You may be of age, but I'm still responsible

As some of you know, I teach a class to freshman. As a result, I feel responsible for the content of information I force them to read or view.

One of the segments we study is the impact the business culture of Enron played a role in it's implosion. Since we don't have time to read the entire book, we watch the documentary about Enron and read a chapter. Unfortunately, the director's of the documentary decided that it was a great idea to put about 2 minutes of film footage of a strip club as they talk about the interest one of the CEO of a division in Enron held. The information is relevant to the story, but the footage isn't really necessary and take the movie from a PG/PG-13 to a R rating.

So, I block that portion of the video out when showing it to my class.

Inevitably, I have students who remind me that *they* are of age and can watch an R movie. I remind them that if they want to view the 2 minutes, they can rent the DVD from blockbuster but that *I* can't be in a position that I have forced someone to watch something they might feel is inappropriate. It's also not fair for me to poll the class as someone might not feel comfortable indicating that they are not interested in watching those 2 minutes.

So, I set my computer up so I could jump over that segment while we watch it. Unfortunately, I could not get the audio to work so I had to show the movie through the DVD player. I knew I had 28 minutes to figure out how to work around this.

Thankfully, after 20 minutes, the solution presented itself. The projector in the classroom has 2 settings, one to project video, one to project computer images. So, when the segment came, I switched to computer and we watched a blue screen while listening to the commentary. It worked even better than the plan on my computer since we were able to hear the two minutes of talk rather than jumping over the stories about this man.

I'm not willing to risk my job over a two minute visit to a strip club - even if it is a movie.