Why I hate teacher movies

Teacher magazine recently compiled a list of their Top Ten Teacher movies (registration required). The list is as follows:

1. Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995)
2. Stand and Deliver (1988)
3. October Sky (1999)
4. Dangerous Minds (1995)
5. Freedom Writers (2007)
6. Chalk (2006)
7. To Sir With Love (1967)
8. Dead Poets Society (1989)
9. Remember the Titans (2000)
10. Teachers (1984)

You can see the list with comments as well as their list of runners-ups if you go to their site and register.

So why do I have a problem with teacher movies? Because it seems that in nearly every single one the teacher has to give up their life for their job. Maybe that is just the Hollywood version of what occurred, but that makes it worse I think. The message being sent to the public is that the good teacher, the great teacher, is the one that gives up everything for their students. I guess that is why, in my own mind, I will never be that good of a teacher – I have bought into the hype. I cannot do it. I love teaching, and I love my students, but I already spend more time on my job than I want, and I do not want to spend any more.

Stand and Deliver came out just as I started college, firmly on the path to becoming a math teacher, and I embraced it wholeheartedly. I wanted to be Jaime Escalante. Granted I wanted to do it in a nice suburban school somewhere, but I wanted to have that kind of impact on students. My second year of teaching, in an urban middle school in the same general region as Escalante found himself, I received an award – The Jaime Escalante Mathematics Teaching Award. You had to be nominated by a student, then selected from the nominations and then I and the student were interviewed, and I ended up being one of, I think, 8 or 9 recipients that year. My second year of teaching! I actually had the audacity and ego to wonder what I was going to do now that I had received an award named after a teacher I had idolized.

I laugh now, because I was so incredibly naive then, and I really had no right standing with the rest of the teachers who were there – many of whom had spent years perfecting their craft. I had lucked out, no more and no less. Once the reality of what I was doing started to sink in I started to see the movies for what they were. Pictures of people that most teachers could never live up to. I can manage my life day-to-day and take care of the students in front of me, and my family at home, and that is enough. I do not need to see a portrayal of the teacher who can do it all, and do it well.

Interesting that I have met Jaime Escalante, and my wife has met Erin Gruwell (the subject of the Freedom Writers). Both left their jobs. Escalante because his success proved his downfall, and Gruwell because she got to big for the job. We want our great teachers to be supermen(or women), but not for long, lest they remind the rest of us that we are mere mortals.

Finally, it seems that every statement has an exception and, as I read the list above, I must admit there are two movies on the list that I still love. Dead Poet’s Society showed me that teaching is about passion and helping students find theirs – something I continue to try and do, although it seems that math is a harder subject to do that in than English. And Teachers. Nick Nolte’s character said it best when asked why he was returning to the school even though half the kids were not after the fire drill.

“I’m a teacher!”

I’m a teacher.