At my day job as a teacher, I don’t pretend to be some kind of wiz at classroom management. After this many years, I’m good at it. If I wasn’t, to put it simply, I’d have a different day job, but that doesn’t mean that it’s my primary method of helping kids learn. I’ve also made peace with the fact that I could show a class a video of literally the risen Christ karate chopping Donald Trump, and there’d still be at least one kid scrolling through TikTok unaware that the rest of us were alive.

What does work, and because I’m not Teachers Pay Teachers I can give this away for free and without fun materials, is that if you make a point of being realistic about what level of attention the kids need to be giving you day in and day out, they’ll come with you when you actually ask for them to give you their whole brains. “Everything I say is equally important” would make your manager sound like a psychopath at work, and the same is true for teachers who want kids to feel that way about high school. Better to understand that students need to hear some things more than others, that no child has the focus of a Carthusian monk, and that if you really need them there should be a code to let them know that they’re really needed. “Look at me,” hilariously, works pretty well. I can’t speak to how well “I’m the captain now” would work, least of all because my students are not old enough to know that was a line from a movie or even a meme, but “Look at me” gets the point across.

It’s the same way in Captain Phillips, a functional movie that got six Oscar nominations (seriously!) and which uses “Look at me” with…I mean, clearly not the same intention that I’ve got when I’m using it at work, but like, it’s not not like that. Like most memed lines, this one’s been posted so much that the actual scene it comes from has absolutely disappeared from memory. It’s far from the first thing that’s said or done once the Somali pirates have come aboard the Maersk Alabama. It’s not even one of the first things that Muse (a skeletal Barkhad Abdi, surely the best element of the picture) says in English once he comes on the bridge. Muse waits a little bit. He sizes up Phillips. He lets Phillips blather on, saying things like “the ship is broken” as if Muse is a child, a rube who can be convinced to leave the ship if it’s sufficiently busted. This is when Muse strikes. He cuts through the malarkey. “Look at me,” he says twice. Both times Phillips responds “Sure” like he’s still part of the conversation. When Muse tells him that he is the captain now, a million JPGs and GIFs were born, but what none of them include is the look of total confusion, a confusion which is defeat, springing up all over Phillips’s face.