Mr. Holland’s Opus (Stephen Herek, Hollywood Pictures, 1995)

    This movie is so saccharine that it contains a week’s worth of sugar content for the average American. Good thing I’m not looking at movies like this one as an example of cinema qua cinema. Let’s be clear that there’s not a whole lot to be gleaned from it in terms of teaching and learning, either.

    One wonders about the motivating factors behind writing a screenplay for a movie like Mr. Holland’s Opus. After a casual watch, it’s clear that Stephen Herek likes his warmed-over ’60s nostalgia as much as he likes hero narratives and cheerleading for music education. Something like American Graffiti, a tepid drama, and The Miracle Worker mashed together. Those pieces don’t fit. There’s too much happening and it takes way too long to happen, which is a dreadful combination.

    You’re not here to hear me crab about bad movies, so let’s get to what the movie is saying about or doing with the educational setting. Richard Dreyfuss’ Glenn Holland is of a type: the second-career teacher who thinks the job is a “fall-back position” that he can just walk into. His principal correctly chides him for thinking that way as she walks him to his class on the first day. I’d love to know what the interview process looks like for a position of music director in a public high school. It’s evident that his first passion is music composition and not anything to do with education. He begins his first class with a closed, known-answer question: What is music? The students do not know what you think music is or how you define it—that is why you are there! Give them ideas to consider and then explain to them how to critique those ideas, at a minimum. His principal has a similarly limited view of teaching. She thinks it involves the filling of young minds with information and then giving them a compass to navigate the world. She suggests Holland does not have a compass, but is just filling their heads with information. Fair. I’m reminded of a comment the director of my grad program in teacher training made early in our coursework. We were aspiring high school English teachers in our early 20s. She made it clear that we should not get into teaching high school English if we wanted to share a love of literature, of Shakespeare, with our students because that is not what the daily life of a teacher is about. Her comment was a bit overstated, but it does capture the vision of teaching and learning that Holland holds. He thinks his passion will carry the day with teenagers, at least, at first.

    One student in particular provides him with a learning opportunity that he eventually capitalizes on, though it’s not clear whether he applies this learning in later years. Gertrude Lang, a clarinetist in the school’s band, can’t form notes with her instrument without squeaking. He tries to teach her directly with private lessons before school, but her frustration mounts. She is ready to quit the instrument when he tells her that music is more than notes on a page. He knows that she knows the music “in her head, her heart, and her fingers” but needs her to develop the self-trust to perform it fluently. She, of course, excels once he gives her the chance to mediate her thinking by reflecting on what she already knows about her skills. He’s becoming aware that his students’ emotional lives and their motivations matter as much as their “pure music” knowledge.

    The other student who we are meant to have feel-good moments about is Louie Russ, one of the only Black characters in the film, and the only one who gets a name. The football coach tells Holland that Russ is academically ineligible for football, but that he could make the wrestling team with the academic credit that Holland’s music class could offer. As the coach tells Holland, Russ has “got nothing else,” so he needs Holland to do this favor. (In return, coach will help Holland’s scrappy group of instrumentalists learn to march in formation so they can perform during football games.) Just so we’re on the same page, it’s 1965 and the only thing a Black student has going for him is sports because he is “not a school kind of person” but he “can work hard.” This is reductive stereotyping at its racist worst. The movie is from 1995, so maybe we are meant to think that these white teachers’ views of this student are retrograde with the passing of 30 years. I don’t think so. When Holland works with Russ, he learns that Russ isn’t able to keep a beat on the drum. In a montage, we see Holland trying to get Russ to clap along with him, tap his feet with him, and bang his drum with him. Here are some of the only moments of physical humiliation in the film. Holland is so fed up with Russ’ lack of progress at toe-tapping that he begins to tap on Russ’ foot forcefully. Is this feedback meant to tell Russ to press down when Holland presses down, or is it meant to tell Russ to stop pressing down and keep his foot still at that moment? I guess his intent is clearer when he grabs the laces of Russ’ Chuck Taylors and jerks his foot up and down in frustration. Worse yet, Holland has Russ don a football helmet while sitting to play his bass drum. Holland then pounds on Russ’ head with a mallet in time with the song. Oh, but it’s OK because “Mr. Russ has found the beat” by the end of the sequence. This result would be heart-warming if it weren’t so revolting. Russ later dies in Vietnam, just to reinforce that he is disposable as a character.

