Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Inspiration By Proxy

A teacher friend across the hall is having a hard year personally. She's a generous, loving, great teacher most of the time but she's fallen into the movie trap, teaching-wise.

Now, let's say she teaches Farsi. If the movies she showed were all in Farsi or perhaps showed Arabic culture, she'd be golden. But they're not. She's gone to all the fluffy, inspirational movies about teachers. It's a bad genre for the purpose of watching but it's worse for her purpose, inspiring schoolkids.

This isn't to say that those movies can't inspire kids, but is anyone catching the irony? Do all those inspirational teachers in movies show any movies? I like to imagine here of a movie of a teacher showing a movie of a teacher showing a movie...

Doesn't happen. I wonder if this highlights both my colleague's shortcomings and the fictional nature of these movies.

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