Cinema and the Teacher- Hollywood

These are movies which attempt to portray the effervescent chemistry between teacher and student, and perhaps contain the answer to the question- Why, in this world, are very very few people actually worthy of being called "Teacher", while the larger lot will forever be relegated to the titles of "sir/ ma'am/ professor/Dr etc".

These are examples from Hollywood.

To Sir, With Love: (1967 Sidney Poitier) The story follows a black man named Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier), a jobless engineering graduate. He ends up taking on a temporary job as a teacher in a rough part of east London. The school he starts working at is known for having lawless classrooms where the kids disobey the teachers and do their own thing.

He immediately lays down the code of conduct in his classroom but when the regular methods of instruction in literature and poetry fail due to lack of intreset by students, he decides to teach them about the value of being educated and thus cultured in manner and conduct.

This earns him the respect of students and skeptical colleagues alike. The ladies in the classroom go from "sluts", in his own words, to proper ladies, and the men go from ruffians to gentlemen. The transformation is quite impressive and inspires his school to believe that there actually is potential in these lower class students.Suddenly, he finds a job with an engineering firm and is faced with a difficult decision. Should he abandon his respectable teaching profession for a higher-paying job as an engineer? Or should he continue reforming the youth that appear to be corrupted beyond repair?

This is one of Sidney Poitier's best roles.

Other movies that walk this way include:

Mona Lisa Smile ( 2003 Julia Roberts)- as an Art teacher in a Women's College in the 1950's, who questions and awakens the possibilities that lie before them, and there is more to LIVING than "conforming to society" and "conforming to life as usual".
During the first day in class the students taunt and humiliate her by showing off that they already have mastered the contents of the entire textbook. They sense she is a challenge to their conventional values and seek to dominate her on her own subject.

She challenges the students by presenting them with Modern Art and asking them to think for themselves instead of spouting what they have read in the textbooks. The students respond to the challenge and lose their arrogant hostility.

She records the highest advance enrolment for the next academic year, and simultaneously gets an offer for a longer contract from the college if she curbs her initiatives towards empowering the mind. The most memorable scenes in the movie are the one with the newspaper clips of the "the modern housewife" and the last scene where she discovers that the whole class had been quietly following her on bicycles as she drove away from college after her last lecture.It signifies that she has been successful in delivering her message and the attitudes she has germinated will continue, even in her absence.

Dead Poets' Society (1989 Robin Williams)- Williams plays an English Literature professor, whose unorthodox methods of inquiry into the very notions of how things are done and why should they so, earns a fan following within his class, once the blinkers are off. The internal rivalry among students and crossing of ideologies with the Principal, sees him being kicked out. Incidentally a Hindi movie, Mohabatein with ShahRukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan, is based on this screenplay.

Finding Forrester (2000 Sean Connery)- Connery plays the epynomous role of William Forrester- author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. He becomes a recluse after that for decades until tracked down by an Afro-American school kid Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), aspiring to a future as a writer.

The theme of the movie- a writer in his last days mentoring a writer in his formative days about the need to challenge one's beliefs forms the setting for a rivetting series of crisp dialogue interludes as each one challenges and changes the other's notion.

"That...young man... is not exactly a soup question" - a dialogue that has struck to one's head. :)