The Classroom in Cinema

It's a strange thing, as a teacher, to have time on your hands, but it so happened that during a recent free period, I had nothing to grade, plan or print. So I reached for the huge stack of educational articles I have been meaning to wade through all year. At the top of the pile was the annual AATF review, including articles in both French and English. I flipped through it at random and became engrossed in a piece about a recent Quebecois film, Monsieur Lazhar, about an Algerian emigre who fills in as a substitute teacher. Although the article concerned the use of formal and informal address between teachers, colleagues and students, I found myself so interested in the characters that I sat down that night and watched it.

Later, as credits rolled up the screen and tears rolled down my face, I thought about how many dozens of movies I had seen about teachers. Some have been good and some very, very bad. Just for fun, I made a list. 

Good: these movies are not only realistic in their depictions of classroom struggles, but they are also inspiring and uplifting -- even when they're tragic. 

  • Butterfly: Although the politics of the era in which it's set (the Spanish Civil War) heavily influence this movie, it remains for me a story about the profound wonder that makes education so beautiful and necessary.
  • Dead Poets Society: I still remember sitting in shocked silence with my best friend in high school after having watched this movie. It had such an effect on us, especially because of our interest in the arts. Robin Williams manages a completely, disarmingly honest portrayal.
  • Monsieur Lazhar: As a fairly strict teacher myself, I appreciated Lazhar's high expectations of his students (he has them practice dictation from Balzac on the very first day; they're in the third grade.) Of course, they come to appreciate his desire to see greatness in them, just as he comes to appreciate their forthright affection.
  • The School of Rock: This may seem an odd choice, but Jack Black is completely convincing as an awful substitute teacher whose students end up teaching him how to educate them. It's also a fantastic, if unrealistic, advertisement for project-based learning!
  • The Wave: Based on a novella I read in grade school, this German film examines the sobering possibility that a new Nazi Party is just one ideologue away. The teacher who starts the experiment, although he fails in many ways, gives his students an invaluable lesson in the sinister power of solidarity.
  • To Be and To Have: In a tiny town in rural France, a one-room schoolhouse is about to shut down. Modern amenities notwithstanding, I could have been watching a dramatization of Little House on the Prairie. It was inspiring to watch education unfold the old-fashioned way.

Bad: don't waste your time here; these are the same tired Chicken Soup for the Soul cliches you've already heard too often.

  • Akeelah and the Bee: The main character was really adorable, and Laurence Fishburne cannot turn in a bad performance, but it was just too trite to enjoy.
  • Children of a Lesser God: I had such high hopes for this film about a hearing teacher at a school for the Deaf, but again, I felt it was trite, especially the affair between the professor and student. (Sorry for the spoiler. No, not really. Now you don't have to watch it.)
  • Freedom Writers: I am making it a personal goal to warn lovers of this movie and / or book that it's NOT ALL TRUE. Students in her class did keep journals, but they edited them as a group, placing emphasis on powerful writing rather than truth. I will never understand what makes people desire to blend fact and fiction. Also, Hillary Swank just comes off as insincere: um, what happened to that husband she moved to LA with?!
  • Mr. Holland's Opus: Could Richard Dreyfus ever be a teacher? No. The end.
  • To Sir, With Love: My cousin and I watched this with our moms when we were young. I actually liked it right up until the end when one of the characters sings an ORIGINAL SONG by the same title as the movie. I'm feeling sick just remembering that awful moment.
  • Good Will Hunting: Robin Williams is a caricature of himself in this movie. Not to mention, the distillation of an entire profession into one simple, repeated question that magically causes an emotional breakthrough?! (I think this is a real improvement.)

Unqualified: although these are not movies about teachers in the classroom, they are compelling enough that you should watch them anyway!

