling that they want to pursue. Using words like video and DVD minimizes the effort they put into it and the scope of what they hoped to achieve.
The other nagging complaint has to do with what Michael Wallmant, the attorney for the school corporation, described as the “unlawful” acts the guys committed in making this film. Wallmant said: “What this DVD shows is an attack upon the teacher...[i]t shows threats made against Mr. Clevenger and his wife and shows Mr. Clevenger trading extra credit for a homosexual act.”
Grr...here we go. This Wallmant human is described as an attorney, which presumes that he attended law school and got some sort of rudimentary education - an education that was apparently so rudimentary that it did not give him the ability to understand the difference between real life and make-believe. The teacher in the movie, is, of course, not Mr. Clevenger - it is an actor portraying a character who is called Mr. Clevenger; and if there are judges stupid enough to allow cheap lawyers like Wallmant to get away with this kind of weak association, then all of us who dabble in the creative arts are in big, big trouble.
I also have a problem with the use of the word homosexual to describe the sex act that takes place. Why not just call it a sex act? Because when Wallmant made this argument, it was in a circuit court in New Castle - and words like homosexual push a lot more conservative buttons in remote backwaters like New Castle than they do in relatively more cosmopolitan places like Indianapolis. Wallmant described the act as homosexual for only one reason, which was to further demonize these young men and the movie they have made. A person with good sense, of course, knows that there is nothing about a homosexual act that is more or less wrong than the same act performed by heterosexuals. Wallmant would do well to return to law school in order to learn this particular lesson.
I started writing this while I was sure the hearing was still going on - and am wrapping it up quite a bit later than that, at quarter to noon. The hearing was set for nine-thirty. Hopefully by this point the judge has reinstated the filmmakers and made some sort of comment for the record that Clevenger is an idiot. Okay...of course a judge isn’t going to say exactly that - but it would be delightful if the judge were able to speak on the record in some way that would indicate that Mr. Clevenger has wasted the time of a lot of people by making his ridiculous claims.
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