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Populär Culture Review
education seriously, so they have essentially the same plot structure as
the others. But there is one significant difference: these films are
intended to point up problems in Am erica’s schools, an intent that has
motivated them from the beginning. But they go fiirther. Between 1955
and 1990, they begin to redefine just what a good English teacher is.
The beginning o f this shift registers in the first two films about
the challenges faced by high school English teachers, The Blackboard
Jungle and Up the Down Staircase. Up the Down Staircase teils the story
o f Sylvia Barrett, who also teaches in a New York City high school. This
film seems to address the problem o f high school dropouts, and she, like
Dadier, works to motivate her students, a generally amiable but
unfocused group o f teens who have little interest in English d a ss and
haven’t benefited much from their education so far. The teaching o f
Dadier and Barrett seems to reflect the pedagogy o f their day, for they
believe they can best help their students by improving their basic English
language skills. Because their mission is traditional, their curricula are
traditional; they focus on basic language proficiencies. Dadier tries to
help his students leam correct usage, correct pronunciation, and
understand the abbreviations in classified ads. On her first day o f dass,
Miss Barrett intends to give a little inspirational speech on first
impressions, and from that she hopes to “make a good case for diction,
correct usage and self-expression.”
As new teachers facing classrooms full o f under-achievers, they
both face the same problem: getting the students interested enough in the
lessons to improve their language competence, and the films focus on
their struggles to engage students. Dadier is ultimately successful when,
in a lesson intended to inspire his students to do their own thinking, he
shows a cartoon Version o f Jack and the Beanstalk. Because they so
often feel misunderstood, his students see the giant as also
misunderstood and reinterpret the story to cast the giant as a sympathetic
character and Jack as a criminal. The lesson excites his students, and he
uses their interpretation to make a point about the dangers o f not thinking
for themselves. As one cynical colleague notes, Dadier “got through” to
them. Miss Barrett gets through to her students in a lesson on Charles
Dickens’ A Tale o f Two Cities. In her introduction to the novel, Barrett
triggers a spirited d a ss discussion when she gets the students to apply
Dickens’s opening line, “It was the best o f times, it was the worst o f
times,” to their own time, which they do in such a spirited way that a
vice-principal bursts into the room and demands to know why she
allowed her dass to behave in such an “unruly fashion” in front o f the