Teachers and Pop Culture

While teachers are not displayed in a singularly bad light in popular culture, the truth about teaching and the field of education is not something that one is likely to be seen. Teachers are generally either be portrayed as superhuman instructors with the miraculous ability to completely reshape their student’s lives without actually doing any teaching, like what we see in films like Dead Poet’s Society (1989) and Dangerous Minds (1995), or as incompetent and unqualified, like what is seen in Cameron Diaz’s Bad Teacher (2011). In American pop culture, it would seem that there isn’t a whole lot of room for films that depict true teachers honestly, as individuals dedicated to their work, but not so much so that they lose their lives and families, and people who were well and properly trained for their positions as educators. Because that is just the thing about movies that depict superhero teachers, they are never really shown to be educating because the fact that the students were doing poorly in the first places is the fault of their previous, and of course ineffective, teacher. While painting the picture of the superteacher, the film is sure to make it clear that all the other teachers and administrators working alongside them are unfeeling or unskilled. All the unruly class needs is a karate lesson from a leather jacket wearing teacher to get them on track, obviously.

So what? Why does it matter what teachers look like in Hollywood? Well, it matters because the way teaching is depicted in popular culture holds great bearing on the way the real-life teaching is viewed. In her short video discussing myths about teaching, she comments on former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s remark that good teachers “walk on water” and are miracle workers by questioning the expectation of teachers to reach inhuman levels of practice to be deemed ‘good.’ Teachers are credited with the opportunity to completely transform the lives of their students, but all the while they’re being kept from the possibility of achieving that by being constantly and relentlessly discredited as ineffective or unskilled. This is the paradox of teachers in Hollywood and reality. It’s hard to know how far the image of teachers in film bleeds into the perception of real teachers by students and parents, but it would be misguided to assume it has no impact. Surely some people wonder what their teachers, or their children’s teachers, are doing wrong to not have them on top of their desks joining a
round of “Oh Captain, My Captain,” and that is when this false image of teachers wounds actual educators. The Hollywood model of the superteacher is not possible to live up to for real, human educators.

To shift the view away from how teachers look in popular culture, we can look at how teachers look at pop culture items like films, and how they instruct their students to look at them.

Movie day in class. Every public-school student’s favorite day, except the tedious worksheet they’re given so the teacher can make sure they actually watch the film. Meanwhile, there are so many beneficial and enriching activities that could be done with watching a film, or film clips, in class. Films must be used effectively in the classroom, not as filler or reward. Documentaries have long been used in history class, perhaps often as a way for a teacher to escape lecturing on that subject and the students are expected to take notes over what they watch – this is not an effective use of film. Instead, students should be given real questions to think about during and after viewing the film; questions like the film-maker’s motivation and why they made the film when they did, questions over the social or political climate viewed in the film, or what kind of perspectives are seen in the film and how they differ from the student’s own. It may seem difficult for some teachers to incorporate a film into their lesson, especially if it is a feature film rather than a documentary, however, introducing the film by saying that though the events and characters in the film are fictitious, here is what we will get out of it. English teachers instruct students on analyzing texts every day, in the same way teachers can instruct students how to analyze a feature film to ascertain important social and cultural information from it.

Adam Farhi opens his article discussing teacher depiction in Hollywood with a quote from Steven Spielberg: “The power of cinema is a lot stronger than the power of literature.” Farhi says that Spielberg is “biased” in his view of cinema (Farhi, 157), and as a future English teacher I know that I’m biased in my views of literature, however, I know the strength that Hollywood has in its sway over peoples’ thoughts, especially the thoughts of young people. In this way, I can see the distorted image of a teacher that Hollywood paints as a greatly detrimental force for real life teachers, but I can also see the possibilities in teaching students to truly analyze what they are viewing. Too often, I think, we passively view movies and TV, without ever considering what we can take away from them. I don’t mean anything as cliché as gleaning a ‘moral to the story’ that teaches you a lesson like children’s programs, but rather what can you learn about that culture, society, location, or people through viewing that film. And by undertaking the practice of teaching students how to look at a film in this way, perhaps the perception of superteachers in films will grow more unrealistic as opposed to idealistic.

References

Farhi, A. (1999). Hollywood goes to school recognizing the superteacher myth in film. The Clearing House, 72(3), 157-159

[Vox]. (2014, September 6). As if teachers’ jobs aren’t hard enough, they’re asked to fix poverty, too. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWSaceaSpRI.