Lit Think Core Values: Intellect
We seek out media that turns on our brains
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
In preparation for presenting at two conferences this year, we took time to think about what we wanted to stand for as a podcast team. When we came up with five core values, we felt it just as important to spend some time in our blog parsing out what exactly these ideas mean in our daily work at Lit Think.
This week, I am looking at our final value: intellect. As educators, we feel it is a good value to end on.
Why Intellect
Many people believe that when they sit down to watch something on television or go to a movie theater, that they should be doing so for pure entertainment. And yes, entertainment matters. Alicia and I often discuss the “brain candy” that we are consuming when we wrap up an episode. My husband and I are on a summer movie kick, thanks to our AMC A-List membership. We had few expectations for the latest Transformers movie and left thoroughly entertained. On the way home, there was little conversation about the film quality or the big questions the film raised for us as we were watching. It was just pure fun.
But Alicia and I also believe that there is media that is designed to both entertain and make us think. It’s the kind of media that encourages us to ask questions and discuss long after we are finished watching. That is the kind of media that we have always tried to bring to our students and it is the reason why we started the podcast in the first place: we needed a space where we could talk about the shows and movies that turned our brains on and wouldn’t let our brains off until we had talked it out.
What We Mean by Intellect
Intelligent media is the television, movies, music, and other art that engages the academic part of our English teacher brains. It challenges us to derive connections to other stories that we have read or watched and make comparisons. While there are times we want to be able to just turn on the television and laugh, we also like to think. Just as we pick all kinds of fiction and nonfiction to read for a variety of reasons, we pick media for a lot of reasons as well.
Intelligent media does not have to be serious or make us cry. It can also make us laugh and teach us the crucial skill of empathy. It challenges us to pull up Google on our phone and look something up or it reminds us of something else that we recently watched and we compare how the stories were told. It makes us want to read the book it was based on or look up more information about the same subject. It has us learning even after we turned it off.
It is how our brains work, and Alicia and I have spent our entire careers encouraging our students to do the same. Now, we also do it on our podcast.
How We Live It
Alicia and I consistently look for media that makes us think.
Want to do that for yourself? Here are some of the episodes from past seasons that highlight authentic storytelling:
Solving a Layered Puzzle (The Glass Onion, 2022)
Lit Brain Obsession (Zombieland, 2009)
Only Podcasts in This Building (Only Murders in the Building, 2021)
Gaming Free (Free Guy, 2021)
More Resources
I highly recommend these resources to further your understanding of media and intellect:
I used this article from the New York Times about television making us smarter with my AP students for several years.
When you are watching historically based movies in class, try using this analysis guide to help them think about the bigger picture of the text instead of just answering questions.
This Edutopia article has additional suggestions for how to make the most of movie viewing in class. Teach your students that they don’t have to turn off their brains when they turn on the television.
Also check out this blog post from last year:
Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends, colleagues, and fellow lit thinkers.