So it’s back to school again–after a summer you had wished contained no end. (Even teachers wish that so.)
Which brings me to this question–did I always think I’d be a teacher some day?
When I was in high school, I dreamed of becoming a medical doctor. It wasn’t because I was seized with the missionary fervor of being physician to the world’s sick, and it wasn’t because many of the doctors I knew were people of some standing–and wealth, yes–in the community, although these were very good parts of the appeal.
It was because I read Erich Segal’s Doctors one day, and the novel romanticized for me the almost heroic efforts of getting through medical school. In my head, I was the book’s protagonist, Barney Livingston, and Harvard Medical School was my Mecca. It was a persistent dream, and I imagined myself looking good in a smock, saving the day at some ER, a stethoscope around my neck.
Later on, in old Ever Theater downtown, I watched Marisa Silver’s medical school drama Vital Signs [1990], which starred Diane Lane, Jimmy Smits, and Adrian Pasdar–and the film cemented more of my romanticism. Medical school looked so glamorous to me.
By the time senior year in high school came around, I was one of those who took the UPCAT in Silliman High, bent on applying for the University of the Philippines’ notoriously hard INTARMED program. Of course, I didn’t get in–thank God for that, in hindsight–and the school guidance counselor later advised me that based on my aptitude scores, I was more suited for a degree in the humanities.
But did I listen to Dr. Aguilan’s advice? No way.
And so in college, I made myself choose between two options, which I thought would lead me closer to my goals of becoming a doctor: it was either nursing or physical therapy. But the latter, in 1993, was all the rage, and most of us incoming freshmen packed into the course attracted by our romance of the medical field–and the green bucks Physical Therapy promised then.
Much later, junior year found me despondent; my heart wasn’t in the course. I hated it. My first hospital duty as a student physical therapist came, and I was told to get the vital signs of a patient assigned to me. I went in: I found an old woman on the obese side, and she was glaring at me while I fumbled with my stethoscope and my BP monitor. Her physique made it impossible for me to get a good pulse–but I pumped on anyway, embarrassed and feeling spectacularly lost. When I got out of that patient’s room, I remember standing for the longest time in that seemingly never-ending, fluorescent-lit corridor of the hospital, experiencing a sad–but exhilarating–epiphany. Can I actually see myself working in a place, like a hospital, forever? And the answer was clear: no.
In the middle of the semester, I told all my teachers I was quitting Physical Therapy, sold all my books, and waited for the term to end. I still went to my classes, still took the exams, still managed to go through the practical demonstrations in Kinesiology.
It was with a heady knowledge that I was through with the charade. They all thought I was depressed and suicidal. They had no idea I was the happiest I ever was.
But I never planned to be a teacher, either. I remember once telling my best friend in college to shoot me if she found me grinding away at a classroom. But it was a profession that fell on my lap, and I couldn’t say no.
That I enjoy the best parts of it–and I don’t mean the paper checking and the grade crunching–is also something I can’t deny. But like my romanticization of a career in medicine, I also know that whatever has pushed me into teaching, and whatever I do as a teacher have also been touched by the movies I’ve seen.
Watch me in the classroom, and you will see traces of what I do in the following movies.
Barbra Streisand’s Prof. Rose Morgan in The Mirror Has Two Faces [1996], for example, figures in a scene where she teaches a rather large literature class in Columbia University. The lesson is on archetypes and the place of sex and love in medieval literature. She engages the class in conversation, like an actor enthralls a theater audience with a compelling story.
And teaching is like that–trying to tell a compelling story out of your lessons. Information without story is just facts devoid of humanity. The classroom is really a form of theater, with teachers as actors playing a part. This is my ideal: a conversation with an engaged classroom, talking about things I love…
Then there is Robin Williams’ Prof. John Keating in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society [1989], and I remember him in a scene where he teaches his high school literature class about constantly looking at things in a different way. He compels them to march right to the teacher’s desk at the head of the room, and then to climb it–and then to see what once was a tepidly familiar room from a completely different angle.
My writing student will find this exercise quite familiar. This is my ideal: the essence of what we do as essentially challenging our students to always try to think outside of the box they’ve grown up in. (You have no idea how many deeply-ingrained prejudices we have to challenge in our students–biases and narrow thinking they’ve inherited from parents or friends. How do you exactly battle that?)
Then there is Julia Roberts’ Katherine Anne Watson in Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile [2003]. One day in her art class in Wellesly College, she confronts with anger the expectations of women’s roles prevalent in 1950s society. In a powerful slide show, she gives them a kind of archaeology of women’s roles as depicted in modern-day advertising: that their lot seemed inscribed in nothing higher than just being plain housemakers.
There’s nothing wrong with being a housemaker, but to have that as the only socially-accepted role a woman can hope for, that’s a different story, she says. Again, like Williams’ Keating, this is about challenging the students about the norms that they–we–accept without thinking.
And finally, the very thesis of what the teaching profession is all about, found in Jerold Tarog’s very powerful Faculty [2010]. In this acclaimed short film, two college teachers battle it out about what their vocation is really all about. What do we teach our kids? Do we push them to be actively engaged in social transformation? To what ends? And where do you draw the lines? Must lines be drawn?
There are other films that tackle the teacher in the classroom–John N. Smith’s Dangerous Minds [1995] or Ramón Menéndez’s Stand and Deliver [1988] or John Singleton’s Higher Learning [1995] –but the four I’ve discussed above are the ones that have shaped me the most as a teacher.
