And a couple more TV-related items:

Anyone out there watching Dollhouse? It's getting better, I think, in the past few episodes. I completely freaked out when I watched the "Man on the Street" episode and found out Mellie was a doll. Holy Cow. And...sad. Tonight's episode is being advertised as an "event," whatever that means, and it sounds like the whole Dollhouse organization is going to come apart--which seems a little early to me. I mean, they didn't bring down SD-6 in Alias until the middle of the second season. But whatever, Joss Whedon. I leave it in your capable hands. Don't let me down. Hey, maybe it will turn into an Alias-style show, where Eliza Dushku hunts down the evil organization that manipulated her and stole her life. And you could have, like, Alpha hacking into her mind and making her do stuff that she doesn't remember. That could be cool.

And, I've been Netflixing episodes of My So-Called Life, which I never watched back in the 90's when it was actually playing and would have been relevant to my life. Now I just watch it and get completely un-nostalgic for grungy flannel shirts and life without the internet. And high school. About which it is scarily accurate.

But, in particular, I want to talk about an episode that deals with a trope that I find particularly annoying as a high school English teacher. And I feel like I'm breaking some kind of secret English teacher pact here, but I'm talking about movies like The Dead Poet's Society and Freedom Writers. TV Tropes calls it the Save Our Students trope. Here's how it goes: apathetic, trouble-making kids sleep-walk their way through school until the arrival of Non-Conformist Teacher, who really "gets" the kids and inspires them by being tough or sensitive or edgy or hyper. And then the kids, who were really just good kids all along, waiting for the chance to open up and discover their inner genius, start liking school and wanting to learn and reading actual books without anyone telling them to. Wonderful! All this unusual motivation makes the Evil Administrator perk up his ears and wander over to see what the commotion is. He finds something naughty about Non-Conformist Teacher's methods and fires said NCT. Newly-earnest teenagers rebel, stage some public demonstration of angst, but to no avail. NCT trudges off into the sunset; students learn an important lesson. The end.

I'm sure you can think of some other examples of this. Danny Darko, for one. Dangerous Minds. The art teacher in Speak.

Anyway, My So-Called Life plays with this scenario a bit. The NCT is a substitute who gets the kids to rewrite their poetry submissions for the school's literary magazine. Unlike the previous Boring English Teacher who cared only about grammar and punctuation, "Vic" (of course, you always call the NCT by his/her first name--surnames are evidence of antiquated authority structures) gets them to write the truth about their feelings (I'm sorry, but the NCT always speaks in italics) and thus produces a much higher quality of writing than can ever be achieved by attention to stylistics. But then the principal reads one student's racy sex poem and the jig is up.

However. This particular show was unique in that Vic didn't end up being quite such a hero after all: turned out he had ditched his family and was currently ducking child-care payments. So our heroine gets simultaneously inspired and disillusioned. Slightly closer to real life.

Anyway, the reason this trope annoys me so much that I'm willing to write an entire blog post ranting about it, is that it hits close to home. Of course I want to be that amazing inspiring rule-flouting teacher of awesome. I feel like I'm constantly trying to live up to that ideal of What A Teacher Should Be. But the reality is, that teacher is like Mary Poppins--she can only exist temporarily, and her effectiveness relies upon the repressiveness of the former regime. If the Non-Conformist Teacher ever got to stick around for long enough, the excitement of their new approach would wear off and they would become the new boring.

(The Onion does an awesome job of nailing that idea in this article, "Naive Teacher Believes in Her Students.")

It's sort of like my eighth-grade class. See, I have the extreme good fortune of inheriting the eighth-graders every year from a very strict, rule-enforcing, traditional teacher. They come to me expecting that they will have to sit quietly in their seats, do their worksheets, and raise their hands to ask a question. Which allows me to have discussions, active games, and participatory lectures because all that stuff seems like fun to them in contrast to what they've been taught to expect. But if their seventh-grade teacher was another version of me, they'd have a been-there, done-that attitude about it all, and it would be much harder to maintain order or get them interested in learning. As it is, the classroom discipline starts to slip around this time of year and I have to tighten things up and crack the whip a bit. (That was a metaphor, in case you wondered.)

Anyway, all that to say, the myth of the NCT really undermines the work that real-life teachers do, because it rests on the completely unrealistic--and, frankly, childish--belief that kids' greatest problem is being misunderstood, instead of the more complex reality that students are sometimes lazy, sometimes selfish, sometimes smart, sometimes not, sometimes eager, sometimes sullen, sometimes hurting people, who are ultimately responsible for their own choices, just like the rest of us. And real teachers just do the best we can with what we know how to do, for better or worse: conform when we have to, sacrifice what we must, be tough, inspire as much as possible, and try not to get fired. Because the truth is, being there is the only way to make a real difference.

Now, having said all that, I still can't help but get a little--dare I say?--inspired by this video, What Teachers Make.

Labels: movies, rants, teaching, TV

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