Inception

Merhaba!

If you haven't seen Inception yet, you might not want to read this short post. It doesn't give much away, but still. You might be one of those people, like me.



The premise of Inception, besides taking place within dreams, is finding if it's possible to plant an idea in someone's mind that feels so natural to him that he thinks it's his own idea. Basically, to give birth to an idea in someone else's mind. There are a few scenes where chacters are quite adamant that it's impossible, that it can't be done, but Leonardo Di Caprio's character is sure he can do it. The rest of the movie is a dramatic, nail-biting saga into the mind where this concept of Inception is played out.

After thinking about my job as a teacher for the last few weeks, it seems that plot is pretty much based on the lives of teachers. Its our role to lead our students to discover truths on their own, truths they can believe in with their hearts and souls even if their not truths they came to without guidance. We can't just teach them that 2 + 2 = 4; we have to convince them until they can claim that knowledge as their own. We can't just say that the English word "sad" is the opposite of "happy"; we have to help them feel it, using their own personal experience, as a personal truth. The best teaching, we've learned, is when the teacher doesn't teach at all, when instead the students learn. In another word, inception.

So the teacher helps create contexts based on a combination of the students' worlds and the teacher's (Ellen Paige's character can go home now). We have to play different roles and different characters to bring language to life in students' minds (see you later, Tom Hardy's character). And the teacher has to perform inception every day, usually alone, on 6 whole classrooms of students. And, by the way, hell yeah the teacher has a time limit (mine will be 40 minutes, slightly shorter than Leonardo DiCaprio's team's 10 hours).

Not to knock Inception, though. It really was a fun movie.