Real talk.
In one of MY classes (that is, not a class I'm teaching), a few of my colleagues/fellow teachers were talking about the movie Half Nelson with Ryan Gosling. They're thinking about using the movie as a means to help get at/understand various ideas swirling around critical pedagogy and all related methodology within this tradition.
However, even though this movie has been on my netflix queue for over a year, I still have not found the strength to ever let it reach the number one spot (thus sending it to me). I guess that's a complicated way of saying I haven't seen it.
I only have a general idea what it's about. It's about an idealistic young teacher who has problems in his own personal life. At some point, he finds it hard to separate the personal from the professional, and in this some barrier between him and his student(s) breaks down.
I'm assuming, since this is Hollywood, that somehow the teacher in the film finds salvation and consequently becomes a mythic hero figure.
I think this is why I've subconsciously been avoiding this movie. I don't want to see a screen representation of the teacher as a heroic figure. It frightens me. And the reason it frightens me is that teaching, to me, is not a heroic act at all. When I walk in a classroom, I don't feel like a hero. Instead, I feel a sense of tremendous humility and frailty. I feel exposed; and, consequently, I feel human.
Freire and bell hooks, among others, talk of "love" when they talk of teaching. This seems appropriate. The risks of teaching are the risks of love. Each day you have to put the fact that you care on the line, as others (both inside and outside the classroom) sometimes try to take advantage of that, drag you through the mud, and disrespect the humanness of the teacher that is often times taken for granted. We're not machines, we're feeling beings, too.
Of course, as with other forms of love, you love in spite of the risks. You get up with the dirt and grass still in your teeth and smile and ask for more. Maybe that's masochistic. I don't know. Maybe it explains why so many teachers, professors, instructors lead horrifically tormented lives that sometimes over take them. Again, I don't know.
Rarely there are Hollywood endings. As soon as you think you've made a break through, reached some sort of pedagogical salvation, new students come in who question your abilities, your credentials, your worth as a human being. You're not a human being to many, you're simply someone sent in to follow through on the predetermined rules of the game. They roll their eyes, administration never trusts you to do as you believe, and parents never think you're doing enough. Heroes? No.
For some of us, it's enough to know that somewhere something is happening out there. Sometimes we hear of it, many times years after the fact in a coffee shop, from a letter, a chance encounter outside of a lecture hall. Sometimes we'll hear those words that makes it worth it: "that class" and "changed me." It doesn't have to be big, but enough to know that somewhere something, even a minuscule realization, changed someone for the better and you were half of the cause.
But that's not a Hollywood ending. That's love in the real world. And there are times when it sits on the cold steel of a razor.