Top Five Teaching Movies:

Note that I've left obvious choices off this list. Movies like Dead Poets Society, Good-bye Mr. Chips, Mr. Holland's Opus and Stand and Deliver are moving and champions of the cinema. The trouble is, they're not quite as earthy as the typical classroom today (not, at least, as I see it). To me one of the supreme tests of life is to be able to go out there and give it all your got without the thought of an assembly in your honor some day, or a roomful of students applauding you and kissing your ass when you walk in the door. Give me a job like that and fuck the movie. The world has enough obvious champions. For once, let's celebrate the uncelebrated.

5) 187, 1997. Samuel L. Jackson.

Sure it's crap, in a sense. It's a teacher's wet dream: You know those bastards giving me trouble in my Chemisty I class? If I cut off their fingers, they'll shape up. And yet, when I watched it (and I plan to watch it again some day soon), I couldn't help but notice some part of my Id had been tapped. No, I would never think of such a thing, and even if I did, the sight of so much blood would probably make me sick. Yet don't we all squirm in embarassed pleasure at the honest suffering and misfortunes of an utter turd? Or does manufactured moral indignation subvert the baser nature that is humankind?

At the very least, Jackson is convincing, and gives some blistering yet effectively short monologues to his problem students. "This classroom is a sanctuary...yours and mine. Repect it," he warns one punk. Then, leaning in close for the kill with his patented Sam Jackson stare: "And for your information...I am a real teacher."

Until he started doing his vigilante bit, I thought the character was a good role model. Which is why he's on the list. Really.

4) High School High, 1996. Jon Lovitz, Tia Carrera.

Unrealistic? Only to a point, baby. The function of hyperbolic satire, as I see it, is to both make us laugh and put everything into perspective. Trouble is, that presupposes something to be put into perspective in the first place. When Lovitz's car is stolen, his new friend Carerra consoles him: "Don't worry about it. Everybody has their car stolen on the first day." Funny, yes, but it also hits home. You don't believe me, check out stats on teacher burglaries in city schools. It doesn't have to be a car. The watch you got for graduation which you left on your desk for all of ten seconds is bad enough.

3) The Blackboard Jungle, 1955. Glenn Ford, Ann Francis, Vic Morrow, Sidney Poiter.

Sure, they may have bastardized Hunter's book. In the original text, the moral of the story seems to be "keep on trying." Dadier has to contend with unruly classes (though Hunter wisely concentrated on one of them in his exposition), but by the end of the book, he's only managed to reach one of them. Still, that's enough, and rather than stop at telling us this, Hunter shows us as, in the closing page of the novel, we learn that "he (Dadier) was not sorry when the bell rang, sending them back to class (after lunch)." Words to live by. I kept them in mind myself.

Not so the movie. In it, Dadier (Ford) fights his class and weakly refutes his self-appointed mentor's proclamation that "this school is a garbage can." He fights the good fight, just like he does in the novel. Only by the end of the movie, pretty much the entire student body has realized the value of a good education, and his mentor is congratulating him. Point missed entirely, Mr. Brooks (director/screenwriter). It's about doing your job even when you can't see the benefits entirely. Tell me you didn't do that to The Brothers Karamazov.

2) The Principal, 1987. James Belushi, Louis Gosset Jr.

It's Eighties claptrap, for the most part, but one reason I always liked it is that Belushi doesn't try to be an action star per se. Yeah, he carries a baseball bat like it was Mel Gibson's sword in Braveheart, and he even rides a motorcycle through the halls of the school to prevent a rape, but it always seemed subtle to me for some reason. (Maybe because he forgot to suck in his gut in a few places.) Belushi tries, instead, to be an incompetent yet dedicated administrator, newly-appointed, whose primary motivation and most endearing trait is that he actually gives a damn. And it works, at least, enough so that, when being stalked by gangbangers towards the end, you're actually hoping the guy will get away.

1) Teachers, 1984. Nick Nolte, Jud Hirsch.

Great dark comedy--the biggest problem Kennedy High has in this movie is the teachers themselves. Those who aren't apathetic and tardy are dead (literally), mental patients (literally) or paranoid (figuratively). The main plot is supposed to be about a lawsuit that's shaking the staff up, but some of the politics are a bit unbelievable. The humor, however, certainly is. Opening shot: Nick Nolte's hand searching for the phone, knocking over beer bottles and cigarette butts, answers, only to be asked in a perfect edge of sarcasm, if he's going to come in this Monday morning, "or is this going to be one of your famous three-day weekends." "Yeah," Nolte growls, "I'll be there." "Oh, that's so wonderful," the secretary responds. "It's such a pleasure to have ambitious and hardworking role models here for our students to--"

I trotted this movie into the office one Finals week, and Rich watched that scene with me. "Funny," he told me bemusedly. "That reminds me of you."