[Idiosyn-critic]

The Incidental Teacher: Film and the Art of Teaching


Len Shneyder

"Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?" Seventeen years after Ferris Bueller's Day Off made its premiere on the silver screen, Ben Stein's droll voice, calling roll at the start of an equally droll Economics class, sounds as familiar as ever. How many of you have memories of dry lectures, asinine homework assignments, and dreaded blackboard demonstrations? These common experiences have provided fertile ground for the cinema. The teacher is as much a cinematic archetype as the all-American action hero or the comic sidekick. However, not every "teacher" film paints a flattering picture of institutions of education, higher or lower, or of the teachers who, day in and day out, prepare the youth of America for the days to come.

As vehicles for inspiration, several teacher movies have withstood the test of time. Take, for instance, Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989), which stars Robin Williams as John Keating, a verse-spouting English teacher with unconventional methods in an all-too-conventional boys' school. The film's motto, carpe diem, still resonates for me with the same force and importance as it did the first time I heard it.

Seize the day; the day is worth living for. Messages like these are seldom forgotten between the front and back covers of books, when these tomes are set before an enterprising student. Through well-chosen poetry and eloquent speeches, Keating inspires his students to step outside their institution, outside tradition, outside the ever dangerous "career tracks" laid out by their parents, in order to seek truth and affirmation on their own two feet. Dead Poets Society portrays the teacher as more than a herder of sheep; it shows that a teacher can also be the one who leads the sheep out of the fold and beyond the pasture.

If intellectually liberating his students is the biggest problem that Keating faces in Dead Poets Society, then let's say he's lucky. In Dangerous Minds (1995), embattled New York teacher LouAnne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer) has to figure out how to keep her students peacefully confined to their seats.

Based on the true story of an ex-Marine who entreated her students to learn by teaching them karate and introducing them to poetry through the lyrics of Bob Dylan, the film provides an interesting counterpoint to Dead Poets Society, as it shows the state of education on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum. As a movie, Dangerous Minds has many problems, mainly stemming from weak dialogue and bad acting. Despite these limitations, it offers an effective illustration of the dangers of conformity.

In certain ways, the affluent establishment that holds back the imaginations of the students in Dead Poets Society parallels the social and economic oppression plaguing the youth in Dangerous Minds. In the latter film, the status quo is ignorance. Where Williams' character vigorously beats the drum, aggressively infusing his students with a zest for something more potent than the monotone lectures of their aging instructors, Pfeiffer's character finds a caring, gentle approach to be the most effective way to reach students who have been victims of apathy.

As Dead Poets Society and Dangerous Minds demonstrate, different institutions and students dictate different approaches to teaching. In Ramon Menendez's Stand and Deliver (1988), Edward James Olmos gives a marvelous performance as Jaime Escalante, a teacher forced to adapt his subject matter and pedagogical methods to the needs of his students.

Here we have another real-life teacher faced with the same apathy and ignorance portrayed in Dangerous Minds. This time, the setting is Los Angeles, and the subject is math rather than English. The question of importance is central to this film; what is the importance of calculus to a "gang banger"? Perhaps there is none, except for the value of better understanding the world. Escalante is faced with the overwhelming challenge to not only teach rudimentary math to his students, but to accelerate them through summer courses into an advanced calculus program. Who would think that a class of inner-city students, earmarked by the rest of the faculty for a blue-collar life, would outshine some of the best and brightest?

To a large degree, an aggressive ego motivates Escalante. He is dead set on bringing his students a sense of pride by giving them the tools to achieve. Though this seems like a noble goal, Escalante shows considerable hubris: in subtle ways, he suggests that he can mold his students in any way he sees fit. He suffers from too much pride as an educator; he wants "his" creations to shine. Olmos' character is definitely extreme.

He is gung-ho and fights two battles, motivating his students while challenging a faculty who have been moved to resignation by their own failures. As this film demonstrates, educational institutions are too often plagued with problems from within that make the job of the teacher nearly impossible. When the majority of the students can't pass the most basic exams and are lacking skills that should have been established during elementary school, then it's safe to say that the institution has failed as a whole.

Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman), a baseball-bat-wielding, fire-breathing principal, fights an uphill battle to validate the existence of his school in John Avildsen's 1989 film Lean on Me. Clark returns to the school from which he was previously fired to turn it around. Upon arriving, he finds it to be a cesspool of drugs and violence. Clark is forced to wage war against his school, as well as against the specter of failure and apathy. In his bid to achieve the seemingly impossible, Clark employs the most unorthodox methods imaginable.

He not only has to attempt to teach his students, but he also has to convince his teachers not to give up on them. He does all this with the greater good in mind. In the process, he angers an entire community and upsets the order of things.

He is a man with convictions so deep that they drive him to hurt those around him. As a principal, Clark is a slave driver. He pushes everyone to the breaking point, because he understands that the normal pace of affairs will not accomplish what needs to be done. His ultimate concern is for the students, but he has difficulty remembering that compassion should always be the walking stick of an educator.

