Teacher movies
After the parent-teacher confab last week, I came home to discover that Turner Classic Movies was coincidentally airing teacher movies, to commemorate the start of school. I unwisely let myself get sucked into the experience. (I overslept the next morning. Oops!)
You know the kind of movie I mean: the slightly schmaltzy, melodramatic kind that features a dedicated, sincere teacher who can see the best in his or her students and brings them (or drags them) to new academic achievements by sheer force of will. The list is practically endless, but there are a few that stand out as really good flicks.
TCM was showing “Goodbye Mr Chips” just as I got home. It wasn’t the silly musical version with Peter O’Toole and Petula Clark from the ’60s, but the original movie version from 1939, starring Robert Donat and Greer Garson. The movie follows the career of Mr Chipping (we never learn his first name) as he reminisces about his life, dozing by the fireside as an old man. It touches on some of the personal sacrifices and obstacles any career teacher makes, without getting too melodramatic about them.
Chips chooses to teach Latin, in some part because he passed over for promotion to housemaster, but largely because he enjoys his craft and working with his form 1’s. Chips seems a stodgy old man, even in middle age, until he falls head over heels for a younger woman, who returns his love. She helps mold Chips into a warmer, less reticent person, in the process opening new avenues of affection between he and his boys with weekly teas. Her death in childbirth leaves Chips stunned, but he soldiers on, leading his classes on the very day of her death, finding solace in the comfortable routine of coaching young minds.
In short, the 1939 version does a pretty fair job of portraying the life of a career teacher, despite the period costumes and boarding school venue.
The second movie I managed to watch most of the way through was, “To Sir, With Love,” with Sidney Poitier. Here, Poitier plays a West Indian engineer to needs a job until he can find a engineering job. He, with as much wide-eyed naivete as Chips, agrees to take on teaching English to high school students in a lower-class London neighborhood.
They are primarily all white and working class. If you believe the movie, most the guys are hoods and punks and all the girls sluts and airheads. They are as bigoted as their parents probably are, and have no affection at all toward Mr Thackeray (”Sir”) or the other non-whites in the class. Learning about anything academic is as useless to them as buggy whips.
Sir has a hard time winning his students over to his line of thinking. There is value in learning. They are all capable of it. All people should be treated with respect, and not judged by their skin color. Girls do not have to lose their virginity early just to please one or many boys. Young men do not have to swagger to earn respect.
Meanwhile, Sir yearns to escape his sojourn into purgatory, even as he slowly wins the respect and affection of his unwilling charges. Their farewell party for him, complete with a solo by Lulu and a wrapped gift, brings him to tears, and perhaps predictably, to rip up his long-awaited engineering job offer and decide to stay.
Sure, these are both idealized versions of someone’s favorite teacher, but there are grains of truth in all these teacher movies. Great teachers stand out among the sea of mediocre teachers. A smaller number have books and movie scripts written about them: a Hispanic calculus teacher, a talented orchestral composer, an ex-Marine. Some are entirely fictional (Sister Mary Clarence), but in all those movies we see the ideal teacher. Warm. Dedicated. Caring. Knowledgeable. Independent.
And willing to make that extra effort to shape unwilling rough stones into diamonds.
If we could all be even a little like those cinematic idols, there would be no education crisis in our schools. Maybe we should make all would-be teachers watch a few of these movies and critique them. It might be better preparation than taking the Praxis.
