Bad Teacher, Revisited

Some years ago I presented some thoughts about Jake Kasdan's 2011 film Bad Teacher--the kind of mediocre comedy that made me think of the kind of material he satirized in his earlier The TV Set (a flawed film, about the long-overdone subject of Hollywood, but at its best a good deal better-crafted and wittier than this one).

Especially as the plans for a franchise fizzled, with the sequel unmade and the TV spin-off airing only a few episodes before CBS dropped it from its line-up, I have not had occasion to really think about it since. Still, running into Joe Blevins' piece for Vulture about the movie (which he regards himself as able to say something about because he, too, was a suburban Cook County junior high school teacher who had been less than ideal in the job) did seem to me to make a few interesting points about the bits of truth within the pile of nonsense that was that film, at times rather wittily. (Blevins likens his experience of teaching "to being a standup comic at an endless open mic night in Hell," which I think those who have been teachers will understand, anyone who did the job long having had an experience describable in such terms.)

Of principal importance here is his admission about how and why he ended up a teacher--a refreshing break from society's general demand that teachers be perfect models of "convenient social virtue" (devotion to the job because it is their true vocation rather than because the non-rich must do something to pay the bills), and the readiness of most teachers to at least pretend to be such. As Blevins admits, he had simply gone to college, "taken nothing particularly useful," and ended up going into education "with absolutely zero enthusiasm" for lack of other options--Blevins, in contrast with those for whom teaching is a "fallback career" (as with so many writers), having no alternative to the "Plan B." Sure enough, he proved to have "no aptitude for this work," and walked away from the job soon enough, even if less equipped than others to do so. (Blevins explains that he became an office temp.)

Here we see a number of underappreciated realities acknowledged--namely the extent to which, given the demand for teachers and the actual supply of people who really want to do the job on the existing terms rather than something else, teaching is often not a first choice of occupation for those who do it; many who end up "falling back" here find that they are not well-suited to the very demanding work, and do not get better (the needs of society as determined by those who make the decisions simply do not align with the supply of talent any more than they do with the supply of willingness); and, contrary to what many of the professional teacher-bashers ever eager to put down the nation's faculty say, those who do not really want the job and do not do the job well often take themselves off to some other occupation that they can do better before very long. It may not seem like much--but it is a far better basis for thinking about problems like the recruitment and assessment and retention of teaching faculty than the prevailing conventionalities.