Abstract
In several issues of Pedagogy in Health Promotion, I ended my Message From the Editor in Chief with the exclamation, “Thank you for having the courage to teach!” This is the title of Parker Palmer’s (2007) book, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. No matter how many classes and years one is teaching, it takes courage to dedicate fully to the triad of subject, teacher, and student—knowing that hanging in the balance one could be receiving the latent rewards of teaching or contributing to some level of failure for the student.
The deep joys and sorrows of life can be manifested through the arts. I have found this to be the case in popular cinema. Can you think of a good teacher motion picture movie? A mostly all-teachers’ favorite, for those around when it ran in the late 1960s, is To Sir, With Love (Clavell & Clavell, 1967). Mark Thackeray, an immigrant to Britain, is between jobs, so he takes a teaching assignment in a tough, London secondary school where the students play typical sophomoric antics. Thackeray’s loses his calm, cool, and respectful style eventually when some students push their antics too far. Thackeray tries to instill in his students respect for themselves, for each other, and for him, by treating them as adults and discussing issues on their minds, thus liberating them from the struggles of their lives, even just for a few hours a day. After a series of dramatic encounters with the students, the teacher has a leveling moment with them and consequently gains the courage to teach for another year—forgoing what could have been a more lucrative engineering career.
Another classic British favorite of mine is the movie Educating Rita where a tired Oxford professor tutors a maturing lady from the English commons (Gilbert & Gilbert, 1983). Most think that Rita has no business being at Oxford, including herself, when she discovers that it takes a lot more than desire and some hard work to be educated. To make things worse, Rita gets stuck between two worlds. One is her home neighborhood of old that she knows she has grown away from. The other is a new aspirant world in which she develops an imposter complex. However, Professor Bryant, struggling with his own contributions to teaching and personal issues, grows fond of Rita through their tutorials, as he discovers that he gets more out of teaching her than the other rising, but otherwise lifeless, students at Oxford.
In Finding Forrester, William Forrester, a great American novelist that becomes a recluse in Brooklyn, New York, after a one-and-done book, befriends Jamal Wallace who plays an exceptionally smart city kid who likes writing more than hanging with his buddies at a playground (Connery & Van Sant, 2000). Similar to Rita above, Jamal gets stuck between two worlds after he is exposed as an intellectual loafer and gets sent to a high-browed private school. There he has a run-in with a strict writer wannabe who feels relegated to teaching at the prep school. This teacher has no tolerance for Jamal’s high aptitude, especially since he is from “another class of students.” William and Jamal create a special student–teacher relationship, as Jamal often visits William after school. As a result, Jamal helps William come out of his shell, and William helps Jamal become a writer. Through this unlikely bond, both become liberated from a dim past and look to a bright future.
Students give praise to high school teacher John Keating in Dead Poets Society by standing on their desks reciting, “O Captain! My Captain!” from a Walt Whitman poem (Haft, Whit, Thomas, & Weir, 1989). Their support warms the teacher’s heart, given his abrupt dismissal from the school for questionable pedagogy for young, impressionable boys at this boarding school. The movie displays the enduring challenge we have as teachers in balancing effective pedagogy with a student’s learning style. As noted by William Forrester in the aforementioned movie, sometimes a teaching strategy can be very, very effective or very dangerous. What’s unsettling is that it may be difficult to tell what effect a teaching style may have on certain students.
Bill Rago, as with Mark Thackeray, is between jobs and takes a teaching position after being unemployed for too long. Rago, while an advertising salesman with a degree in English, never stepped into a classroom to teach. He is not enthused about teaching, and to make matters worse he is assigned to a U.S. Army training camp to work with the lowest aptitude recruits. Rago underestimates these students’ interest in literature, and when the recruits challenge him to “get real,” Rago takes on the challenge not as a drill sergeant but as their Renaissance Man. With great passion, he introduces the trainees to several plays by William Shakespeare, one of which the class performs for Rago, as a surprise (Colleton, Abott, Marshall, Greenhut, Vajna, & Marshall, 1994).
Another in my top 10 teacher movies is the sobering film The Emperor’s Club, in which William Hundert, a classics teacher at an all-boys boarding school Saint Benedict’s, takes on moral certitude that his students will heed the principles of a gentleman, even in competition (Abraham, Karsch, O’Neil, & Hoffman, 2002). Hundert takes failure to heart when a student, whom he trusted, cheats in the school’s classics competition. To make matters worse, Hundert learns that even later in life the student continued to cheat for gain as he rationalizes “in the real world people are dishonest.” Naturally, Hundert is devastated to learn that one of his pupils has gone bad, but he is later rewarded for his love of students when one of them entrusts his son to him for “right” instruction!
What does your top 10 favorite teacher movies look like and why? These movies are realistic. While they show the heart-warming and romantic side of teaching, they demonstrate the daily and long-term challenging landscape of an educator. The reward of teaching could be palatable, such as the breakthrough that Ann Frank makes in helping Helen Keller communicate intelligibly for the first time (The Miracle Worker; Coe & Penn, 1962). A big lesson learned could be a group benefit such as the crowd cheering moment in Scent of a Woman when Ret. Army Colonel Frank Slade’s monologue supports prep school boy Charlie Simms for not selling his soul and squealing on his mischievous friends who befouled the headmaster’s new car (Brest & Brest, 1992).
In most cases the rewards of teaching are subtle, and they are most likely to be latent, as shown in Mr. Holland’s Opus when retiring high school music teacher Glenn Holland is treated to a surprise playing of his composed masterpiece “An American Symphony” by former students (Field, Cort, Nolan, Duncan, & Herek, 1995). Most people appreciate the remarkable influence that teachers have on their students whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. What may not be so understood is the courage it takes to step up and teach every year, every month, every week, every day, every class and for every student.
Thank you for having the courage to teach!