  • Lean on Me: There are plenty of cliches here, too, but Morgan Freeman has enough memorable lines to redeem it, and I'm partial to the true-to-life story that's close to my church home. Bonus: the faculty meeting that ends with the kind of verbal dressing-down most teachers dream of delivering.
  • Waiting for Superman: The only movie that ever inspired two blog posts, it is more about the educational system than education itself -- but still, everyone should watch it, because if you think you're not a part of that system in some way, you're dead wrong. 
  • Spellbound: This movie is actually a complex character study cleverly disguised as a documentary. The only downside is the knowledge that, out of eight charming children, only one will win the National Spelling Bee -- and truly, you are rooting for them all.
  • The King's Speech: Out on a technicality, because an SLP is not the same as a classroom teacher, the recent Best Picture is one of the few winners that actually deserved that honor. Geoffrey Rush is transcendent, and Colin Firth is maybe even more attractive with a speech impediment than as his normal brooding self.
  • The Life of David Gale: A bold political statement about capital punishment, this sleeper is only tangentially about a wrongfully-accused college professor. Kevin Spacey doing his in-your-face Kevin Spacey thing, and Kate Winslet being the luminous, visceral presence she always is, makes the film riveting to the last moment.
  • Rushmore: I am sorry I waited so long to see this movie about a bizarre love triangle between two teachers and a student. I thought I wouldn't like it. I was so wrong; in fact, it opened the floodgates to a long, torrid affair with Wes Anderson's work. Bill Murray is inimitable. Jason Schwartzman redefines precocious. Be ye not so foolish: watch it now!

Une Vie Francaise

A month ago I lost my driver's license at a concert. (They actually didn't ID us that night, and to add insult to irony, it was a lousy show.)

I hate the MVA so much that I put off getting a new one, going so far as to carry my passport on a recent domestic flight. But last week I remembered there was an express office in Columbia that's open on Saturdays. So I rounded up the following forms of ID as per their website:

  • Passport (proof of identity)
  • Name Change Order (my passport only displays first and last) 
  • Credit Card Bill (proof of residency)
  • Pay Stub (proof of SSN, but mine only displays the last 4 digits) 
  • Recent Employment Contract (proof of full SSN)

So, guess how many she looked at?

Zero. She asked for my name, then my SSN, pulled up the file, took my picture and sent me on my way. But not before she asked about my middle name, which gave me such trouble at the MVA when I first changed it. I told her it was Armenian, then couldn't resist adding that her name meant "sing" in French. She was tickled by this and wanted to know how I had learned French. I told her high school plus practice, and she seemed genuinely interested and impressed that it was part of my daily life.

After that, I stopped for breakfast at La Madeleine, where the cafe is strong and the croissants can be found as God intended them (toasted almonds outside and marzipan within.) The staff is all Francophone, but diverse, and they are happy to chat with you a bit while you wait to enjoy your meal close to the fire.

Speaking French is occasionally useful, as at the concert (this one was amazing) when I calmly directed some confused patrons to their seats in their native language, or the time I watched a movie at a theater where the subtitles weren't working. It also brings me grief, mostly in the form of sarcastic comments from friends and family who wish they could understand me. But mostly it is a joy -- anytime I think, speak or dream in French, my life seems a little bit sweeter. 

What I Taught Myself Thirteen Years Later

Of all the amazing moments in the fascinating and weighty American Beauty, it’s Lester Burnham’s last words that I recall most often: “Man, oh man.  Man, oh man, oh man, oh man.”  He’s looking at a photo of his family that seems untouched by the psychosis and pain that’s haunted them throughout the film.  They are young, happy, united.  His words are at once a meditation on the depraved and surprising nature of humanity, and a simple inability to express one’s feelings about said nature.  In this state of transcendent meditation, his life is cut short, and the movie effectively ends.  This is its thesis statement.

I feel something similar when I look at my own life, or at least at the period about which I wrote so much in those letters I republished last month.  It’s hard to read them, in part, because I see so many failings in them. Failure to see things as they really were: I was foolishly optimistic about the situation there for far too long. Failure to see almost anything beyond myself: I wanted to leave the letters untouched, but couldn’t bring myself not to edit out the most navel-gazingly offensive passages.  Failure, above all, to see that what mattered most was very far from what I spent most of my time trying to do.

Above all, I was surprised to learn that although I had always believed these letters were the start of my writing career, the writing itself wasn’t that great.  At times there was a glimmer of something real, but in the main it was simply what it sounded like: me telling stories about my life, which although amusing at times, was pretty ordinary.  That fact was both shocking and freeing.  God knows I need to be reminded more often about how ordinary I am.

