Day 128: The Class

[no quote this time.]

Teaching students must certainly be a hard job. Why do they even bother? Is it from some sort of self-fulfillment? That really can't be it. The kids these people work with are at that tipping point. At around 12-16 you know nothing, and don't quite give a damn if you don't either. These aren't exactly the type of kids you want to teach. I mean, why not teach a class with older students? (Now that I think about it. He says he taught these students before but aren't teachers usually assigned to a specific grade and unable to follow a class? Anyways...) I imagine that people become teachers the same way they want to become lawyers or doctors. There was probably that moment when they were younger that triggered it. There was probably that moment where taught someone something special and it gave them a feeling of absolute worth. That person knows that one thing because you taught it to them. You've made an impression. I mean what more valuable thing is there than knowing that you left the earth leaving a mark behind?

And so begins The Class. A well made French film that chronicles roughly the first half of a school year with Mr. Marin who is played by Francois Begaudeau, a real life novelist and teacher who wrote a book of the same name about a similar story. This version is a very closely woven fictional pastiche of those experiences. From the onset, a repertoire has already been established with his students. A lot of them he already knows. This probably makes it even more difficult. The back and forth between students is often very combative and crosses the line quite a few times. I can't say that I've really been in a class like this though which makes the character all the more realistic. His patience exists in abundance. When he runs out of it the effect is no less surprising since you remember that he's still a teacher. Yet, the empathy for it is quite understandable. My patience would have run out a long time ago.

The film does go to some length to separate Mr. Marin from the other teachers. Film theory books go to great lengths to make the distinction between "telling," and "showing," and this is even more apparent in French cinema where realism is held as sacred. To "tell," would break the illusion of art existing without an author. But as Wayne C. Booth says in his book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, "...the author can to some extent choose his disguises, [but] he can never choose to disappear." Take for example one scene where a teacher returns to the break room so frustrated that he lets loose. His anger and frustration with the students sends him into quite a rage that leaves all the others speechless. Yet they refuse to criticize him. Why? Because they know exactly how he feels and I wouldn't be surprised if they've been there before. Not to mention that this is quite tame.

I use the word tame because as the teachers look for ways to discipline the students in the most effective ways possible, some teachers come across as simply self-righteous and judgmental. Others too idealistic. What makes Mr. Marin so interesting is that he's trying to find that delicate center of realism. He enjoys being around his students yet he can't be their friend. He sees the need to judge and discipline but he can't be their parents. He wants them to learn literature as effectively as their can and that may require personal details but he can't be God and ask for their secrets. This is a delicate act. The relationship between teacher and student is an odd one. Geoffrey Canada says that "education is the cure to end generational poverty." I completely agree with him. Yet what are we really saying? We're saying teachers play the role of social reformer in a way. Whether we know it or not, they ultimately end up shaping more than our world-view. As a child, you spend most of your time in school work, and in the classroom. You can't remain impersonal to them all the time yet it would be rather odd to be personal.

Kids are people and people are tricky. Humans aren't complex in the sense that we're tangled wires of chaos, but more like we're finitely colliding mosaics of life. We are made up of various undefinable shades. We react but interaction is much more difficult. What makes it even more delicate is dealing with so many who are so different. Different students are looking for different things in their teacher and at times they feel neglected as sometimes the courses and the textbooks fail to recognize the respective cultures the students belong to. Similar controversies have been discussed by minorities in the United States who regard standardized testing as retaining a cultural bias.

In a normal film, I might have laid criticism to the fact that character details and development can at times be clearly missing. There certainly isn't a traditional arc but that's what fine. People don't really have arcs at this age and most of us probably won't have cinematic arcs anyway. They didn't go the route of a film like Freedom Writers. Instead The film feels very much like a documentary which is perfect. It doesn't try to romanticize the hard lives of the students or the difficult task of the teacher. Instead, it tries to position the story as objective as possible. The author, in this case, has wonderfully found the right disguise in which he can show us his story. Quite literally, he's hidden in plain sight.