'O Captain! My Captain!'

Just watched a 1980s movie, 'Dead Poets Society', and it brought me different thoughts and emotions after watching. It talks about how an English professor John Keating (Robin Williams) inspires his students to learn and love studying poetry, but more importantly, to live up a fulfilling life.

Keating told his students to call him 'O Captain! My Captain' if they were daring enough. The name comes from an old poem after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He breaks the rule of tradition in teaching and tries to deliberate students' mind from old poems. He made it but unfortunately, being dismissed for a miserable tragedy of a student killing himself. There are different favorite scenes to me. For example, Keating taught his boys a lesson on a line 'Carpe Diem', meaning to seize the day and to do whatever we want. Or another scene when he told his students to rip out the page of an introductory of 'Measuring poetry', which is a stupid description of quantifying what is a good poetry. A good teacher is simply not teaching what is on the page, but what is going outside the classroom.

And my most favorite line comes from the scene (shown in the picture above) when he stood on the table and told the kids: 'I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.' It corresponds to the last scene when the students revolted against the teacher and stood up as the same way to tell Keating, who was dismissed and leaving the classroom, that they understand this philosophy of life. What a wonderful arrangement by the director. And the line reminds me that we have to allow more perspectives on a thing, which might well be forgotten when days come and go in the same pattern.

Last but not the least, a quote from the movie for some good thoughts:
'We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be? '

It is your luck if you met a wonderful and inspiring teacher as John Keating. You might not agree with him/her, you might have a hard time to change and learn. But he/she just enlightens you, or even inspires you to go for your dream.