the class

so, i watched the class tonight, hence my clever and original title.

this movie is a french film, one of those nominated for best foreign film in the oscars this year, about an urban french class in france. fluhfluhfluh! it has in the past been likened to a "french dangerous minds." i cannot speak to that comparison as i have never been blessed to sit through that michelle pfeiffer film. sadly. so sad. really.

it was painful. painful to watch this poor nice guy french teacher be bullied by his insolent students. during the film i totally sided with him. little brats! i thought as they talked back to him and to one another. attitude! as one girl refused to read in class when asked to. i kept waiting for the students to share sob stories (predictably) to explain why they were so awful and thought we had come to that point of the film when they are asked to create self portraits ala anne frank's diary. but no. nothing ever comes out to really explain why the students behave this way. no sad sob story in the background. at the end of the film when this is brought up in a teacher's conference as they discuss the possibility that a certain student's expulsion could mean he will be shipped back to mali, one teacher argues that they are not the parents and that their roles lie solely inside the school. the teachers were actually quite liberal and debated the merits of discipline versus reward, but i was all about discipline watching the film. it reminded me of the very first class i ta'ed as a grad student that totally ganged up on me. a room full of spoiled freshmen who, once they decided it was them against me, it seemed there was no going back. i tried to handle it like the teacher in the film, keep going regardless, meet their insubordination with jokes, etc. but man, it wears you down. it's hard to care at the end of the day if they learned anything if you made it out alive. and my students were EASY compared to the students in this film.

so, at the end of the movie, i was like, ok, this generation sucks and i never want to teach high school and no wonder teachers like the bottle. i wanted a cigarette just watching the thing, it was so stressful and painful, and i don't even smoke!

but but but. the genius of this film lies in its ambiguity. so, all those kids just suck, right? well, there is a bit of a curveball thrown at the end that kept me wondering. and the great thing is that this was no message movie in typical hollywood style. no thud thud thud in your face this is what you learned today at the end of it all. so, in the end all of the students are shown talking about what they learned that year and one of the most loudmouth girls in the class (she seems bright but acts like a dumbass and is a pain in the ass to teacher and peers alike) says i didn't learn anything here. the teacher challenges her, saying you can't be in school all year and not learn a thing. i'm living proof, she says, laughing. what about what we read? he asks. your books are shite, she replies. what about a book you read on your own? here it comes....she busts out that she read the republic and starts talking about socrates and what a riot he was.

that gave me pause. what is this movie critiquing? the out of control behavior of today's youth? OR the low standards that teachers have for "these kinds" of kids? a running theme throughout the film is respect, the students all insist that the teacher doesn't show them respect. i found this to be utter bullshit, i thought he was doing the best he could given how THEY treated HIM. but maybe the respect wasn't lacking in the way he treated them. maybe it was in the amount and type of work he gave them....his attitude that they couldn't or wouldn't do it anyway. their self-portrait involved them writing a one page essay about their likes/dislikes, etc. that originally didn't strike me as too easy. it seems like something i would have been asked to do in my eighth grade english class, where despite being in honors english we were still learning how to distinguish between nouns and verbs. but, on second thought, it wasn't really asking them to think all that much.

so, what if he was underestimating them? is that it? i don't know. from my experience i feel like i have given past students very challenging work and when it is challenging then they complain that it is too challenging. i don't know the right answer here.

at the very end of the film, a girl approaches the teacher after all the other students have filed out and says that she didn't learn anything. then she keeps repeating that she doesn't want to go to vocational school. the teacher tells her that is a long way off. (the students are probably in the equivalent of our 8th grade). she repeats herself. and the film pretty much ends. it left me wondering: does she want another type of school (i.e. college) or no school at all? similar to questions brought up by the whole republic exchange, is this school not enough for her or does she just not want to be in school? or is it just that what we are doing is total horse shit?

one thing that did strike me during the film was how involved the students were. they were constantly questioning the teacher, especially little miss republic, but this is considered insubordination. but it was, because it prevented him from teaching the curriculum. and yet, it was frustrating to watch because if they would direct that curiosity towards the material, it would have worked better for everyone.

so, the class did me in. it was painful to watch and, similar to actual education reform, it is so difficult to pinpoint the exact problems and provide solutions to what exactly was going wrong in the classroom. but it was all kinds of fucked up.

one more thing: i was wondering if there was an allegory between the classroom and france as a country since most of the students in the class were immigrants in a french classroom with a french teacher, being scolded for not fitting in more with the curriculum and for not respecting the teacher's rule. when they do not respect the teacher, they are kicked out. but the teacher was not always respectful of them either, at one point, exploding and calling two girls "skanks" and describing one student as being "limited" in his ability. i don't know enough about french society to be able to expound upon this but i think it was there. especially when you contrast the ways in which the teachers talked about two students who might potentially be deported: one, a good student and chinese, and the other, a bad student and african. they sent around a collection for the chinese student who would have been deported because his mother was illegal and they expelled the african student with the knowledge that his father might send him back to africa. the message here is play by our rules or get out. if you play nice, we'll help you; if not, consequences.

my problem with all of this is what is wrong with personal responsibility? and i felt like such a conservative watching this movie, but if you don't play by the rules, you should be punished. i had absolutely no sympathy for the kid who got expelled because he was a bad, disrespectful student. if expulsion will get him sent back and he knows that, then he better shape up. we have to have order, there have to be rules. right?

and on that note, i learned way more from this film about law and order and its role in society than i did from the supposed "brilliant" crime drama the dark knight. 2 hours in a classroom with these kids will teach you more about questioning authority than the joker ever could simply by declaring his "anarchist" tendencies.