Homework 49

I think that the film produced in class was a little unclear. Without enough time to flesh out the scenes, something gets lost in the translation. Being the writer, I feel like I should clarify what was the intention of the film, what the message was meant to be. We have the super-teacher, Mr. C, who manages to relate to students enough to keep them mostly placid. This comes at a great personal cost, however, as we see that his lessons are largely lost on the class. Something not shown in the film is the teacher's personal life, where he is fairly happy and normal, spending much time with his girlfriend and being generally very social and well-rounded. The death of his girlfriend was meant to push the teacher over the edge, showing the watcher his immanent mortality, and demonstrating the frailty of human spirit when brought to a life-altering reality.

The teacher's in-class breakdown shows the blending of personal and professional elements, where something that is socially rejected publicly but emphasized privately becomes a public affair. Kids who were once rowdy and hard to control become timid, unsure. The change in dynamic between the struggling class powers isn't something that the students are used to, and so they find it difficult to come to terms with. Even the wise-cracking teenage 'rebel' is at a loss for words when the teacher begins his rant, decimating the students one by one.

In comparison to films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous minds, where teachers win over the hearts of even the most unruly students in order to teach them and help them rise above their intellectual ditch, this film takes an entirely different approach, where the teacher is initially a good teacher who relates to the students but eventually is forced to acknowledge what he believes to be a hopeless situation. This film is more like Hamlet 2, though with much less tongue-in-cheek dialogue and without the happy ending. The teacher in Hamlet 2 has his wife leave him and his hopes largely dashed by fate, but instead of Mr. C from "The Teacher" who became deeply depressed and turned to alcoholism, he went on to direct the play to major success.

The film we prepared in class made a point to mock the concept of an all-knowing super teacher by making the teacher human, with all the human problems and things that go with it.