Heroic Teachers
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being late one too many times. The student had taken his grandmother to the
hospital. The student’s grandmother is with him, and the two are invited to stay
for Christmas dinner.
Like Clark, Escalante is willing to sacrifice himself to help students. He
drives himself so hard that two weeks before the students are to take the AP
exam, he has a heart attack. Despite the fact the doctor orders “no job-related
activity for at least a month,” he’s back in class two days later. Gmwell takes
two part-time jobs so that she can purchase materials and activities her Long
Beach district won’t pay for, and her commitment ends up costing her her
marriage. Through their total devotion to the needs of the students, these selfsacrificing teachers are able to convince the students that they really do care, and
this is all it takes to change their attitudes and motivate them to learn.
If these movies only entertained their audiences, there would be no problem
with them, but the danger is that they do more: they offer a “rhetorical vision,”
which critics define as “a view of how things have been, are, or will be that
structure^] our sense of reality in areas that we cannot experience directly, but
can only know by symbolic reproduction.”3 Steven R. Thomsen reminds us that
the repetition of negative messages about teachers and teaching in the mass
media contributes to or reinforces “what people believe is actually true
regarding teachers and the profession.”4 If cinematic images can contribute to or
reinforce negative images, it can just as easily contribute and reinforce positive
ones, however unrealistic. And it is hard to believe that the rhetorical vision
offered by these films is not enhanced by viewers’ knowledge that the
experiences of real teachers are being portrayed on the screen.
The rhetorical vision of “teacher-as-savior” offered by these films is
comforting and inspiring, but it is also dangerous because these films attribute
the perceived poor quality of education offered by America’s schools solely to
the teachers. They suggest that whether or not a student learns is entirely up to
the teacher, which ignores that fact that a teacher cannot teach anything; the
student has to learn it, and little can be done by the teacher for the student who
flat refuses to do so. Teachers cannot, except perhaps in rare cases, make those
obstacles to learning created by poverty, family problems, gang violence and
street influences vanish. Teachers cannot routinely undo the psychological
damage done by prolonged exposure to unqualified or under-qualified teachers.
Teachers cannot make the obstacles to learning created by inadequate funding,
large class sizes, poor political and pedagogical leadership disappear through the
sole act of caring.
But the rhetorical vision of these films urges viewers to believe that
teachers can overcome any and all obstacles to learning—if they just care
enough about their students, and convince those students that they are worth
caring about. What America’s education system really needs, this rhetorical
vision argues, is not more money for schools, not smaller class sizes, and not
higher teacher salaries; it is not more parents participating in their children’s