I never thought I'd live to see the day that schoolteachers were regularly vilified. Pilloried for having pensions. Excoriated for having the hubris to negotiate the terms of their employment and have those terms codified in a legally binding contract. And mostly, demonized for failing to use their classrooms as tools to magically correct all the wrongs of society that the rest of society has decided it just can't be bothered with trying to fix.
But then, I never thought I'd see the day when a group of Southern Christians gave a standing ovation to a serial adulterer who's being bankrolled by a gambling mogul.
I've been thinking about writing this diary for a long time. My desire it to present a place where members of this community can share with each other their memories of those teachers who made a particularly strong impression on them. Who inspired them, broadened their minds, lifted their self-expectations, ignited a passion for knowledge, or just somehow managed to entertain the heck out of them while still effectively teaching an otherwise boring subject.
What finally motivated me to get off my butt (or more accurately, to get on my butt) and write this diary? Believe it or not, it was the recent broadcast of the Academy Awards. Because I couldn't watch that show dedicated to the appreciation of the art of film, and not think of Mr. A.
You see, Mr. A (I don't have permission to use his name, but if you were to Google it you'd find him all over the internet) taught a 12th grade high school class called "Cinema Studies."
I first encountered him my Junior year. I was taking a one semester literary course, the specific genre of literature being Science Fiction. One day the teacher invited Mr. A into the class to show us a few movie clips and talk about "B.E.M.s" (Bug Eyed Monsters to the uninitiated.) Coincidentally, this was around the time that PBS was broadcasting the remarkable Richard Schickel series "The Men Who Made The Movies." That show had first captured my interest with its examination of the artistic judgments that made special movies, well, special.
Mr. A's presentation to the class that day was so wonderful, and he was so infectiously enthusiastic, that when I learned that I could take his Cinema Studies class the following year I made a point of doing exactly that.
Along with a heck of a lot of others. It was a popular class. Very popular. He taught it numerous times a day, in a double classroom of sixty students. He was assisted by another teacher, a particular necessity when it came time to break up into discussion groups. But make no mistake...it was Mr. A's baby.
"Cinema Studies!?!?! "You mean you go to school to sit and watch movies?!?!?" If I had a dollar for every time I heard a "grown-up" exclaim something along those lines, I'd be a one-percenter.
It turns out that Mr. A heard those lines too. Every damned year when he had to defend his class to parents and administrators who wanted to take an ax to it.
Their response perfectly exemplifies to me the stigma we've attached to reading in our society. Nobody ever said, upon hearing that their child had signed up for a literature class "Literature?!?!?!" You mean you go to class and read books?!?!? No, of course not. Reading is regarded as work. Reading is a burden. Nobody wants to read. It's a chore you're assigned, right? I was blessed to have parents who I observed reading, every night, for the pleasure of it.
Of course anyone who has ever taken a literature class knows that reading the book is only the beginning. Then you analyze the book. When was it created? What was society going through at the time? Why did the author choose to tell the story from this character's viewpoint and not that character's? Why is the story told in the first person? Why is the story told non-linearly? What does it have to say to us today? Subtext. Symbolism.
Well of course, that's exactly what Cinema Studies was. As Roger Ebert says, so eloquently, "A movie is not about what it's about, but about how it is about it."
Eyes were opened in that class. Minds were opened. Worlds were opened wide to people. It was one of those classes that didn't just give you knowledge, although it most certainly did that. It taught you how to think. Now, a lot of wingnuts hear that line and they confuse it with being taught what to think.
That's not what I said. This was not indoctrination, such as the sanctimonious Santorum froths about. This was a continuous exercise in critical thinking. In not just looking....but seeing.
Mr. A wrote books. He won awards. He could have easily taught college students. But he spent decades enriching the lives of a bunch of suburban Chicago high school kids. A few years ago I learned that one of those kids went on to become one of the most lauded directors in the American theater. And although he chose to pursue his art on the stage rather than the screen, were I to ever meet him the first words out of my mouth would be "So, how much did Mr. A inspire you?"
I ran into Mr. A several years after graduating. I was with a friend of mine, a couple of years younger, who had also, at my urging, taken the Cinema Studies class but had also since graduated. We were at a Chicago Film Festival screening of Abel Gance's film Austerlitz. We went up to Mr. A, and he was so gracious, and so grateful, not only for our coming up to greet him but for our very presence at the film festival. He told us that former students would regularly approach him and tell him how much his class had meant to them, and how important this was, as he still had to fight regularly for the class's very existence.
I went on to take several other film classes at two different colleges, and they were all sad and pale pretenders to that wonderful high school class of Mr. A's.
Eventually Cinema Studies was retitled to something on the order of "Film & Society" and I guess that finally brought a little breather from having to defend this gem of a class from the "You mean you go to school and watch movies?!?!" crowd. Mr. A retired from teaching a few years ago, after changing the lives of an estimated 6,000 students. Me being one of them.
So....that's my personal testimonial to the most memorable teacher I ever had. Please tell us about yours, if you would.