    Those moments should have been enough for this film, really. The principal who hired him retires and kisses him goodbye because he’s her favorite. Gross for a few reasons. Then, she gives him a compass, as if it weren’t obvious enough that he has “found his way” as a teacher. Too much. When that scene faded to black, I was glad because I was sure there was nothing more to cover. But, of course it went on. There’s an even more cloying moment still to come when Holland sings and signs JOHN LENNON’s “Beautiful Boy” to his son who has 90 percent hearing loss.

    Despite all of the changes Holland and his students have been through over the 30 years of time that the movie encapsulates, the board still eliminates his position along with all of the other art programs at school. Here is where the most real part of the movie happens. A despondent Holland is talking with his football coach teacher friend and he observes that it would be the end of Western civilization if a high school cut its sports budget. His buddy reassures Holland that “they’ll miss [him]” when he’s gone. Holland counters that he feels “expendable.” That’s a succinct summation of what teaching feels like. Some may remember you, or how you made them feel, but you are still a line item on the budget of an institution that cannot love you back, no matter what trinkets it provides you with. A triumphant exit with a supportive crowd at your back does not take away from the fact that teaching is more than just a deeply emotional labor. Recognizing and managing those emotions is necessary, but it is not enough. Beyond respect, teachers deserve much higher levels of the kind of compensation that goes into gas tanks, grocery tills, and mortgage accounts.

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Teachers

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 20th Century Fox, 1969)

    Miss Jean Brodie is quite a character. A leader, if not just a teacher. She says as much when speaking with the headmistress at Marcia Blaine’s School for Girls. where she teaches 12-year-olds. The headmistress is unhappy with Brodie for taking girls to the theater and the museum on weekends. Brodie defends herself by saying that the root of educate is the Latin educere, meaning “to lead out.” As in, she is leading the girls out of the darkness and into the light. Her headmistress counters that surely there should be some “putting in” happening as well. Brodie has read well, knows her etymology, and replies that that would be an intrusion, from the Latin “to thrust into,” which she does not capture how she sees her role as a teacher.

    It’s these word games that give Miss Jean Brodie a sheen of unassailability. She seems to float through the school, dispensing pithy observations about culture and the proper way to live. She is “in [her] prime,” don’t you see? That teaching girls is “[her] vocation” must mean that her pedagogical methods are beyond reproach. She just wants her kids to prize “goodness, truth, and beauty” in artwork and poetry. Sounds pretty good to me. Parents would love for their children to have a teacher who is so dedicated to her calling.

    The problem Brodie creates in focusing on the rearing of her “brood,” as she calls it, is that her ideals are those of the Fascisti in Italy. It’s 1936 and they are in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s far enough away from the front that Brodie’s ideas about what makes for skilled pedagogy never come into direct contact with the realities of war or the effects of fascist ideology. On a walk with her students, she sees a bag of trash on the ground and uses the moment to praise Il Duce himself, saying, “In Italy, Mussolini has put an end to litter!” She says this without a thought of its accuracy or implications. Suddenly, her prior praise of Robert Burns and Giotto di Bondone seems a little less like mere eccentricity and more like cultural supremacy. The late Maggie Smith does a commanding job of keeping our attention on the force of Brodie’s personality throughout many scenes like these. She really sells the idea that Brodie is a misunderstood intellectual who is trying hard to lead her students into a more cultured world, even if they are not ready for it.

