Better Than A Lost Flashback

If you enter any elementary school today and look at posters inside classrooms, you are more than likely to see posters and projects exalting the benefits of reading. Reading, reading, and more reading-- not to be confused with the three R's of environmentalism in my school: reduce, recycle, and reuse (I love those R's. I still try to live by them). However, it is has dawned on me how contradictory my elementary school operated. You see, when it was lunch time, my school had the option of letting the children play outside (recess) or have them sit down in the school auditorium for some random movie. Recess does wonders for school children. As a teacher, I love when I get my students back from recess because they are often closing in on a food coma. (That's almost a lie. My students go bonkers regardless of the time of day, except when they're still asleep in the morning.) You would think the school would let us play. And they did, but sometimes the weather would not cooperate, so we had to resort to the musty, rusty, and dusty auditorium.

Imagine me, around seven, eight, or nine years old, discovering these films that the lunch monitors would put on to try and appease the kiddie masses. My question is where did they get their material? I can tell you the four movies I remember being forced to watch in my five years in elementary school. Wait for it...Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Never-ending Story, Feivel Goes West. See! I can't even remember four movies. The fourth movie was some live action film that had a blue monster (costume form) who would pretend to be a statue when the kid star would turn around. (Points if someone can give me the name, Please!)

This was torture. Though I am a huge couch and theater seat potato, I hated those days of non recess. The auditorium had wooden chairs that would squeak a sound that only you could hear. It hurt my bum. The most annoying thing was that they would never play the films completely or even in order. Tomorrow's lunch day would have the movie on some other scene. If you were lucky like I was, then the next day there would be an entirely different movie instead of the one you were trying to piece together. You were just left on your ass with a cliff hanger. So the Never-ending story literally never ended. (I actually rented it via Netflix just recently. Pure crap. But Nostalgic Crap nonetheless.)

Oh Loh'. (Points for whoever can tell me who says that. Hint: On American Idol.)