Teach me

Not So Hot for Teacher

Illustration by Tom Gauld

By ELIZABETH ALSOP

Published: September 14, 2012

In his State of the Union address in 2011, President Obama made a point of applauding the nation’s teachers and exhorted Americans to do the same. “In South Korea,” Obama reminded us, “teachers are known as ‘nation builders.’ . . . It’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect.”

Out in TV land, however, we’ve been receiving a different message. In the past few years, viewers saw teachers turning tricks (“Hung”), dealing drugs (“Breaking Bad”) and taunting overweight students (“The Big C”). All, of course, while not teaching. In the opening episode of “The Big C,” a student in Cathy Jamison’s summer-school course asks, “Are you going to teach us anything today?”

“Have I ever taught you anything, really?” Jamison counters, before queuing up a DVD and returning to her online shopping.

On the first season of HBO’s “Eastbound and Down,” the baseball has-been Kenny Powers lands the one job seemingly available to a self-delusional drug enthusiast: substitute gym-teaching. In a typical scene, Powers arrives at a school dance high on Ecstasy, treats his ex-girlfriend and the assembled student body to a sexually explicit dance, then passes out in his own vomit on the auditorium floor.

So what, exactly, is the message here? That teaching gives you ample time for unsavory extracurricular activities? That it is no longer just the career of choice for the lazy or low-achieving, as the cliché goes, but also for the lawbreaker? That it is just a matter of time before Dexter trades forensic police work for a gig teaching human anatomy?

It’s not that these shows aren’t wonderful — wonderfully complex, wonderfully rich, wonderfully funny. But look closely, and you’ll find they all, to some extent, use the teaching profession as a shorthand for a character’s dysfunction or even cosmic disenfranchisement. It’s no coincidence that anyone teaching on television these days tends to be broke (Ray Drecker on “Hung”) or sick (Walter White on “Breaking Bad”) or both. No one, these shows imply, would teach because she wants to, because she likes it or is good at it. Despite the lip service regularly and dutifully paid to the profession, within the lexicon of contemporary visual culture, it seems clear that it remains a career of last resort.

This trend is especially surprising given that Hollywood has historically been very nice to teachers — maybe too nice. Consider the catalog of teaching films, from the respectable (“Stand and Deliver,” “To Sir, With Love”) to the risible (“Dangerous Minds,” “Mr. Holland’s Opus”), and you find they all share an ambition: to beatify teachers. It’s a (too) familiar type; as the critic Philip French points out, these teachers are presented as “triumphalist Hollywood heroes who inspire a class of unruly Hispanic math pupils . . . or persuad[e] a generation of special students to worship dead poets.”

More recently, we’ve seen less reverential takes on the inspirational-teacher trope: comedies like “School of Rock” or “Bad Teacher,” whose protagonists are pretty much precluded by the rules of the genre from being competent, even as they end up being, at times, inadvertently inspiring. Even the crack-addled instructor played by Ryan Gosling in “Half Nelson” manages to triumph.

These divergent trends — the teacher as psycho; the teacher as saint — only confirm what the film scholar Dana Polan called the “problem of the pedagogue’s embodiment”: the difficulty we have “imagining the teacher as a real person,” rather than as an icon, an authority figure or a bad joke.

At the same time, there is something unsettling about the coexistence in our cultural imagination of two such widespread yet incompatible extremes. Our own experiences, after all, should give us some insight into real-world teachers — so shouldn’t there be some middle ground between gifted teachers and laughable ones? Between standing and delivering and breaking bad?

You could argue that in pop culture, all professions are subject to this treatment: lawyers are charlatans, except when they’re crusaders for social justice; doctors are heroes, but also arrogant and self-destructive; cops are corrupt, unless they’re upstanding and salt of the earth.

But the thing is that, in pop culture, there are so many lawyers, cops and doctors — many more than teachers, and these portrayals benefit from quantity as much as quality.

Portrayals of teachers are more rare, despite the fact that teaching, much more so than policing or lawyering or doctoring, is a job we all, theoretically, have had years of experience observing firsthand. A long-running recruitment campaign for the New York City Teaching Fellows program capitalizes on this very fact. “You remember your first-grade teacher’s name,” the ads read. “Who will remember yours?” Teaching, we seem to agree, demands universal respect. But actual teachers? Not so much.

I am hardly the first person to notice that teachers have a public-relations problem. Since 2010, when Robert Kolker concluded in New York magazine that there “may be no more vilified profession in our culture these days than teachers,” a flurry of articles on the subject has appeared in print. Last year, Dave Eggers co-wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times that condemned the scapegoating of teachers, while Ellen Galinsky began her encomium to a former teacher in The Huffington Post by remarking on the contrast between this single act of “celebration” and the “typical portrayal of teachers in the media.”

More recently, in honor of National Teacher Appreciation Week, the Times columnist Charles M. Blow wondered why it is that teachers should “be demonized so much.” And just a few weeks ago, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey proved how reliable a target of opprobrium public educators may be, when he took a shot at teachers’ unions during his speech at the Republican National Convention.