    It’s not only Brodie who takes the “leading” part of education too far. One of her colleagues forces her into a bathroom in an early scene and forcibly kisses her. They had had a consenting relationship before, but that kind of behavior is obviously inexcusable. Worse still, this teacher later forces himself on one of Brodie’s students while she is in his art studio and later paints her in the nude, even though she’s a child.

    Brodie later comments that “A mature man can find love in a young girl,” which is the kind of sentence that repulses me to even type. It’s not taken as a wild idea, either. The lack of reaction to it makes the apparent ordinariness of the observation all the more appalling. Whether we are meant to think of this comment as par for the course in 1932 or even 1969 is unclear. Set against Brodie’s other seemingly benign cultural observations, it’s easier to see the non-response to this comment as further indication of the rot in her mind wrought by fascism.

    Her ultimate fate is the result of her misplaced faith in her brood, which is a delightful consequence for such a flawed character. As a teacher, I want to see her survive to stick it to the board and the headmistress. She’s going to go down fighting! That rules! But, what she’s fighting for is based on her reputation in the community, which is in tatters. Although it’s the implication of an affair that the board sees as uncouth, the final betrayal is from Sandy, one of her former pupils. Sandy is disgusted with Brodie because her desire to see her students “serve, suffer, and sacrifice” has led to one of their deaths in the war. Her rhetoric finally has real-world consequences. Even more humiliating for Brodie, she learns that this girl’s brother, who she had assumed was fighting on the side of the Fascisti is actually a Republican. Meaning, this student of hers has died for nothing.

    So, what responsibility do teachers have for their students once they leave their care for the day or for the year? Is education “leading out,” or is it the intrusion of new ideas? What can we actually learn about teaching in 2026 from a movie based in 1936 and filmed in 1969 about the impact of a pathologically dedicated, and yes, Fascist, teacher? As with Jim McAllister in Election, Jean Brodie is a good reminder of how not to conduct oneself in the classroom. I admire her ability to sneak her own ideas into the curriculum, right in front of the administration’s faces. It’s a shame that those ideas are so poisonous. Getting kids to think that your teaching “makes history seem like the cinema” is a true gift. What she calls the “leading out” of education turns out to be nothing more than the intrusion of Fascist ideals into her charges’ minds.

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Adolescence

Cat Cafe Manager (Roost / Freedom, 2022)

    Of course I had to play a game that focuses on running a cat cafe. That’s a no-brainer. The gameplay is simple and the story doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. The writing can be funny at times, which goes a fairly long way in a game that can be quite repetitive. I can see playing it again to experiment more with the various style and decor options that are available for customizing your cafe. But first, cats!

    You start with the inheritance of some land in a small town where your grandmother once lived. She was a cat lover and you are in charge of creating a cafe that caters to cats and also humans as a way of honoring her memory. Also, a grimalkin appears in a cat shrine near town and asks you to help restore this sacred clearing to its former glory. There are four statues in the shrine and if you thought maybe each of these would correspond to an area of the cafe that you can improve, you would be correct. When you earn “delight” points for meeting your customers’ needs, you can improve your cafe’s furniture, staffing level, menu, or style and decor. You can switch freely between these branching skill paths at any time, which allows for a great deal of customization as you work to make your grandma proud.

    How you please your customers is simple: serve them the food or drink they want, talk to them, and allow them to play with certain cats. Each type of person has a different stereotyped personality and diet. The vagabonds enjoy water and sandwiches, the artists enjoy coffee and sweets, the punks like milkshakes and vegetables, the witches like tea and platters, the fisherfolk like cola and soups, and the tech bros like their fancy coffee drinks and complicated sandwiches. There’s more variety than that, but you get the point. Some cats appeal to these personalities more than others, so when the cats appear as strays by your front door, you can decide which ones to adopt.

    At first, you’ll only have enough money to acquire a sink and serve water to vagabonds, but as the days go by and word of mouth spreads, you will be able to get a variety of appliances and ingredients to attract a wider variety of customers. Somehow, there’s no need for a dish machine… I said money above, but it’s a variety of objects that you trade to shop-owners in town. Each store takes a different kind of currency and each type of customer rewards you with one of those currencies. Gold, gems, materials, fish, and timber rule everything around me.

