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.
