Have you ever noticed how all those movies about amazing life changing teachers are always stories about people who buck the system? Why can’t I be one of those people? Now, granted most of those films have been time compressed, so that what you get to taste in your living room is usually the result of work done by an individual over several years, such as Jaime Escalante, a man who taught inner city rejects how to do college level math–his program was developed over about ten years. The teacher in Dangerous Minds has also had a long and arduous career in education learning how reach her inner city students. The latest film out, Freedom Writers, looks to be of the same nature as its predecessors, though set on the west coast this time. And there are so many others, all with one thing in common: they truly teach by bucking the system.
As a fairly inexperienced teacher driven by test scores and “No Child Left Behind” legislation, I am frustrated that I can’t be one of those “buck the system” types. I believe that the irony of these films, based on the True success stories of teachers throughout history, is the key to real learning. Many of these films have inspired my pursuit, and others, of a place in the field, and yet in reality the pressures to conform to a curriculum that pushes students through leaving an almost one room schoolhouse feel in every classroom–except that each student is roughly the same age chronologically, is nothing short of death to the true teacher.
And it seems that on top of all this bucking the system is the sense that these methods are most successful in the inner city. How does one effectively and truly teach the students in between. The county school systems, where students are from the farm, to students from small city low-income housing areas, and everyone in between, are all in one room.
I daily witness the same hateful prejudice, which permeates the schools of the inner city. But there are so many forms, so many guises which this intangible thing takes on. It appears that the most recent teacher to come to the silver screen discovered that this was the issue she had to first address, before any standard curriculum could be learned by her students. I wish that I could buck the system somehow. That I could confront my students with their petty and unreasonable hate for one another. But I am stuck presenting boring information to an apathetic group of beings who would choose not to be there if they could. How do I buck the system safely, acceptably, in a way that will not shake or ruffle the person who could have me fired?
I want to. But I don’t think I can.