    What it means for you as a proprietor is that you will have to direct your attention to punks if you want to expand the physical footprint of your cafe because they are the ones who pay in construction materials. Want to improve your menu? Better advertise to the witches who will pay you in gems that you can pay to the fisherman who runs the dry goods store so you have the recipes and ingredients you’ll need. There’s a constant process of seeking to balance the needs of the different customer types with your overall goals for your cafe. There were definitely times when I stopped advertising to some of my clientele because I didn’t need any more of their form of payment. I needed more recipes and more furniture, so it was all witches and tech bros for a good while in the mid-game.

    You’ll be chasing the feeling of stasis every few days when it seems like you’ve struck equilibrium between the size of your cafe, the customers who arrive, the cats you have, the food you offer, and the workers you manage. In this way, the game has a compelling cycle. The game-days fly by quickly and any feeling of letting down your customers will soon pass. Each day, you can see your customers’ satisfaction levels, conveyed by a smiley face. You’ll also get a letter grade ranking based on what I am assuming is an average of their overall satisfaction.

    If this process all sounds rather faceless and plain, then you need to consider that the larger point of the game is that you can adopt cats. I mean it’s right there in the title, so I don’t want to belabor it. You can eventually have up to nine different cats in your cafe at once. You may also have had others pass through on their way to a forever home out in the community. I think I fostered close to 15 cats in my time with the game. As mentioned previously, each cat has its own traits and skills (playfulness, bladder control, messiness, etc.) that will make it a good fit (or not) for what you are trying to achieve in your cafe. Late in the game, you will get certain lures to place in the strays’ food bowl that will attract special cats with unique attributes. I had a hard time deciding whether to keep these clearly beneficial bonus cats or part with the first few cats I’d adopted (and named after some of the actual cats in my life).

    Unfortunately, these cats cannot talk to you. Only the grimalkin speaks, and only at specified points in the narrative. Otherwise, you can see how the story of the small town (and your cafe’s role in it) plays out by interacting with a few regulars. There are five specific visitors who are special enough to get a name and an avatar. As you get to know Bonner and Arwel and Mateo and Carla-lala and Finley, you will see how they may already have existing relationships that you are joining. Some of the fun in the writing shows up here. You get to choose how to support Finley in her music career and how to advise Bonner in a conflict (based on a simple misunderstanding) with his husband. Finley has a great line in comparing music to sauce that goes on the rice that is your brain. Music is amazing in that way, and it’s nice to share that moment with Finley. Arwel has a brusque personality fitting his punk personality but can also quip Dad jokes with the best of them, such as when he asks, “Which smart-ass decided the word litter should refer both to the thing they poop in and their kids?” I laughed.

    I’ll be coming back to this game again for sure. I was so focused on foods in my original playthrough that I didn’t do a lot of intentional decorating. I am thinking of making different sections or rooms for each kind of customer, just to see how that goes. If there are any updates to the game, it would be nice to give your employees a place to sleep. You can purchase cat beds, litter boxes, and food bowls that your cats can use throughout the day and night. But, each night at 7:00 when the customers leave, your workers just stand around with vacant stares. They should be allowed to go home and rest! Or, if this is some kind of cult-like cat cafe where they spend the night at work after their shift, I will need to obtain beds for them. They can already make use of the food they prepare or the toilets I’ve installed. If the developer’s goal was to highlight the exploitation of restaurant work, then they certainly succeeded. Somehow I don’t think it was, and that nagging thought took me out of the pure joy of building a cute place for cats and humans to socialize each other.

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Das Lehrerzimmer [The Teachers’ Lounge] (İlker Çatak, if... Productions, 2023)

    Here we have a fascinating film about teachers, students, schools, learning, and the truth.