An angel, in the form of Vice Principal Ms. Levias (wonderfully portrayed by Beverly Todd), is sent to guide the wayward principal back on track. Her sole act of compassion is really an act of bravery: She tells this man that his good intentions will lead them all straight to hell. She cares enough to contradict the self-righteous Clark, prompting him to pause for a moment and understand that berating his staff will not get him what he wants, and that the path to salvation is cooperation.

What happens when your student is bright? What happens when a student is gifted, but talent and intelligence are liabilities in his social environment? This issue is addressed in Finding Forrester (2000), directed by Gus Van Sant. In this film, Sean Connery portrays William Forrester, an agoraphobic author who has stopped writing, and instead spends his days drinking and spying down on the basketball courts below his tenement.

One night, on a dare, young Jamal (Rob Brown) sneaks into Forrester's apartment. When he awakens the sleeping man, Jamal becomes desperate and drops his backpack. In the pack is a book filled with the boy's secret writing, which Forrester takes the liberty of critiquing. What ensues is a relationship between writer and protégé.

Thanks to his prowess on the basketball court, Jamal finds himself and his talent headed to a private Manhattan school. Forrester, in the hours following school, helps the young scribbler "find his words by loaning him some of his own." The bond between Forrester and Jamal is as much a friendship as it is a relationship between teacher and student. Forrester's bitterness and a tragic past make him a befuddled teacher. He raises Jamal's ire by making him speak up in his own defense. Silence, to Jamal, is a security blanket, but Forrester brings the quiet intellectual out into the world and helps him sharpen his tools.

Forrester is a bellowing ogre of a man compared to the quiet and sinister Robert Crawford (F. Murray Abraham), a teacher at Jamal's exclusive school. Finding Forrester shows Connery's teacher in contrast with an Abraham's anti-teacher, a man who does not live up to his responsibility of teaching his students, but rather ridicules them in order to pump up his own fragile ego.

The social contract between teacher and student is not marked by the power position of the teacher, but by the dialogue between a teacher and a student. Abraham's pinheaded character lords his knowledge over his students and runs aground when Jamal proves him wrong, causing the climactic conflict that brings Forrester out of hiding.

The "teaching" in Finding Forrester takes place primarily outside of the classroom. In Dead Poets Society, Keating actively leads his students outside the classroom. In helping his students seek knowledge as well as an atmosphere conducive to self-discovery, Keating liberates education from the physical constraints of school. In so doing, he also challenges the image of the teacher as a reservoir containing all knowledge.

Nowhere are the notions of carpe diem and education outside the classroom better illustrated than in Hal Ashby's quirky and lighthearted Harold and Maude (1971), starring Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. Cort plays Harold, a teenager from a very wealthy family being raised by his socialite mother (Vivian Pickles). Harold is obsessed with staging his own death by various means: hanging, slashing his own throat, shooting himself, hari kari, and self-immolation. These desperate acts are rooted in his discontent with a life devoid of anything meaningful and a mother who never really listens to him.

One day Harold meets Maude, a 79-year-old free spirit who drives like Evel Knievel. The friendship that ensues is nothing short of total liberation for the young Harold. Maude helps him find a reason to live by showing him that life isn't a series of gray doldrums between suicide attempts, and that the onus is on the individual to fill the days with excitement and beauty. Maude is full of witty and wonderful pearls of wisdom that sometimes ring of cliché but nevertheless elucidate her character's zest for life and the world at large, such as "Try something new every day" and "Consistency isn't a human trait." Harold is constantly challenged by Maude's unorthodox ways.

The concept of the "incidental teacher" can be derived from Maude's perspective on material goods as being incidental rather than integral to her being. As a teacher, she becomes a part of Harold's experience by way of a serendipitous incident. Maude's entrance into Harold's life is a catalyst for his discovery of the world around him, as she immerses him in the universe and creates a dialogue between him and all he encounters.

In a telling scene, the two are walking through a field when they run across a patch of daisies. Harold tells Maude that he wishes he could be like one of these daisies, because they are all alike. He is drowning in his own oddity and uniqueness. Maude points out to him that what he sees from a distance as uniformity is, in actuality, a subtle uniqueness that permeates each and every flower. This realization and affirmation of identity is an incidental teaching of an accidental friend. The classroom here is the world, and the education is a dialogue with everything that lives, breathes, stands, walks, talks, and exists.

There are nearly as many types of teacher in film, each with a subtle difference, as there are in real life. The one thing to remember about teaching and learning is perhaps best summarized by a Chinese proverb: "Teach when someone wants to learn." There is no single formula to teaching. Knowing when and how to apply the appropriate pedagogical method is as important as the teacher's fidelity to the contract that he or she will be free with knowledge, so long as the student is ready to learn.