A Paideia Odyssey: What I Learned From Being an Instructor.
With my course on the cinema of Christopher Nolan, I sought to guide students through the psyche of a singular filmmaker.
At Paideia, ÈËÆÞÓÕ»óies have wielded lightsabers, mastered vehicular robotics, and survived ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó’s very own version of Survivor. This year, however, attendees experienced a journey into a different kind of tumultuous territory: the mind of Sir Christopher Nolan.
With a Best Director Oscar (for Oppenheimer) and a Batman trilogy under his belt, Nolan is as close to a household name as a modern filmmaker can be. Yet with my Paideia course, The Nolan Tenets, I wanted to circumnavigate the hype and plunge students into the psyche of this impassioned and idiosyncratic auteur.
Initially, I assumed that the course might attract the sort of Nolan superfans who relish speculation about the notorious spinning top from the director’s sci-fi heist film Inception. Yet the scholars and citizens of the ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó community are perpetually surprising—and those who signed up for The Nolan Tenets were no exception.
One was a staff member excited to geek out about a great director; one was a physics major fascinated by Interstellar, Nolan’s epic about a journey through black hole; and one was a Batman fan unsure if he was ready to venture beyond The Dark Knight, but intrigued enough by Nolan's other films to give the course a shot.
By the end of The Nolan Tenets, I wondered if the course had made an impact. What reassured me was when one of the students (who was about the same age as me when I first became a Nolan fan) shook my hand. Being a Paideia instructor in 2026 was a blast, but after meeting so many insightful ÈËÆÞÓÕ»óies with their own ideas to share, I want to be a Paideia student—in 2046.