In my classroom, poetry is its own reward
Louann Johnson, Dangerous Minds
The other night I stayed up well past my bedtime watching “Halls of Anger” (1970) on TCM, a movie that, while also about racism, belongs to the subgenre of movies about a teacher using unconventional methods to reach resistant students. Others that come to mind are “To Sir With Love” (1967) and, “Dangerous Minds” (1995) but I know there are many others. In each of these movies the students are inner-city and have been written off by “the system”. The plot generally goes like this: teacher tries to follow the required curriculum, students taunt teacher, teacher has angry outburst and throws out the textbook, students are won over, roll credits with uplifting song.
I watched with #2 pencil and paper ready as I waited for the inevitable moment when a student would read poetry and the scales would fall from his eyes. (I have a continuing obsession with poetry in movies.) As it turns out, in “Halls of Anger” actor Calvin Lockhart's teacher Quincy Davis further alienates his students when he tells them they’ll be studying the poetry of James Russell Lowell and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. One student says something like, “If I have to look at another poem by someone with three names I’m going to . . ." Lockhart finally reaches his students by having them read aloud the sex scenes in a drug-store bodice ripper; once they’ve mastered those steamy passages (with much guffawing) he turns them on to Madame Bovary. “That’s beautiful,” says Otis Day’s Lerone Johnson upon finishing a description of Bovary’s response to love-making. [Correction - it was Lady Chatterly's Lover, D.H Lawrence, not Bovary (see comments)-- sdh ]
Can you name any other such movies? And I wonder, has there ever been such a movie where the teacher uses science or math to reach students? (Maybe this is the wrong place to ask that last question.)
-- sdh
