Watching a high school teacher in films or on TV is often worse than having to relive your adolescence. They wear their hair in tight buns and scream, or they leap atop desks and quote Walt Whitman, only to be fired by misguided administrators.
Some of the more deviant onscreen teachers have sex with their students or their enticing colleagues in janitors’ closets.
These high-octane goofballs rarely grade papers, and one never sees them planning, say, how they’ll cram teaching “Huckleberry Finn” into three weeks or pleading with the global studies teacher for the LCD projector for half of last period.
Instead, the portrayals of high school teachers are invariably exaggerated and predictable, almost like our memories of school-cafeteria food.
One of the more outlandish depictions of high school teachers comes in “Strangers with Candy,” the new feature film based on the 1999 television series. “Strangers” is a perverse, satirical version of an after-school special. Jerri Blank, the protagonist, is an ex-prostitute and ex-junkie in her 40s who, upon release from jail, decides to return to high school. Not only do she and her classmates play hilariously grotesque one-dimensional characters, her teachers and administrators compete to be as outrageous and inappropriate as their young charges.
And what’s not to enjoy about Stephen Colbert, as Jerri’s absurd science teacher, Chuck Noblet? He favors the Bible instead of traditional textbooks, and in the series he once delivered this gem to a class about a new student:
“Now I want you to treat Ricky like you would any other student you know nothing about and who evidently feels he can walk into my classroom in the middle of the semester and expect me to change my lesson plan.”
Caricatures give release
As a high school teacher, I laugh and cringe at our caricatures, but also wonder about their origin. The profession has long been a staple in films, from “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (1939) and “To Sir with Love” (1967) to “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982) and “Dangerous Minds” (1995). Whereas other professions such as lawyers, journalists and cops get swashbuckling portrayals, we’re usually left with three options: saint, buffoon or sex-crazed ignoramus.
“Most recent films tend to depict teachers … as bumbling dullards who lack skills and are generally powerless, or who play adversarial roles toward students,” writes Barbara Beyerbach, a professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, who has done extensive research on portrayals of teachers in film.
“Teachers are rarely represented as cosmopolitan, ambitious, romantic, or actively engaged in teaching.”
I can’t claim all those positive attributes, as my students would be quick to attest. But I would like to think that I am, at least occasionally, actively engaged in teaching.
Perhaps we recall our teachers in easy cliches because high school is such a hormonal, dramatic time. Adults often remain on the periphery, bit players in our personal dramas. There’s some catharsis in seeing an especially severe teacher or administrator given his comeuppance in a dunking tank or public dressing-down.
Comedy and drama also demand types, at times. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Fast Times” would hardly be any of their raucous fun without the stilted, joyless teachers and administrators. They are only slightly more alive than the anonymous, “wah-wah-wah” voices of teachers and other adults in “Peanuts” cartoons.
Sometimes we also might need the converse, the sentimentally heroic, such as Richard Dreyfuss’ character in “Mr. Holland’s Opus” or Edward James Olmos’ character from “Stand and Deliver.” (The latter, along with “Dead Poets Society,” was recently named one of the 100 Most Inspirational Films by the American Film Institute.) These more valiant teachers sometimes remind us that every moment spent in high school was not angst-filled but perhaps imbued with some real learning.
Books more realistic
In books, high school teachers do not fare much better than in films: leering Mr. Antolini in “The Catcher in the Rye,” controlling Miss Jean Brodie in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Only rarely are we offered a genuine, complex hero such as the protagonist in James Baldwin’s 1957 story “Sonny’s Blues.” A high school teacher in the ghetto neighborhood of his youth, he is confronted with his younger brother’s drug addiction and imprisonment.
“Plainsong,” a novel by Kent Haruf, a former colleague at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and ex-high school teacher, gets about as close as I’ve seen to a recent, layered portrayal of a teacher. Tom Guthrie, the protagonist, tries to uphold academic standards in a small Colorado town while muddling through family crises.
Characters such as Baldwin’s and Haruf’s show the subtleties of teaching. It is not a saintly or preposterous profession but a hard one with rewards that can be difficult to get across in a film’s third reel.
Two of my most gratifying moments as a teacher took place offstage, away from the classroom. In the first, I received an e-mail from a former student, a first-generation college student, who had overcome considerable obstacles to make it to Brown University. He wrote me a witty and wise note that managed to talk about both Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” and the antics of a well-meaning but pretentious classmate.
Another time, at home grading papers, I found this insight buried in a paper on Chaucer: “Love is like the thesis in a good paper: It should be the center of the world.”
In both these cases, I was alone, but suddenly I did not feel that way. I just sat there for a few moments, transfixed.
No student slowly started to clap and was then joined by others to result in a standing ovation, as might have happened in a film. As James Baldwin’s teacher-narrator says in the opening of “Sonny’s Blues,” “I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again.”
