Goodbye Mr Chips

This week I have individual zoom meetings with all my teacher-training students on one course. They need to read an academic article about Classroom Management and tell me about it in English, which is their second or sometimes third or even fourth language (but mostly second). 

The article offers a number of tools for creating trust with the class, promoting a good atmosphere, and motvating the pupils. It's a nice article. 

So I'm discussing classroom management with a twenty year old student teacher, and she tells me how films can show good teaching and you can learn a lot from them. She can't remember the name of the film, but she wants to tell me about a great teacher who inspired the students and there is a film about how it was done.

"Dead Poets' Society?" The student looks at me blankly. Of course, it's way before her time (1989). I'm laughing to myself inside because before I thought of  Dead Poets' Society, I really wanted to say, "Good Bye Mr Chips." (1939 - before my time, 1969 - my favourite, and 2002 which I'd forgotten about and anyway, wasn't as good as the 1969 version.)

I googled it later, and the student was thinking of Freedom Writers (2007). I've not seen this film but I want to. I think back to other inspiring screen teachers of my youth - To Sir With Love springs to mind. I'd like to show it to my students but it would be wasted on them because times have changed so much. Or would it? 

All these films have the same principles at heart. I gave my students an academic article written in 2019, that basically says what we all know about good teachers from watching films about good teachers. (And maybe from once being pupils ourselves.) I don 't remember any of the names of the authors of the inspiring articles I set for this course, but last year I did want to be like Rita, the Swedish teacher from the Netflix series (but without so much sex and no smoking).

In the age of Google translate, even the EFL powers that be, are turning away from reading comprehension and towards communication. This past year on zoom opened up a whole new way of teaching. When digital replaced print it was easier and much more fun to use video than it was to look at texts. 

However, there's no denying that the personal connection was missing. It was great to return to my primary school last week and enjoy actually being with the pupils. With residual capsules (or bubbles, or pods, or whatever you want to call the smaller class groups) I don't actually have a classroom with a computer screen. So I try to be elements of Mr Chips, and Sidney Poitier, and Robin Williams, and Rita (without the sex and cigarettes), albeit adjusted for 3rd to 6th graders. 

Academia is considered dumbed down if we watch it rather than read it. But only by old school academics who remember screen time as purely recreational. The screen generation has no patience for all the reading we had to do. Why should they when a you can find a personal teacher on You Tube to show and tell you everything? 

So our students and pupils watch role model teachers, teaching in films, when traditional teaching is almost obsolete. As xyz (Einstein?) said, "intelligence is not knowing the answers, it's knowing where to look for them." And where to look for the answers is more and more on a screen rather than in the library - which actually looks more and more like a computer room than a library. 

But maybe it's not good bye Mr Chips after all. The methods have changed but the important characteristices of a good teacher are the same - trust, respect, listening, nurturing, the journey over the grades, leaving your ego at the door, etc...

The irony is that even Mr Chips emerged from the the original print by James Hilton (1934) and had far greater success on the screen.