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Popular Culture Review
hop artist Tupac Shakur. The well-intentioned but lame effort reveals how the
students really feel about her and being in school.
A student named Eva, who soon admits that she hates Gruwell merely
because she’s white, shouts, “You don’t know nothing. You got us in here
teaching us this grammar shit, and then we got to go out there again.. .. What
are you doing in here that makes a goddamn difference in my life?” A black
student also criticizes her. “You don’t know nothing, home girl.” When she asks
him to explain things to her, he replies angrily, “1 ain’t explaining shit to you.”
Eventually he tells her to “stop acting like you’re trying to understand our
situation and do your little baby-sitting up there.”
Despite their students’ family circumstances, educational deficits, and
negative attitudes toward education, these teachers are able to motivate their
students to perform beyond all reasonable expectations. Clark’s students turn out
to be the best in the school. Escalante’s students do so well on the AP calculus
exam that ETS accuses them of cheating, but they are vindicated when they
duplicate their performance. Johnson’s students learn to analyze college-level
poetry intelligently and perceptively. Gruwell’s students become her family and
end up writing the book that was the basis for the film.
The teachers in these movies are able to succeed where others fail because
they understand something about the students that the administrators and
unsuccessful teachers fail to understand: the bad attitudes and the resistance to
learning these attitudes generate are not the consequence of their socioeconomic
status but of attending schools where they are not respected by the faculty or
administrators.
Clark’s principal is part of the problem. He refers to his new teacher’s
students as the “bottom of the barrel,” and at one point Clark insists to his
principal: “All they want is your respect.” A vice principal at Escalante’s school
also refers to the students as “little bastards,” and the math department chair
calls them “illiterates.” The principal at Johnson’s school, judging by his
insistence on students’ absolute conformity to the most minor of rules, thinks of
them almost as cattle. Gruwell’s department chair, a Mrs. Campbell, seems to
think of the school’s minority students as dogs. “The best you can do [as a
teacher],” she tells Gruwell, “is try to get them to obey, to learn discipline. That
would be a tremendous accomplishment for them.”
It is because of this lack of respect that faculty and administrators do not
attribute ability or potential to students, and thus they expect little or nothing
from them. The math students at Escalante’s school are behind other high
schools in math because the administration accepts the math department chair’s
opinion that it is in the students’ best interest NOT to teach them higher level
math: “Our kids can’t handle calculus,” she says. “Students will rise to the level
of expectations,” Escalante counters. “What if they try and fail?” she worries,
adding “You’ll shatter whatever self-confidence they have. And these aren’t the
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