Yesterday I took my children to see Kung Fu Panda.
And, no, I didn’t lose a bet. However, I tried to talk my son into seeing The Incredible Hulk instead, but he has a love of physical comedy that only a computer-generated animation can provide. Let’s face it: for all the special effects, the Hulk doesn’t have a sense of humor. When he throws a cow (or a Trojan rabbit), it’s not nearly as funny as when Monty Python did it in The Holy Grail.
I bet you think that the difference in our preference tells you something about the both of us. Wrong. We both ultimately prefer Spider-Man. As it turns out, the comic book doesn’t fall far from the rack.
So here’s how Kung-Fu Panda goes. A fat, out-of-shape, klutzy son-of-a-duck sous-chef named Po is seemingly accidentally anointed as the Dragon Warrior who will face the big-bad-evil Tai Lung in a battle for the Valley of Peace. At first, the Master Shifu is reluctant to train him in preference to his own team, but finally comes around to the point-of-view of his master, Oogway, that there are no accidents and that Po was chosen for a reason.
Po’s compulsive eating turns from liability to asset as Shifu realizes that Po’s gluttony allows him to access kung fu skills. Using dumplings, Shifu gives Po the training that usually occurs over a lifetime in a single afternoon while his carefully trained and seemingly deserving team gets their collective backsides handed to them by Tai Lung. In the end, all that is required is that Po believe in himself for good to triumph over evil.
I guess the message is that our vices make us strong.
Huh?
Or maybe the message is that an inflated sense of self-worth combined with an afternoon of after-school tutoring will turn us into overnight successes.
Beg pardon?
As a teacher, I get this line a lot:
“Mr. Feingold, this is hard.”
To which I reply:
“Anything worth doing usually is,” or
“That’s why it’s called work. If it was fun and easy, we’d call it ‘happy fun time.’ We’d serve cake, too.”
You see, (until now) I’ve been extolling the virtues of hard work to my students. Too many of them already have an over-inflated sense of self, and too many of them already feel that anything resembling work is either beneath them or beyond their capacity. Fewer and fewer of my students understand that in order to become a better reader, one must actually read and read actively, and that hard work is an intrinsic and necessary part of the process. Or if they do understand it, they don’t seem to be willing to do it. The only time I really smell the wood burning is during the End-of-Grade tests, and, sometimes, not even then.
Hollywood seems to be devaluing my quaint, American approach to the acculturation of my students. Apparently, if we just tell our learners that they can do anything if they believe in themselves enough, they will. Effort, shmeffort. And while we’re at it, the heck with earning respect, from others or even ourselves. We’re entitled to it, whether we do anything to deserve it or not.
To paraphrase Edward Norton in Fight Club: I feel like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that won’t deliver a plot line to save our way of life.