MATILDA: A REFLECTION
Watching Matilda was a whole roller coaster and the movie has so many lessons that we can apply in our daily lives especially when it comes to family, school culture, teacher leadership and how it affects us when it comes to education.
At the start, I didn’t really understand why our professor made us watch this film as it seems like it’s a family movie and how Matilda feels isolated from her family. But then the story progress and then we’re greeted with Miss Trunchbull and her horrible ways of handling the kids inside the school. From this scene alone, I now understand that this film wants to show us how it is impossible for students to learn in a negative school culture with a principal like Trunchbull. The way she acts is not admirable and it’s not something that others would look up to considering the fact that she has no manners and it seems like educating the children is not her goal but to enforce fear to them to feel superior. I even started wondering if there are really people like her walking around freely like they didn’t do anything wrong but then I realized that even though she was portrayed in an exaggerated way, there are really a lot people in the real world who would barely even try to treat others properly just so they can boost their own ego and their own superiority complex which we cannot deny that happens in a lot of fields. The line, “You are small, I am big. You are dumb, I am smart and there’s nothing you can’t do about it” was even stated twice in the movie and there’s no doubt that that’s how some people really see us just because they think they are better.
For this movie, there are many things that I’ve learned and I want to start from how reading can be a magical world for us to learn. I really admire Matilda and her determination to gain more knowledge by going to the Children’s Library everyday to educate herself when her parents didn’t even want her to go to school or at least give her a book. This made me realized that if you really want to do something, no one can stop us from learning despite all the hindrance as long as there’s a way. It’s the same with our situation today, we are forced to stay at home because of the pandemic and although meeting with our teacher is sometimes really hard, we can learn in other ways by self-studying or reading books that can help us in the long run.
The second lesson I want to share is about negative school culture and how teacher leadership has a really big impact on this. From the film, we can see that kids are having a hard time learning as even colorful instructional materials were prohibited by Miss Trunchbull for some reason. Yet, that didn’t stop Miss Honey from doing her job and I really admire her for her passion and effort that I started wishing for more teachers with the same empathy as her. Instructional materials were not allowed so they became creative by hiding it when the principal is not present. The said person doesn’t even believe that her students can spell something as simple as “difficulty” yet they proved her otherwise because Miss Honey created a way for them to learn easier by making them sing the letters which is easier to remember.
As the movie progress, I started visualizing myself as someone like Miss Honey. I don’t have to be exactly the same as her but I want to be someone that my students can rely and someone who can be creative to make my student’s way of learning easier. This is really easy to visualize but I know that making it happen would be challenging but that’s always the process, nothing can be achieve without a lot of efforts. Because of this movie, I also want to avoid becoming someone like Trunchbull who inflicts fear and discipline students in a horrible way. I believe that making the student fear you is one of the strategies that other teachers do but you can make your students fear you in a good way and respect you at the same time. Never make them feel small and always give them a chance to show their full potential. We are not teachers to make other feel inferior, we are given this title to educate and uplift other people’s mind.
Overall, the movie is great and other people who are aspiring to be future educators should also give this a try. In that way, they can also visualize themselves on what they want to be or what they want to avoid and perhaps in the future, we would have better educational system full of educators like Miss Honey.