Every year, as the final days of school wind down and the energy in the building shifts into that particular end-of-May chaos of finals, I do something that might look like I’m taking it easy: I put on Finding Nemo.
But if you’ve sat in my classroom for a full year of marine science, you know this is anything but a throwaway movie day.
Read more: Finding the Facts in Finding NemoIt usually starts within the first ten minutes. Marlin and Nemo are swimming through the coral reef, the anemone they exit from, the octopus and corals they see, someone will always sit up a little straighter and go, “Wait. We learned about that.” And they’re right. And then later when Marlin and Dory are traveling through the sweeping East Australian Current, they get excited because they learned that in the first unit of the year! And that’s even more exciting! They see that the EAC is real. It’s one of the major western boundary currents of the Pacific, sweeping warm water southward along the eastern coast of Australia, and it genuinely does function as an underwater highway — just like Crush the sea turtle enthusiastically describes. I watch students pull that connection out of their own memory, unprompted, and there’s no better feeling as a teacher.
And then of course my dearest scientist Mr. Ray glides onto the screen.
If you haven’t seen the movie recently, Mr. Ray is Nemo’s cheerful, spotted eagle ray of a teacher who enters the film belting out a song about the ocean zones — epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathypelagic — while his students cling to his back. We stood in the classroom and went through the zones, layer by layer, from the sunlit surface down into the midnight zone where the anglerfish lurk, and they remember it and get excited about it!
But here’s the part I love most: the corrections.
By the end of the year, my students are not passive viewers. They are critics. The moment Nemo’s anemone comes on screen, someone will inevitably mention that the clownfish and anemone relationship isn’t just cute — it’s mutualistic symbiosis. The clownfish gets shelter and protection from predators; the anemone benefits from the fish’s waste as fertilizer and from the fish chasing away butterflyfish that would otherwise pick at its tentacles. There’s a whole ecosystem of relationship dynamics packed into that one little home.
And someone always brings up the fact that Nemo’s dad, Marlin, would not actually have stayed Nemo’s dad after Coral died. Clownfish are protandrous hermaphrodites — the dominant female in a group is the largest individual, and if she dies, the dominant male (that’s Marlin) would transition to become the new female. Meaning the biologically accurate version of Finding Nemo would have Marlin become Nemo’s mother. This sends the class into an uproar every single time, and I love every second of it.
The shark scenes get scrutiny too. My students have spent time learning about shark behavior, sensory systems, and the deeply unfair reputation these animals carry, so when Bruce and his friends show up reciting “Fish are friends, not food,” there’s an appreciation for the sentiment paired with a more nuanced understanding of what sharks actually are: apex predators that are essential to ecosystem balance, not mindless villains.
What I’ve come to understand is that Finding Nemo works at the end of the year not because it’s a break from learning, but because it’s a mirror. It shows students what they now know. It gives them a chance to recognize the ocean not as a backdrop for a story, but as a real, layered, ecologically complex world — one they’ve spent a whole year learning to understand.
When a student leans over to their friend and whispers “that’s actually a mutualistic relationship” or shouts “THE EAC IS REAL” at the screen with genuine excitement, they aren’t reciting a definition. They are thinking like scientists. They’re watching a world they now partially know, and they’re noticing both what gets it right and what takes creative liberties.
That critical lens? That’s what I’m after. Not just content knowledge, but the habit of looking at the world — even a Pixar world — and asking is that accurate? Why or why not? What’s the real story?
So yes, we watch Finding Nemo on the last days of school. We eat snacks and we laugh at the seagulls and we cheer when Nemo escapes down the drain.
And then a student raises their hand and asks if the drains in Australia really do lead to the ocean, and I smile, because that question is the whole point.
Just keep swimming — and just keep asking questions!