Yet the issue isn’t only that, as one recent caller to Brian Lehrer’s show on WNYC put it, “we’ve given the best of our students the idea that teaching is the worst of all possible professions.” It’s that many of us aren’t being given any more nuanced an “idea.” Put another way, the fact that we see teachers in such extreme terms — as angelically good, as horrifyingly bad — may in fact be an indication that we don’t see them at all.

Pop culture has provided us with plenty of memorable representations of school, especially high school, an institution that, canonical narratives of American adolescence tell us, is something not to be enjoyed but merely to be survived. (Or not: see “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”) There may be no more fertile ground for teenage anxiety in American movies than the halls of the local high school. But in the school-centric teenage comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, teachers themselves are generally ancillary to the drama; far from noble pedagogues, they are bumblers and buffoons. (Perhaps no better represented than in the impotent echo: “Bueller? Bueller?”)

The real attacks in these films are aimed at the institution, not its teachers, who mostly come off as patsies: symbols of some larger adult order of orthodoxy and the willing progenitors of hapless squaredom.

In retrospect, it seems clear that such portrayals of teachers, however lighthearted, might cumulatively have had more lasting effects; that yesterday’s Ed Rooney, slopping through the mud on the hunt for Ferris Bueller, blazed a trail for today’s Walter White, peddling meth. By downgrading the teacher from saint to character to caricature, high-school films of the John Hughes variety heralded teachers’ loss of cultural prestige: hastening their slide down the rungs of respectability from dignified to doltish to outright dysfunctional.

Once teachers were turned into objects of fun, it was apparently not hard to devolve them still further — to make them menaces, instead of merely dim bulbs. Along the way, they stopped being recognizable as teachers. As a result, viewers are now all too familiar with certain tropes of teaching yet all but unacquainted with anything like the real thing.

What’s strange is that, while we’ve seen a lot of teachers, we still see very little teaching. It’s the one profession in pop culture in which the practitioners rarely get to practice. Imagine “Law and Order” without the litigation or “ER” without the diagnoses. Then you can appreciate how weird it is when even programs about education, like David E. Kelley’s “Boston Public,” show relatively little actual educating taking place.

Even the recent wave of education-related documentaries (“Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” “The Lottery,” “The Cartel” and, to a lesser extent, “American Teacher”) all spend more time talking about schools than documenting them; more time discussing teachers than observing them. By contrast, there have been several Francophone films, including Nicolas Philibert’s “To Be and to Have,” a documentary about a one-room schoolhouse, and “The Class,” Laurent Cantet’s fictionalized portrayal of a Parisian lycée, that unfold almost entirely within the classroom. Teachers teaching: it seems almost a radical approach. Here in the United States, the lone example that comes to mind is the fourth season of “The Wire,” much of which followed Roland Pryzbylewski, a former cop, through his first year as a middle-school math teacher. What is most remarkable about Mr. Prezbo (as the students call him) is that, like Monsieur Marin, the instructor in “The Class,” or like the protagonist of the 2011 film “Monsieur Lazhar,” Prezbo is both likable and fallible; he does right and means well but also makes mistakes.

Which brings us to one of the more surprising recent entries in the annals of teacher narrative: Tony Danza’s A&E reality show, “Teach,” and his accompanying book, both of which chronicle his attempt at teaching 10th-grade English. Danza’s book has a notable title: “I’d Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High.” This seems to signal an encouraging development: an attempt to understand firsthand what teaching entails, before presuming to say anything about it. He’s not the first celebrity to evince such humility. During an interview last year, Matt Damon rebuked a cameraman and a journalist for their casual bigotry toward teachers, a demographic that includes Damon’s mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige. One version of the footage, that has been removed from YouTube, received about two million views and 8,000 comments.

BONUS FEATURE: Six Fictional Teachers You Would Actually Want

1. Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier, ‘‘To Sir, With Love’’): How many teachers have inspired a theme song? Not to mention one as good as Lulu’s?

2. Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell, ‘‘Battlestar Galactica’’): We may never see the former teacher and secretary of education Roslin in the classroom, but as President of the 12 Colonies, she does manage to save humankind.

3. François Marin (François Bégaudeau, ‘‘The Class’’): He makes mistakes, but Marin’s high expectations for himself and his students make him as dedicated a pedagogue as any we’ve seen on screen.

4. Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith, ‘‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’’): Though Maggie Smith has described the character as ‘‘Miss Jean Brodie in a wizard’s hat,’’ her influence seems noticeably more benign; as the transfigurations instructor, she is deeply committed to her students, despite her strict exterior.

5. (Tied) Eric Taylor and Tami Taylor (Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, ‘‘Friday Night Lights’’): O.K., neither of them is a classroom teacher, but Coach Taylor has got to be one of the best pep-talkers on television. And Tami, the guidance counselor, steers the troubled Tyra into college. A husband-and-wife superduo of mentoring.