Two things inspired me about this experience.  The first was the similarity of my seventeen-year-old self with my only-very-slightly-younger students of today.  As the age gap between us grows (I am now roughly twice their age) I find it harder and harder to relate to them, and I can be especially unforgiving of shallow self-centeredness. But reading my own entries from that time has reminded me that this is how teenagers are, and I was like that too. So if I don’t rush too quickly to judgment, my own students may follow a similar path to a greater understanding of the world.

The other was the space between my letters.  A weekly missive may seem extreme for a college student, but in fact it was barely enough; I remember keeping lists in my head and on paper in preparation for Sunday, when I’d include the thoughts and anecdotes in my pre-blog entry.  Having time to think before I wrote — imagine! — is probably what I miss most about that style of writing, and there’s no reason I can’t institute that here.

So my posts will probably be less frequent, at least for awhile.  Thanks to everyone who has checked up on me, but honestly, I’m fine.  I just want to wait until I have something to write that’s worth the space.

The End of an Era

Yesterday morning, a stack of ungraded essays in front of me, I finished watching “Frost / Nixon,” a fascinating account of the television interviews that planted the disgraced president firmly in the camp of the forgotten. As the credits started to roll, I punched the eject button and slid the DVD into a plastic sleeve, then into the signature red envelope, and padded downstairs and outside to plunk it in the mailbox.

This is a scenario I’ve repeated hundreds of times since we joined Netflix in 2003, soon after we were married. I convinced Rob that it was a more economical solution than paying for cable; plus, I argued, we would be able to watch movies of greater diversity and intellectual caliber than the drivel on HBO. And although my first pick was, ironically, Top Gun, we did watch many more unusual gems over the years.  Nearly half of my rated films (which number 1954) were watched via Netflix, and we were happy and loyal customers.

And now they’re screwing it all up.  First, by raising their prices an inordinate amount (our service went from $10 per month to $16.)  Second, by backtracking to explain that they are really splitting the company in half to capture both the DVD-by-mail and the instant-watch markets.  Third, by choosing the name Qwikster for their new DVD service: it’s trite, juvenile and comes with its own set of problems.

Like everyone else, I’ve grumbled about having to choose between two services, both of which are useful (on principle, I refuse to accept a 60% price hike.)  We’ve rented 503 discs from Netflix over the last 8 years, but we’ve watched 490 on-demand movies, and in all likelihood that number would rise much faster if we’d kept both.  (As an example, the last two discs I had to return yesterday shipped in mid-July and late August, and I only just got around to watching them both; meanwhile, we watched dozens of movies and TV shows on the website.)  But part of me feels like canceling the membership altogether, simply out of protest.

So I’m taking the coward’s way out — that is to say, I’m postponing my decision.  We’ve placed our account on hold for three months.  The semester is usually too busy to watch many movies anyway, and in the meantime we’re holding out hope that a better option will present itself.  (Blockbuster has proven itself incompetent during two trial periods, but I’m hearing good things about Hulu Plus.)

I don’t mean to romanticize a business merger, but truthfully, I am a little sad that they’re changing.  This was a company that was really, really good at one thing: you could get almost any DVD from or to their warehouse in one day, so that you could almost watch a different movie every night.  Customer service was streamlined and simple (no questions asked if a DVD never arrived or wouldn’t play correctly — they simply shipped another one.)  I can’t imagine they’ll be as successful doing what everyone else is already doing — putting free or low-cost content on the Internet for all the world to see.  But, for old time’s sake, I wish them luck.

Modern Love

So a couple of nights ago, instead of grading papers or cleaning the kitchen, I went to the movies.  Ever since I read in The Week that the *average* rating of Drive was four stars, I had wanted to see it — even though I enjoy cars less than probably anyone else I know.

It was just as fantastic as everyone says it is: gripping and understated at the same time.  I don’t want to go into a lot of detail (I’m certainly not a qualified film critic) but I think what got under my skin the most, and has stayed with me in the days since, was the depiction of the side-note love story between the two main characters.

