Blog 4 - Media Representation of Teachers

I am a sucker for teacher movies. I'm sure it's one of the reasons I became a teacher. I went to film school to become a screenwriter, and my thesis script was a teacher movie. One of my favorite books is Up the Down Staircase. All that having been said, I think the majority of teacher movies are a load of bullhoey.

The problem with Hollywood (no big news here) is that its depictions of teaching - and most any profession - is oversimplified. Sure, generally speaking, in movies like Stand and Deliver the teacher is heroic, but to an unrealistic degree. You can basically take any teacher-protagonist from any teacher movie, and he/she is the same character. (At this point, I am going to use "he" only to avoid playing the pronoun gender neutral game.)

He starts out with ideals, but quickly finds himself in over his head. He struggles at first, but sticks with it and makes a breakthrough by using unorthodox methods. He gets his unruly, underprivileged, often skeptical students on board with his outside-the-box program and teaches them to believe in themselves, despite resistance from any or all of the following: administration, colleagues, student's family and friends, society, his own family, the students themselves. Usually there is some crisis of faith - often represented by the failure or near-failure or even death or metaphorical fall - of a key student who has been closely working with the teacher, but the teacher and students rally to achieve success in the end.

This pattern fits for the story of Jaime Escalante and his math students in Stand and Deliver, Erin Gruell and her writing students in Freedom Writers, Louanne Johnson and her poetry students in Dangerous Minds, and on and on and on. These are real-life teachers. It's also true of fictional teachers like the title character in Mr. Holland's Opus or the Sidney Poitier character from To Sir, With Love. Granted, Hollywood is in the business of telling stories, and so these movies fit standard narrative patterns, but - and this is the point of the assignment - what is wrong with this picture is that it is unrealistic. It is sanctified. Problems are too easily overcome. If only a clever lesson plan and some chutzpah (or moxie or ganas) were all it took to transform students, a lot more students would be transformed.

I think parents expect too much of teachers partly - not all, but partly - because of teacher movies. Real change is gradual, incremental, glacial, even. Even when a movie shows change over time as in Stand and Deliver - I believe Escalante worked with those kids over 2 years - it doesn't feel as long because the movie is only 100 minutes long.

Another problem is that we teachers generally come in contact with these kids for 45-50 minutes a day, 5 days a week, about 33 weeks a year. In the movie, it looks much more continuous than that because of something called editing. All the other stuff gets cut out, but it's actually very difficult to have any continuity.

Finally, it goes counter to good storytelling practice to portray teaching as it truly is because so much of it is mundane and boring. No audience wants to see that. Even a documentary is edited. How much of good teaching is simply wait time? Monitoring who's on task? Grading papers? Planning lessons? Not exactly riveting action. For every effective minute in the classroom, I would argue two were spent trying to plan that minute. Teaching honestly is a round-the-clock job - at least it can be - and I don't think audiences appreciate that. Movies touch on the personal cost the job has on teachers only insofar as it serves the story, but the potential cost is so much greater. One of the greatest challenges is deciding where to draw the line between personal and professional time outside of the classroom because there is always more work to be done. It would be like asking a parent to delineate a clear boundary at home between "me time" and "kid time." It would be impossible.

On balance, the depiction of teachers as heroes is much appreciated, but something that I think we might do better without. We are human beings doing our best, and it sure would be nice if audiences (read: parents) had a better appreciation for that, especially when we don't measure up to these idealized versions of what movies build us up to be.