"The Class": A Film Review for (the Other) Mothers' Day

A few days ago, I finally got around to watching The Class (Entre les Murs), winner of the Palm d'Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Written by François Bégaudeau, a teacher who is also a novelist, The Class is a small film with a documentary feel that thankfully avoids the "teacher as hero" clichés typical of most Hollywood films in the school genre (think Stand by Me, Mr. Holland's Opus, etc.); instead, it delivers a number of nuanced and ambiguous lessons on how difficult school life can be for all players involved: teachers, administrators, parents, and students.

In contrast to the simplistic accounts of "bad teachers," "bad students," "bad parents," and "bad administrators" we see in the mainstream U.S. media, The Class lets viewers see an urban Parisian classroom in which representatives of each of these roles resist such easy labels. Well-intentioned teachers and administrators have bad days; by the end, their best efforts fall victim to disastrously unintended consequences for a "bad" student they were trying to help.

In newspapers and in TV news, the event would get snapshot coverage enabling the too-quick-to-judge world to practice the scapegoating-du-jour we call teacher-bashing. But the film turns the two-dimensional "bad teacher" caricature into a "round" one by showing us that teacher, day in and day out, over a full school year. Watching him contend with classrooms full of indifferent and typically rude students day after day, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing, but never quitting at his overall thankless and solitary task to break through their walls and find a way to make them want to learn, gives us a different perspective. He's not a hero, he doesn't fight through to a happy Hollywood ending. In the end, he's merely, like most of us, well-meaning, reasonably competent, and guilty, like all of us, of imperfection.

It's an interesting film to write about on Mother's Day. Teachers obviously have much in common with mothers: they're responsible for the well-being of not one or two or three youths, but closer to 100; their job demands the patience of Job, without Job's mythic and larger-than-life ability to meet those demands. Sometimes, like mothers everywhere, they have a bad day and do things no mother would want to be seen doing: they show anger, they make bad judgments, they fall and fail.

A moment's honesty tells us this must be true of all mothers everywhere: none of them are perfect, and for most, the best they're capable of is usually good enough.

Yet we revere our mothers, and willingly forgive them their shortcomings. Why we aren't equally forgiving of the adults who teach almost every mother's child how to read, write, think, calculate, wonder, create, express, socialize, how to be confident and curious and able to grow into the world - why we find it so much easier to attack and resent them for demanding they be treated and rewarded like the imperfect professionals they are - is beyond me.

Anyway, watch the film if you get the chance. And while you're taking time today to thank your mother for the imperfect job she did while sacrificing 20 years of her life to raise you, think of the teachers who also raised you, and helped you develop the very ability to read that you're practicing right now. And consider thanking them - and your local teachers too. God knows they get enough of the opposite of thanks from American society today.

Happy Mother's Day, teachers. (And an early Happy Father's Day, too.)