During a teaching stint some years ago, I found it useful to create a repertoire of movie teaching aids. Movies can either be distraction, or highly efficient conveyors of experience you can't really explain via lecture–like how a newsroom operates, if students have never been in one. After seeing the 1994 Ron Howard movie, The Paper, and the 1997 Costa-Gavras movie, Mad City, viewers understand a great deal about the complexities of print and broadcast journalism.
Apropos of the headlines in the last week, I found myself wondering what violent young girls, and their parents, could learn from the movies Divergent and Noah last week. Noah is the biblical story, highly re-modelled. Divergent is derived from a children's novel written by 25-year-old Veronica Roth. (What do Trini 25-year-olds invent?)
Divergent begins about a century after an apocalyptic war, where survivors are divided into five factions according to dominant traits: Erudite (intellect), Candour (honesty), Dauntless (bravery), Abnegation (selflessness) and Amity (generosity).
The suitability of individuals for factions is determined by a test. The heroine, Tris, is a rarity for whom the test is inconclusive. She is capable of any and all the traits of any faction. Her type, a divergent, is a threat to the rulers of the faction system, who rely upon people conforming to a predictable type to control them.
http://www.guardian.co.tt/digital/new-members