    When I started this project about teachers or teaching on the silver screen, I never wanted to cast judgments on a film for being closer to reality than another. That would be boring. I am mostly reacting to whatever elements of the film make me think about my experiences as a teacher and how the teacher appears as a full human being in the film. The shortsightedness of focusing on how closely the onscreen events adhere to my experiences would be most evident in a film such as Das Lehrerzimmer because of its German setting. Of course teaching in a different country would give rise to practices that I might not be familiar with. What a tedious analysis it would be if I just ran down the differences or departures from what I expected based on U.S. schooling. Hell, that wouldn’t even be analysis but cataloging. Boring either way.

    Thankfully for both of us, this film addresses issues beyond education through the use of a school setting. The publisher’s description on the back of the box would have you think the film is about an idealistic, young teacher trying to find the culprit of a recent theft in her classroom. That’s only the beginning of the plot. There is a much bigger meditation here on what it means to reason from incomplete information. We’re first exposed to that idea in the daily warm-up that Frau Nowak (played by Leonie Benesch) gives to her students. She’s asking them to prove that 0.333… + 0.333… + 0.333… is equal to 1. One student points out that the solution is something like 0.999… and thus it never becomes 1. Another student disagrees by offering that 0.333… is equal to ⅓, so three of that number is equal to 1.

    The question Frau Nowak asks her class after these competing perspectives clash on the chalkboard is key: Is this a proof or an assumption? The class doesn’t have the time to fully respond to that question. They seem confused by their teacher’s choice of terms, if not the math itself. I’ll note that I was confused about the age of the students at this point because this question seemed quite advanced for the apparent age of the students; we learn later that they are 11 or 12. This feeling of searching confusion continues through the rest of the film as the characters continue to contest what counts as evidence and the ethics of collecting it in the first place.

    See, it’s not just the initial theft in Carla Nowak’s classroom that is at issue. After the administration botches an investigation into the theft of one student’s cash, Carla gets the idea that maybe it’s one of her colleagues who has sticky fingers. There’s a communal pay-what-you-can jar near the coffee machine in the teachers’ lounge and she sees another teacher shaking some coins out of it. She suspects foul play, so she sets up her wallet to be plainly visible on the back of her chair when she steps out of the lounge. She has also set her work laptop’s camera to record its field of vision, including the chair. Although the camera records the distinctive sleeve of an arm that reaches into her purse, Carla did not obtain the consent of anyone to record in the lounge.

    The fallout from this (also) botched investigation contaminates relationships among the staff, especially when the nonconsensual nature of the recording becomes apparent. Carla had initially seemed to be a sympathetic victim, but now she seems to have entrapped another professional with her misguided scheme. Even though her evidence is clear about the thief’s identity, her method of obtaining it was unethical. This situation puts everyone in a difficult position, not the least of which is the child of the apparent thief who is also a student in Carla’s class. It’s not clear how to adequately resolve this issue as it escalates throughout the film.

    We eventually learn that not only is Carla in her first year in the school, but also she is from Poland. Her lack of experience and outsider status causes other teachers to reprimand her for not involving the faculty union in the first place. She was too ambitious with her investigation and too trusting of her own students, they think. This aspect of Carla’s character is compelling as well. How schools absorb new teachers (regardless of their age or experience) is a fraught process. Everyone comes with their own hang-ups and ideas about what school is and how to do it. An organization like a union or faculty committee can try to mold a semblance of coherence around a process that can be challenging to navigate, but it is hard to have adults agree on a common vision for something as complex as schooling.

    As with investigating a classroom theft, there is not always a simple approach to take. The delicate nature of interrogating children about their peers’ behavior can lead adults to lean into the power imbalance inherent in teaching. Sometimes adults might find it easier to create scapegoats or trust gut instincts when a more careful approach is needed. How to wrangle the truth in such situations is difficult and exposes the assumptions we all have about how the world should work from our vantage point. With Das Lehrerzimmer, İlker Çatak has done an excellent job of depicting the less-than-ideal circumstances we find ourselves in when negotiating proofs and assumptions in service of trying to reach the truth.

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All Her Fault

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