Mentor text: Max Keeble's Big Move

I chose Disney’s Max Keeble’s Big Move as my mentor text this time around for a few reasons. This movie perfectly displays the stereo typical middle-school experience, but focuses its attention on a select group of children and identifies the viewer with their true identities, rather than what they are labeled at school. Watching this movie has helped me to incorporate more detail in the characteristics of the characters I am using and identify with what other label them as versus what is really going on inside their head-what their true thoughts and feelings consist of.

This movie captures all angles and cliques of middle-school aged children and their experiences within their years of middle school. Kids face a harsh reality growing up and attending public school, but as we grow older and begin to mature I believe we familiarize ourselves with who we really are and learn whom others truly are inside also. This stage is more of the high-school level of thinking, but rather my story and Max Keeble’s Big Move share the common ground of taking place in a setting that in not yet conducive to the maturity of finding yourself, but more along the lines of just trying to fit in with the crowd around you.

In the movie, we see Max’s strive for the most popular girl in school, when he is simply a “loser” and the task seems impossible. With the help of his ultra high confidence after being informed he’s moving away, he tries for a shot at the girl of his dreams figuring he now has nothing to loose. When she shows interest back, everyone is shocked simply because they come from two completely opposite groups or labeled categories. This connects to my story in that the girl who is a so-called “loser” communicates to the most popular girl in school through conversations in marker on the bathroom stall, but they both lack the knowledge of just whom they are talking to. Although their peers view them as two completely opposite people, they happen to share some vast similarities that no one would ever expect when looking from the outside.

Watching this movie has provided me with much more insight and ideas around the stereotypical functioning of the child’s mind in middle school and their actions as a result of their dire need to constantly fit in, rather than just expressing who they are themselves.