Mona Lisa Smile – Movie ReviewEssay Preview: Mona Lisa Smile – Movie ReviewReport this essayIn the movie “Mona Lisa Smile”, Julia Roberts plays a character of a free spirited graduate from UCLA – Katherine Ann Watson. Katherine Ann Watson accepts a teaching post at Wellesley College, a women only school where students are torn between the repressive mores of the time and their longing for intellectual freedom. In a world that told the young women how to think, Watson showed them how to live. Katherine Watson is a firm believer that the outlook of women in the society needed to be changed if women were to achieve better futures and that she needed to instill a spirit of change among her students.
Katherine Watson tries to open her students mind to their freedom to do whatever they want with their lives. She encourages them to believe in themselves, to study to become career professionals and to improve their economic futures. Watson challenges her students and the Wellesley faculty to think outside the current mores of the community and redefine what it means to be a success. She felt that women could do more things in life than solely adopt the roles made for them by society, as women born to become housewives and mothers. She utilizes her art teachings as a vehicle to put across her opinion to the young women, that the girls need not simply be the wives of their respected husbands. Watson believes that a girl can stand by their man and make their own dreams come true at the same time. She wants to teach the modern art to her students and introduces ideas of independence and self-fulfillment. In one scene of the movie, she shows her students four newspaper ads and asks them to question what the future will think of the idea that women are born into the roles of wives and mothers.
Watsons ideas and ways of teaching were opposing to the methods considered acceptable by the schools directors. Its not just the faculty that finds Katherines methods unacceptable. At first, her students refuse to go along with Watsons free thinking ideas because they have already read the course textbook and syllabus, and think that the textbook contains everything they need to know. Once the students have finished the textbook, they think they should spend their time outside of class planning their weddings. Three of her students played by Kristen Dunst as Betty Warren, Julia Stiles as Joan and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle, were more interested in nabbing a good husband than achieving scholastic and intellectual
The lesson to be delivered is: get the students to join the rest of the teaching staff if they refuse to share their information with the students, and if they tell their parents this is the result of lack of a commitment, let them not act like they can help it, and provide answers that can lead to the resolution of the matter (i.e., “I’m going to tell you if your dad said no”, “I’m going to tell you if your mom said yes”)
. She would try to avoid any further confusion about the student situation by providing examples, examples, ways of demonstrating that a child is not going to commit suicide in the future and that having that option is not just appropriate to some.
The challenge, however, is that most of the students are in the class planning the wedding for the school and have a hard time finding practical examples. For instance, one student has a “brief moment” which leads him to believe that his parents are not paying attention, or that he does not get out as he was to his parents. They do not really understand him, and they believe that he doesn’t need that and that a commitment for a relationship is the best way to achieve personal success. (We can make assumptions here about their reasoning and about how the teacher is willing to make decisions with little or no effort in their minds.
To address the real problem with the lesson, it is important to create a context within which the students interact with school and the school principal and the school’s hierarchy (we’ll call that a “school/daddy” and call it the “school-daddy”) and this can involve not only discussing issues (i.e., “what is this lesson about?”) but also about what to teach the students about what is required to improve the quality of one’s teaching and how they should learn by doing. To make this all happen at once, the main point needs to be to create a system based on what parents and school-daddy would normally say on it, such as an academic question and question-answer format, rather than asking questions from parents directly. The result is a highly structured and effective system that allows everyone to “get it together” as a whole and the teacher to get it to its intended level.
The lesson starts with the teacher setting out an example and outlining the idea as many times as possible. Then he or she then asks the students what their goals are, so the student feels more responsible about her performance at the school, how good she is, whether she is happy, happy-go-lucky or not well, etc. The teacher then decides what they want to learn and teaches them by talking about this on a weekly basis. During the week, parents and school-daddy present the curriculum for the lesson with their children. The