On the Mountaintops
Using heavy doses of antibiotics (and warehousing heavy doses of intestinal flora-producing substances), I am recovering from a serious sinus infection. For eighteen years I have been feeding amoxicillin to my children for various aches and maladies, and now I am taking it myself. It is not pink nor in liquid form, but it is amoxicillin nonetheless. And I love it for me as I did for them.
So this evening I stepped out and went with my daughter to see Freedom Writers tonight. It is the new movie with Hilary Swank, who plays a dedicated new teacher in a “voluntarily integrated school” which became (especially after the Rodney King fiasco) an “involuntarily segregated school.” This will not be a movie review. I hate reading reviews—no less after I’ve seen the movie, when I seek confirmation—as before, when I seek guidance. And I do like seeing movies about schools and teachers, because I need to know what ‘they’ are thinking about us. And so I would like to say two, maybe three things about the film.
One: I very much enjoyed Freedom Writers. Because it says about teaching what I have learned about the profession in my thirty five years engaged in it, and specifically over the past several years as I have, in my writing, come more and more to articulate the position: to teach is to assume an ethical position in an immoral world. To teach is to be a prophet in a degraded world. To teach is to not suffer silently, but to suffer nonetheless. To teach is to change the world paper by paper. Erin Gruwell was a wonderful teacher—I am not certain what she does presently, though the film suggested that she works now at California State University—because she was concerned with the lives of the children now, rather than their future lives which might never occur. Without ignoring the world outside the classroom, she attempted to create a safe-place within it, and to offer her adolescents robbed of their adolescence, some place of relative peace to make some sense of their lives outside this artificial and temporary haven. In this impossible situation, she did not change the world, but she did manage to affect not a few of her students. It is their writings (and lives) which inspired this film. I wonder then, if she ought to be less the focus—though she is the hero, she is not alone in her heroism. Her complexities are too known, and those of her students less revealed, perhaps. She is too often in the center of the screen image. And though her students are not flat stereotypes, they are less than full characters.
Two: Though the film suggested that Erin Gruwell was a wonderful teacher—depicted her as a incredibly effective, life-changing teacher, in all the best senses of that term—it was quite clear that there was nothing we could teach in our schools of education which could prepare our students to practice as did Ms. Gruwell. That is, how she was trained to be a teacher was never raised in the film as an issue: it was her own personality and particular circumstances in the classroom that made her a great teacher, defying the system as she did. That system must include her teacher education. But some of us in higher education (what ever that is) know that there is indeed, something we can do to prepare more Ms. Gruwells. But this curriculum will not sit well with neither administrators nor politicians. It may do for ‘the unteachables,’ but it will not do for those who are certainly college bound.
However, it is clear to me that if we do not do change our educational focus for preservice teachers, we will perpetuate the world the Ms. Gruwells of this world must defy. So, though the film will make a great deal of money, and columns will be written about the courage of such teachers, in fact, there is nothing in our society in place to support either the Ms Gruwells of this world or the educational structures which could produce more like her.
Three: For $27,000.00 salary, no one should have to forgo her life for so much effort and so little respect. The absolute nerve of a society to pay so little to those who care so well for their children.
I sense my anger rising. I’m going to stop now.
So this evening I stepped out and went with my daughter to see Freedom Writers tonight. It is the new movie with Hilary Swank, who plays a dedicated new teacher in a “voluntarily integrated school” which became (especially after the Rodney King fiasco) an “involuntarily segregated school.” This will not be a movie review. I hate reading reviews—no less after I’ve seen the movie, when I seek confirmation—as before, when I seek guidance. And I do like seeing movies about schools and teachers, because I need to know what ‘they’ are thinking about us. And so I would like to say two, maybe three things about the film.
One: I very much enjoyed Freedom Writers. Because it says about teaching what I have learned about the profession in my thirty five years engaged in it, and specifically over the past several years as I have, in my writing, come more and more to articulate the position: to teach is to assume an ethical position in an immoral world. To teach is to be a prophet in a degraded world. To teach is to not suffer silently, but to suffer nonetheless. To teach is to change the world paper by paper. Erin Gruwell was a wonderful teacher—I am not certain what she does presently, though the film suggested that she works now at California State University—because she was concerned with the lives of the children now, rather than their future lives which might never occur. Without ignoring the world outside the classroom, she attempted to create a safe-place within it, and to offer her adolescents robbed of their adolescence, some place of relative peace to make some sense of their lives outside this artificial and temporary haven. In this impossible situation, she did not change the world, but she did manage to affect not a few of her students. It is their writings (and lives) which inspired this film. I wonder then, if she ought to be less the focus—though she is the hero, she is not alone in her heroism. Her complexities are too known, and those of her students less revealed, perhaps. She is too often in the center of the screen image. And though her students are not flat stereotypes, they are less than full characters.
Two: Though the film suggested that Erin Gruwell was a wonderful teacher—depicted her as a incredibly effective, life-changing teacher, in all the best senses of that term—it was quite clear that there was nothing we could teach in our schools of education which could prepare our students to practice as did Ms. Gruwell. That is, how she was trained to be a teacher was never raised in the film as an issue: it was her own personality and particular circumstances in the classroom that made her a great teacher, defying the system as she did. That system must include her teacher education. But some of us in higher education (what ever that is) know that there is indeed, something we can do to prepare more Ms. Gruwells. But this curriculum will not sit well with neither administrators nor politicians. It may do for ‘the unteachables,’ but it will not do for those who are certainly college bound.
However, it is clear to me that if we do not do change our educational focus for preservice teachers, we will perpetuate the world the Ms. Gruwells of this world must defy. So, though the film will make a great deal of money, and columns will be written about the courage of such teachers, in fact, there is nothing in our society in place to support either the Ms Gruwells of this world or the educational structures which could produce more like her.
Three: For $27,000.00 salary, no one should have to forgo her life for so much effort and so little respect. The absolute nerve of a society to pay so little to those who care so well for their children.
I sense my anger rising. I’m going to stop now.
posted by Alan A. Block at 8:07 AM
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