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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Reponse to Chicago Tribune's Charlie Kirk Editorial

All Her Fault

Negative Space by Gillian Linden

Steve (Tim Mielants, Big Things Films, 2025)

    Why I chose to watch this movie on the first day of my spring break is a mystery to me, too. I have been asking colleagues and friends about movies that center teachers’ daily lives (as laborers and as people) and one of them suggested Steve. It’s got Cillian Murphy, she said. He’s the headmaster, she said. It’s about a reform school for boys in England, she said. The boys have behavioral and emotional problems, she said. The look on her face as she said these words communicated that it would not be an easy, gentle watch. It was not.

    I’d either misheard her or she did not say that the film is set in 1996. I had hoped a movie made in 2025 about teaching would have been set in that era, or at least one touched by the pandemic. Even so, its chaotic camerawork and pacing reflects plenty of what a teacher’s day is like, even if it doesn’t involve older adolescents who are in a boarding school setting. They do add a great deal of tension and excitement to the 24-hour period shown episodically in the film.

    There are glimpses of what these boys could be like if they were featured in the fuller narrative of a short series based on the same source material (the novel Shy by Max Porter). The half-dozen of them who get enough screen time to be named have established beefs with each other and society at large. They each have an understanding with Steve (no last name is given, so he’s never Mr. Surname) as a more knowledgeable other in their lives. They are sick of him and his go-to phrases and prompts for reassuring or disciplining them in turn. There’s a comfort revealed in these interactions that could have been interesting if it were fleshed out across multiple days or weeks of time. For the purposes of communicating the sturm und drang of the boys’ lives and their resonating effects on their teachers, a short burst is enough.

    Even so, there is still more going on in the day of the film that adds even more detail (i.e., stress) to the narrative. Our first view of Steve is from an interlaced video taken in the confessional format so familiar to documentaries and mockumentary sitcoms. The producers are trying to get him to speak about his job, yet his mind is elsewhere. Turns out there is a news crew at Stanton Wood that is creating a short segment on the school. Their program, Points West, runs as a packaged segment at the end of the nightly news. Initially, the camera people, producer, and presenter are trying to do their best to make an honest look at the school and the troubles its staff and students are facing. This does not remain the case, as they end up disregarding the requests from Steve and the other staffers to not film in certain areas or during certain times of day. They’re more of a nuisance than anything. Their presence helps break up he scenes and give more context for the boys and the staff; the confessional segments with “give me three words that describe you” or “what would 1996 you say to 1990 you?” prompts are interspersed between the classes and conflicts of the day in question.

    Because this is a single film and not a series, there’s never a grand reveal where the viewers or the characters see the completed Points West segment. It’s simply more background noise for all involved at Stanton Wood. It’s “just one more thing” that is contributing to Steve’s on-the-job chemical abuse. The same goes for the conversation the staff has with two people who appear to be the managers of the trust that owns the property where the school is located. Turns out they are selling the land, so the school will shut down in December 1996, which is a few short months away. The immediate effects on Steve and the other staffers are uniformly negative, but we are never sure how the boys might have reacted to this news. One gets the feeling that it is simply too heavy a burden for the adults to bear, so they need time to process that trauma before sharing the news with the students. Again, this is “just one more thing,” but it is the sort of all-encompassing “thing” that makes going through the motions of teaching children into a soul-draining exercise for reasons that have nothing to do with the children at all (see also teaching during the polycrisis). Urie Bronfenbrenner might have said that this property sale is an example of a change in the exo-system affecting the meso-system and micro-systems for those in this school.

    Steve is the title character, so he gets the most screen time, but his colleagues Amanda, Shola, Owen, and Jenny all play a role in each others’ lives. As expected, Tracey Ullman’s Amanda does the emotional labor for the staff during meetings, making sure that Steve is emotionally and physically regulated when they gather. As an aside, it seems like a blessing and a curse to have meetings that do not involve agenda items prepared in advance. There is a lot of planning that goes into making an effective meeting happen, but being so busy dealing with so many issues means there is not time to cobble together line items to discuss. Everyone is just in survival mode. Steve reveals this existential exasperation when he speaks voice memos into a personal voice recorder. He’s addressing himself in the third person and being quite hard on himself about all the things he has plans to do during the day. Anyone keeping track of all of these tasks will easily see that he falls short of his intentions, even as he takes the day as it comes.

    Those voice memos and his negotiation of how best to address each new eventuality as it unfolds during the day are both very effective in reflecting how day-to-day concerns can easily overwhelm the executive functioning abilities of teachers. Students, of course, are still beginning to develop executive functioning at this age, so having a more knowledgeable other be not the most helpful model of managing actions, emotions, and thoughts makes for a challenging learning environment. Sometimes surviving the day is all you can do. There’s an effective scene toward the end of the film where Steve returns home to his wife and daughters and his wife (she is not named) rhetorically asks him “Another tough one?” as he is covered in dried mud and has dead, exhausted eyes.

    Steve represents a telling case, if not a representative one. Most teachers are not dealing with all of the overlapping layers of stress and pressure that we see in the film. This seems to have been a particularly bad day for us to have seen Steve at work. Even if Bronfenbrenner’s layers of structure are not visible or made manifest all the time, they are nevertheless part of teachers’ and students’ lives. In the days, the moments, when we have to reckon with the existence of these structures, the compounding stress brought on by that awareness can be debilitating. Steve does an excellent job of making those structures visible and, in this particular case, apparently immutable.

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