List of the week: Movies about high school teachers

The only thing that really excited me about hearing there would be a National Honors Society assembly today was that my classes would be cut down by ten minutes.  In my years here, NHS assemblies have not been the most exciting or moving of assemblies. They tend to consist of a droning keynote speech, a long slide show, and more speeches.

However, I was pleasantly surprised today. The speaker, a middle school teacher who was involved with the establishing of the KIPP Heartwood Academy, really captured my attention. She spoke about the challenges of teaching in underfunded urban schools with bad track records. She described students who had given up on themselves and their teachers and had resigned themselves to self-fulfilling prophecies. Despite the odds against her, the teacher started a school that took similar kids and turned them into students who value education, respect one another, and dream of going to college. I tutored many of them every other Saturday in my junior year and felt almost useless. These kids were so smart and well-behaved, they hardly needed my help.

By not paying teachers their worth, our state is shirking its responsibility to encourage quality teaching in its schools. We pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to engineers, technicians, and web developers to fuel innovation, but a tiny, tiny fraction of that is paid to our teachers. How many of you have had truly life-changing teachers in your life?

On that note, I’m going to feature scenes from well-made movies about teachers who did more than lecture into space:

Gracias to Natural Selections

Dead Poets Society : On his first day as English teacher at an all boys boarding school, John Keating (Robin Williams) instructs a student to read the preface of his poetry book. He then tells the boy, and all the boys in the class, to rip the page straight out of their books and throw it on the floor. He deems it rubbish. He tells the students that they can call him “Oh Captain! My Captain! (the title of a Walt Whitman poem) if they feel daring. He tells them to stand on their desks so they remember to always look at things with a new perspective. They boys stare at him incredulously. Keating then leads them outside and instructs them on the doctrine of “carpe diem.” Seizing the day.

Note: Robin Williams said that he chose to play John Keating because he was the kind of teacher he wished he had.

Gracias to ScreenRush

Freedom Writers : New teacher Erin Gruwell has a tough job. She is a white teacher at a school full of minorities. The cap? They all hate her. One day, she places a long piece of red tape down the center of the room and tells her students to stand on opposite sides of the room. She successively asks students to walk up to the line if a series of categories apply to them. Do they know where to buy drugs; have they ever been shot at; do they know anyone in a gang; do they know anyone who has died from gang violence. The numbers of students who approach the line is astounding. She brings her at-risk students face to face – the asians who hate the mexicans who hate the blacks.

Note: This movie is based on the book called “The Freedom Writers Diary” by Erin Gruwell and the kids of Wilson High. True story.

Gracias to EW

Stand and Deliver is also really good, though I haven’t seen it in a while. Also a true story. Favorite line: “Hey Kimo, you proud of me? I’m the first one here! What’s Cal-cool-us?”

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