Based on a True Story

Stand and Deliver. Freedom Writers. The Ron Clark Story.
What do these have in common?
They are the typical "inspirational teacher makes inner city kids love learning" based-on-a-true-story movies. They’re pretty good, actually, even though they all seem similar. There are a couple of problems, though.
The first one is minor: producers think they can get away with "inspirational teacher" not-based-on-a-true-story movies. This is not so. Example: Take the Lead, about a dance instructor teaching kids in detention. Kids in detention should not be learning to waltz; they should be cleaning gum off the undersides of desks. And companies should most certainly not finance an "inspirational teacher" movie that is not based on a true story. It bastardizes the subgenre and makes it cheaper, especially when it’s a bad movie in its own right.
The second problem, however, is much, much worse. It could threaten the world as we know it and change the way the future plays out.
It’s giving our teachers ideas.
Not on how to run the classroom, but that any teacher, in any classroom setting, can be the influential teacher who totally changes kids forced to go to school into kids with a desire to learn. Unfortunately, this isn’t so. These are all inner-city kids in the movies, even in the fake ones. They are not middle class suburban kids whose parents have college degrees and took them to Mommy and Me swim classes and coached their soccer teams.
Worse, it takes a truly slow teacher to think it is the G.T. kids (for teachers who teach G.T. classes are the only kind with whom I have much experience: gym teachers don’t count as much of anything) who need inspiring and saving from dangerous lives as gangsters or dead-end jobs flipping burgers. And if a teacher is that slow, he or she has no business teaching even regular kids, never mind inspiring under-achievers to reach for the top.
They also don’t look behind the scenes of those movies. Two hours is not enough time to cram all the actual teaching the inspirational teachers do, and therefore they can only catch some of the character development tricks they pull. Because those teachers actually do teach, and not only do they teach, they teach completely and don’t expect their students to be able to use telepathy. But more on extra-sensory perception and related topics later.
However, certain teachers do not seem to realize that actual teaching occurs, and seem to believe that their job is to teach kids to think about the world around them and to figure things out for themselves. It partially is a teacher’s job to do this, but there are some things a teacher should just tell students. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, after all.
Take, for example, a certain teacher, whom we shall call Mr. Spock. Mr. Spock tries to sound inspiring, as though each little tidbit of information reveals the meaning of life. He tries to make us think, by giving a general overview on topics and then testing us on the specifics of topics mildly related to what he taught. When we all perform poorly on that test, he assumes we must not be taking notes well enough, and forces us to take notes in an awkward, too-regulated style, and then grades us on how well we adhere to a note-taking system that may or may not work for each individual student. Even if a parent attempts to complain about his lack-of-teaching methods, he explains that if we do not understand something, we can ask him questions for clarification. When we bombard him with questions on difficult subjects so we can try to understand the concepts involved, he dances around them, saying we should already know or we’ll get to it later (and then we never cover it, naturally) or simply asks the question back in another form, to get us to "think" as opposed to parroting, I’m sure. He may or may not have his subject mastered; we have no idea because he does not teach it. He does, however indicate that he has no basic command over the English language and attempts to provoke intelligent thoughts with ungrammatically-phrased questions. How anyone can take him seriously, I have no idea. I also have no one to ask, because no one has ever taken him seriously.
This half-formed teaching style frustrates students. We cannot learn the material, and therefore those of us who normally would have been gung-ho about the subject, possibly pursuing it as a career, end up disliking the subject and not ling up to our full potential. Getting us to live up to our full potential is, of course, Mr. Spock’s goal. I love irony, but I would love this case of it a lot more if I didn’t get full points for informing my wannabe-great teacher that getting hit by lightning gives you superpowers. Because even though he wants to be immortalized in a movie for getting a bunch of suburban kids to get all hyped up about learning, he doesn’t want to work for it. Those teachers in the movies, on the other hand, work five billion hours of overtime and go overboard to help their students. Letting us stay after school to take a missed test does not count as overboard.
Those inspirational movies should seriously come with a disclaimer along the lines of “This is a condensed version of the entire story. Please do further research on the featured teacher before attempting to emulate his or her methods.” It would save loads of us loads of frustration and would save loads of teachers loads of uselessness and general dislike in their direction. Those teachers who would have been inspiring anyway still will be, and we won’t be saddled with someone who says, “All objects accelerate due to gravity at the same rate, no matter what their masses,” as though announcing the date of the Second Coming. It’s a win-win situation.

Thought for the day: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Especially if you have good aim.

Signed,
Two of Wands

For Better or for Worse

It's nearing time again. Yeah, there are still five or six weeks left, but it still seems like everything is drawing to a close. The sun is bright and hot, burning up these last few weeks quickly in what will be a barrage of projects and tests as our teachers try to cram in fifty more grades in before the quarter ends. And through it all, we'll have five million more important tests, like the AP exams this week, and the state exams (one of which I get to take twice). And finally, we'll have finals, and that last day... The most bittersweet day of the year, because when you're not trying to pull formulas and words and crap from the deepest crevices of your brain, you're remembering that nothing will ever be the same.
Because even though you'll see most of these people in a few months, they'll have changed, and you'll have changed. Things that could have happened when we were all how we are will never happen, and we'll continue through life, discarding the possibilities of who we are in favor of the possibilities of who we might be.
I know far better than some that change happens, for the better or for the worse, and usually I can accept it, embrace it, even. But the last day of school has always been the hardest change for me to take.
It makes no sense, because I've never seen the world through rose-colored glasses- I'm the cynical outsider who always unintentionally sees flaws. But somehow, on that last day, I look back on the past year, and all I remember is the fun I had, the people I got to know- and somehow I forget the times I wished wildly for the place to burn down, because the people in it were so crappy.
Perhaps it's the depressing music to which I'm currently listening, or the fear of boredom, but thinking of the coming summer grips my heart and squeezes, allowing the lesser stages of a panic attack enter.
How is it that every summer I forget how, last winter, I always longed for summer? For a time with no school projects, no overwrought schedules, no bone-deep cold driving me from the sun? How do I always forget past summers, and the friendships forged, and the new experiences which came my way? How can I forget the fun, and the warmth, and the pure exhilaration of being alive?
It's getting close to that time of the year when all I remember are the friends I've lost as the calendar flipped from June into July, when my soul yearns for days of laziness in the form of teacher-aided skipping, talking non-stop as my friends and I pack books or make paper clip chains in the library. When I remember our plans to stay in touch, and how they all fell through. Or even if we do still talk or see each other, however rarely, it's as people who barely know each other. Yet I can see, either in their matured faces or between the words of their brief emails, what used to be. But that's all gone now, because we've grown up some since then.
Yes, I know change is good. Change is necessary, and mostly I thrive on the though of it, because it means things can get better. But when I remember my missing friends as they were and compare them to the strangers of today, all I want to do is return to then, no matter how much then sucked in other ways, and freeze it, and live in it forever.
Maybe I'm justing getting emotional and girly- I'm allowed to do that occasionally, even though not everyone might think of me as a girl- but every word is truth. As I said, maybe it's really just the depressing music, but maybe it's just how things have to play out. For better or for worse.

Thought for the day: They say the best leader is someone who doesn't want to lead, which kind of makes elections a crappy way of getting a leader.

Signed,
Two of Wands