(Possible spoilers ahead, depending on your pickiness; continue at your own risk.)

They meet honorably: he holds the elevator door for her and watches with an eager, shy smile as she enters her apartment on the same floor.  Later, he listens in on a sweet, intimate conversation between her and her son, and he helps fix her ailing car in the parking lot.  As their relationship deepens, we watch as they watch each other, laugh together, care for her son.  They spend a lot of time just smiling, bashful in each other’s presence but unable to shake the wide-eyed adoration they feel for one another.  Physical contact is limited to a squeeze of the hand and one glorious, passionate kiss in the elevator just before they are separated forever.

The things they love about each other are apparent.  She is a nurturing mother with a sense of adventure; he is protective, dependable and comfortable in almost every situation.  They are both beautiful (hey, it’s Hollywood.)  But it’s not their physical attractiveness we see; it’s the strength of their character, strength that’s reinforced as they grow closer together and help each other cope with problems and celebrate victories. And, despite their love for each other, they each choose something even higher — she, her marriage; he, her family’s safety — in the end.

Is there anything that’s more beautiful than this?  And, basking in the warmth and purity of it, how can we stand to be confronted by the sheer drivel of Sex in the City and its counterparts in film, the relentless stream of romantic comedies that washes over us every summer?

I realize a movie is just a story.  But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that it use that hour or two to say something meaningful.  A movie like that can just take your breath away.

Fiction

They are done with poetry, they say, and in spite of myself I have to agree: as usual, the villanelles were deeply compelling but the epics lacked, well, a certain epicity.  We read in earnest, and I made them laugh and grimace with plot summaries and gory details from the sections we had to skip for reasons of time and sensitivity.  Someday, someday, I will be able to open their eyes to the desperate beauty of Homer the way a professor once did for me.  For now, I revel in the small steps forward: the student who wrote with surprising conviction and gravity about an epic match between football teams, and the fact that most of them can at least differentiate between Achilles and Agamemnon.

Today we begin something new: a new set of texts I will painstakingly select read and reread, agonize about how to introduce and discuss them.  I will have to talk them down from the ledges of convoluted plot and melodrama, convince them that characters with slowly-developed depth are the only ones we can mentally invest in.  I will scour my shelves for new and fresh excerpts, authors they will not have read, premises they will find absurd and inspiring.

But not just yet.  First we will all take a much-deserved break.

We pray, of course: for friends and family who are suffering, fading, departed, and for college decisions, and for the requests they can't bring to leave their lips, which die unspoken in their mouths.

Then they write while I set up the projector amid furious speculation (Is it a movie?  Will we watch it for the whole class?  I hope it's funny.  I hope it snows tonight!)  And I end it by saying that yes, we're going to spend the next two classes watching and discussing one of my favorite movies about writing, creating and justice.  It's sweet, sad and funny.  Oh, and by the way, I made popcorn.

It is this last statement that causes them to erupt into cheers as I open the bag and pass out cups.  But I like to pretend it's partly for the other stuff, too.

A Little Faster, A Little Better

One of the most depressing lines in the hilarious movie Office Space is when the main character admits that at his current job, every single day has been worse than the day before. "So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life."

My experience has been exactly the opposite: each year I teach is a little easier than the last.  Each year I'm able to anticipate the miscommunications, fence in the problem students and keep up with the grading just a little bit better.  Each year I enjoy it more, and I think I get a little better at what I'm doing.

So when I look at the last semester through the glow of two weeks' vacation, I realize it wasn't that stressful.  There was only really one problem that kept recurring over and over: student absences.  In six years, I don't think it's ever been this bad, not even during the swine flu epidemic last fall; between field trips, parent and student illnesses and visits to the guidance office, I was losing one or two students from almost every class, almost every day.  This meant I had to decide when and how they can make up their work and how much, if any, they will be penalized for doing it late (a family emergency is an acceptable excuse; a field trip is not.)  I often had to decide these things on the spot, as the student would approach me the day she got back and want to know what the plan was.  And if there's one thing I hate, it's worrying about loose ends.

