01. Watch "Inspirational" Teaching Movies

This one should be fairly easy to rationalize: People enjoy feeling useful, important. This includes teachers, who naturally wouldn't spend upwards of 5-10 additional years in school learning their craft (not counting continuing education opportunities/requirements, etc.) if they didn't come home at the end of the day feeling, somehow, appreciated.

Thus, movies such as "Chalk," "Stand and Deliver," "Freedom Writers," and "Dangerous Minds," to name a handful, are popular amongst the education-savvy crowd. 'We get to see a glossed-up version of ourselves on the big screen,' educators think, and they nod along happily as Hilary Swank and Michelle Pfeiffer stumble, fall, dust themselves off, and live to teach another day.

This blog entry is, in itself, a bit self-serving. I recently reinvigorated my Netflix account, and was interested to see whether "Freedom Writers" was worth its weight in salt. I didn't expect great things, but I was also taken aback by how painfully cliched each and every scene was. At the core of the flick is newbie teacher, Erin Gruwell, played by Swank (whom I have nothing against), yammering happily to the principal of a newly 'integrated' high school about how EXCITED she is to be working with such a SPECIAL group of students. Kindly, the principal suggests that she dresses herself down before the first day of class - Gruwell comes to the interview wearing pearls and heels.

In the course of roughly two hours, meant to span two years of instruction, Gruwell takes heed of 0% of the advice offered to her. She continues dressing like she's V.P. of her own company, and breezily disregards any and all admonishments and suggestions given to her by her fellow faculty members, whom the script seems to go out of its way to paint as egregiously full of themselves and spiteful of the students they purport to teach. She goes over the head of her immediate boss after being warned not to expect them to read at their grade level when they've previously tested at roughly a 5th grade level (Gruwell teaches freshmen and sophomores). In response to her frequent whining and bucking of the system, she is rewarded with special favors from the school board, such as being able to teach "her" students as juniors and seniors. (Admittedly, I found the lack of an annual teaching rotation to be a silly plot point designed to inspire yet more drama and perceived oppression on Gruwell's behalf.)

The real-world educational community seems to have a love-hate with Gruwell, and with inspirational teaching movies in general. The Freedom Writers have heart-wrenching personal stories and overcome great feats; at the same time, Gruwell's 'methods', which seem to amount to floundering around and clumsily hitting on Something That Works temporarily, cannot be replicated. It is, at best, a sloppy case study. Having read the original diaries on which the film is based, I remain skeptical that the "turning point" of the story - when Gruwell compares a crude drawing of a Black student to drawings of Jews with exaggerated noses during the Holocaust, and the class is suddenly all-ears and ready to trot out their most personal revelations and experiences for her daily in a pile of composition notebooks - was ever such an egregious change. Gruwell hardly explains the quickness of their turn-around in the book, either. I can't help but think the tension was built-up. As my own experiences attempting to inform 7th graders about the Holocaust have showcased, Hitler does not an apathetic group of students automatically unmake. It takes time.

Also, at the end of the film, we're told that all 150 of Gruwell's Freedom Writers graduated from high school. Does that mean she also somehow pushed them through all of the other classes they never seemed to go to? Similarly, there wasn't one student in the bunch who said "fuck it"? Not one? Out of a group of 150 kids who previously couldn't be paid to go to school? Did she even meet any sort of state curriculum with any of the books she chose? Also, how much more beneficial would it have been for an entire school of impoverished youth to meet Miep Gies, or to use shiny new computers that some billionaire donated?

The biggest offense, however, is the glossed over racial tension; not so much between the Black, Latino/Latina and Asian students; but between Gruwell, their White savior, and the kids as a whole. There's something uncomfortable about Gruwell simply painting over her students' tumultuous home lives and writing off their struggles by buying them new books. It implies that, if she can just take them out of their shitty lives for a few hours a day, lives which she makes as much effort to understand as the school principal's advice, she can change everything about them. It's an annoyingly simplistic moral, and in all honesty, makes the film hard to stomach. The idealistic White teacher knows best, because she is neither wisened and embittered like her co-workers, nor is she plagued with any of her students' problems. This allows her to smile gummily and stand before the class, still defiantly wearing her pearls, as a White beacon of hope.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit to seeing faint outlines of myself in Gruwell's character. I imagine I'm not the first educator to be annoyed by flicks like "Freedom Writers". At the same time, part of the allure of teaching movies is the wish-fulfillment aspect. In the real world, you can't throw your school administration under a bus, or alienate your co-workers, or use your students as leverage to get favors out of the superintendent and expect there not to be repercussions. I can't help but think Gruwell herself knows that she, essentially, got lucky. After teaching the Freedom Writers for four years, she went on to publish their diary entries, and now lectures fellow well-meaning, fledgling educators on how to work with underprivileged youth; only not, because she doesn't. Gruwell's biggest claim to fame now is that she successfully cut-and-run. She no longer works with the kids she purports to champion, but rather, lectures about the ordeal that working with them once was. She's more Harry Wong than Cesar Millan, teaching about how she used to teach instead of actually teaching.

For me, inspiration comes from ascertaining a sense of realism in my overall situation. I then come to recognize that a) the circumstances surrounding said realism still make me nominally happy, and b) I can be successful as an educator without spouting platitudes. That said, if I had to choose a "realistically inspiring" movie for people to add to their own newly-invigorated Netflix queues, it would be Lower Learning, starring Rob Corddry as a sadistic elementary school principal, and Jason Biggs as the Erin Gruwell character. Early on, however, the audience recognizes that Biggs' character isn't as fresh-faced as his idealism would have people believe; it's just that Corddry's character is even more effed up by comparison.

The film is touted as a dark comedy, and in complete honesty, it gets low reviews. I think people assume it's "Freedom Writers" with a few more laughs and a few less gunshots. Instead, it opens into the bleak landscape of a low-performing primary school, with teachers who are corrupt, miserable, and co-dependent on their young charges for everything from taking baths in chocolate to marital advice. Once again, I'd be lying if I said I didn't see a little bit of myself in Biggs' character, or his pill-popping school-inspector crush, played by Eva Longoria. We know these people, in varying degrees - that's the point. It's just that, this time, the intentional on-screen ridiculousness is making me laugh, rather than snarl at the white elephant mess that is "Freedom Writers."

Anyway, I hope I've "inspired" somebody see it. Nothing else, though; I'd hate to get cocky.