Films and Education
If I was Dewey Finn my students would LOVE me. I would start the classroom day by having the students listen to a song that I chose and perhaps I would also follow along on my guitar. After I was finished and the song was over I would have a few of the students grab an instrument as well and we would do a variation of that song. Of course if I was Dewey Finn, my classroom would have 15 students, who all sat quietly in their chairs, waiting to be instructed on whether they can get up and talk or to pull out their history textbook. Never mind that if I was Dewey Finn, I also would not have a teaching degree and an administrator that would pop his or her head a least once if not twice a week. Dewey Finn and the students of School of Rock do not exist. Gone are the days that the classroom size is 15, it’s more like 35, and in my experience a classroom has never sat so calmly in anticipation of the day to come. Rather, the 35 students would all be doing activities along the lines of running around, sitting in groups gossiping, or skipping class. If I was a lucky teacher, one or two of the 35 would be sitting in their desks waiting for school to begin. The reality of what teaching is can not be shown in a movie. Even what I believe to be the most realistic movies about teaching and tough students, Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds, gloss over how hard it is to truly connect with students. Yes, they do show the many obstacles stand in a teacher’s way but they show them with inspiring music in the background that makes the watcher believe that given the right soundtrack anything is possible.
That being said, I love those movies. I love the movies about how a teacher can turn around a classroom in a year or how a coach can turn a losing team into a winner. Those are the stories that make me believe that if I keep trying to motivate a group of individuals, everything will turn out for the better. I know that I’m not gullible and I’m certainly not naïve, but I do know that teaching is hard and can wear away at your edges. A most recent movie, Half Nelson, with Ryan Gosling, portrays an inner city teacher who is hooked on drugs, and even in Freedom Writers, Hilary Swank’s character loses a husband. Yet, even with those troubling issues, the two main characters still teach, still inspire and in turn are affected greatly by their student population.
In terms of labeling, what would a film be without the hero, the villain, and the damsel in distress. Each teaching film has these qualities just like every other film out there. It wouldn’t be Hollywood and a blockbuster if they didn’t have the necessary elements and in a lot of cases it wouldn’t have an audience. The main characters in each of these movies could have any one of the labels that Shannon and Crawford listed off. Those labels also brought to mind other movies that weren’t on the list. Who can forget the teacher on The Breakfast Club? He earned himself the label of “jailer� and throughout the movie worked hard to maintain authority against his “inmates.� The films that were listed in the article “Top Ten Picks for Great Teacher Flicks� (http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin156.shtml) got picked for a reason. They are all highly visible movies that those in the teaching profession can recall and some can say helped to steer them toward their living. Teaching movies also prepared future teachers for roadblocks that they were going to face. If it wasn’t a student who was hard to reach, it was the administration or district that didn’t have the funds, the resources, or the will to help. In Music of the Heart, Meryl Streep used music to reach her students and had to go up against cuts in funding to help keep her program afloat.
Like I previously mentioned, a bad situation, a trying time or an uplifting moment, set to a great song, can cause a person to feel huge ranges of emotion and also make you feel like you are part of the protagonist’s struggle. In Dangerous Minds, a thumping beat and the lyrics of Coolio got you in the moment with LouAnne Johnson and her students. It also made the soundtrack extremely popular. A white middle-class girl like myself felt a little tougher when listening to the rap song that came from the movie. I in no way was an inner city girl with a rough life, but listening to that music and watching that movie gave my imagination a little creative stirring. This goes with any movie and the score that goes with it. Just by listening to one song, a person can be put into a specific movie scene. If I said Celine Dion “The Heart Will Go On�, then name that movie, I’m going to say Titanic. Whitney Houston and “I Will Always Love You�? Well that’s gotta be The Bodyguard and now Jack Black with a little bit of every rock song? Well of course School of Rock.