The thing is, when I'm busy being a parent and bookkeeper to my students, I lose some of the passion and enthusiasm for my subject that made me want to teach in the first place.  And when I have to penalize students for turning in late work, I feel bad; I know a one-day absence doesn't justify an assignment that's two weeks late, but I feel for the kid who was sick and just plain forgot, at the same time that I realize it isn't fair to the others to just let her hand it in late.

In trying to decide what to do about this, I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite method books of all time.  In Tools for Teaching, Fred Jones gives practical advice as follows:
"It is not your job to work yourself to death while the students watch.  It is your job to work the students to death while you watch."

This may sound a little off-putting, and it definitely reeks of melodrama, but I think he means exactly what I just said: teachers need to be free to teach, not bogged down in the mundane details of classroom management.

So I decided to turn around what I had been doing.  I had been filling out a form each time a student was absent, stating what she had missed, and placing it in her mailbox in hopes she would make it up in a timely manner.  From now on, I would have the student fill out a form each time she was absent.  If she wanted any kind of extension or grace for late work, she'd need to tell me when and why she was absent, what she had missed and how she planned to make it up -- and do this on the day she returned, so that we both knew what the plan was.

I cannot tell you how excited I am to try out this new system.  Partly because I adore new systems, and partly because I hope it means, once again, that this semester will be the best one so far.

The Antidote to Drudgery

Sometimes it's hard to be nice.  Especially when it gets cold: so cold you wear your jacket indoors, and you get used to the creaking of the leather every time you shrug your shoulders, or the swish of filled down as you type with chilly fingers (fingers that never quite warm up until you're back under the flannel sheets upstairs.)

Especially when you're tired: so tired you have to sneak into the kitchen during your first lesson of the day to make a cup of tea, lest you nod off during a particularly dolce Andante.

And especially, most especially, when a two-week vacation leers at you from just around the corner.  You can see it, taste it -- if only you could hurry up and get through the flurry of paperwork, exams, and general miscommunication that seems to flare up, as if by magic, at the end of every semester.  It's so close, that precious time with your family and home, your friends and sadly-neglected reading list.

If only that were how it worked, instead of trudging through hour by agonizing hour.  There's no shortcut besides patience and time.  And so I cannot think of a better source of encouragement and motivation for a disillusioned teacher than Etre et Avoir, the movie I happened to watch last week.  It's the simplest story possible: a few months in the lives of a group of young students (about a dozen, ages 4-12) who attend a tiny school in rural France.  I am often mocked for preferring movies that lack plot, but this is in a class by itself: there is no tragedy, no moral, no brush with greatness, just ordinary children leading ordinary lives with an ordinary instructor.

But the ordinariness of la maitre, as they call him (I am considering adopting a similar title, which would probably put me in a better mood right off the bat) is what makes him so transcendent.  He is not lovey-dovey, showing great restraint with gentle shoulder-pats when tears render a child excruciatingly huggable.  He is not a pushover, sternly admonishing instigators and dawdlers back into docility.  He is not particularly imaginative in his choice of lesson plans or teaching aids, preferring simple workbooks and rote exercises.

So what is it about Georges Lopez that made me shamefacedly examine my own actions of the past week?  A particular favorite was when a hapless student began, "Oh, I thought -- " and I actually responded, "It doesn't matter what you thought, this is how it is -- " and heard the cock crow inside my soul as I wondered, "Did that actually come out of my mouth?"  This man has endless patience -- no, not patience, love -- for his students; enough love to allow one to form an upside-down V instead of a seven and wait while she steps back, frowns and says, "no, that's not it" -- and then make a seven out of a dotted line for her to trace easily.  He never raises his voice above a soft, amiable timbre, whether pushing one to examine the concept of infinity or another to redouble his efforts toward his studies.  He simply teaches, pouring his heart and mind and strength into their fragile forms, helping them to grow.

Anyway, it's a good movie, and it's helped me through this week.

Still Waiting?

In case my glowing review of Waiting for Superman wasn't enough to drive you off the couch and into the theater, here's a good excuse to go: teachers can see the movie at a discounted price this week.

Okay, so it's only a three-dollar discount, and it's only for three days.  But you really should see it anyway.  And I might even go with you!  :)