AMERICAN TEACHER
Documentary
Directed by: Vanessa Roth
Narrated by: Matt Damon
Anyone who’s even tried to have a conversation about the current state of public education in this country quickly finds out how complex and systemic the problems are and just why it’s so difficult to do anything quickly to improve the situation.
Vanessa Roth’s documentary, AMERICAN TEACHER focuses on the impact that budget cuts, increased classroom size, and the increasing tenuousness of teaching as a viable and economically sound profession with a singular thesis: increase the pay of teachers to allow them to focus more on teaching and their students so they wouldn’t have to take the little income they make and put it back into their classrooms on basic supplies, or like some of the other teachers profiled in the film, take second jobs or leave the profession entirely to keep themselves and their families financially afloat.
The film profiles four teachers from the country Harvard graduate and New Jersey elementary school teacher Rhena Jasey; 7th grade Texas gym coach and history teacher Erik Benner; pregnant Brooklyn 1st grade teacher Jamie Fidler, and Jonathan Dearman, a former teacher from a predominantly African-American high school in San Francisco. Each of them discuss why they went into the profession and we get to see the struggles that the current educational environment has placed on them and on their personal lives as well as the impact of the bureaucracy of education complicates things even further.
The one thing that the film really does do well is really illustrate how demanding, both intellectually and oftentimes emotionally, teaching is. I can say from personal experience that the overwhelming majority of the public doesn’t really have an understanding of how complicated teaching is – at any grade level – and AMERICAN TEACHER really does paint this picture, however bleak, very well. People never realize that teachers are making decisions about how to relay information at almost every moment of the day, having to change their strategies on the fly to accommodate different groups of students or having to start from scratch in the middle of a lesson because something isn’t working. For that, I think Roth really deserves praise.
However, the various talking heads that come up in the film talking about educational policy throughout the film actually detract from what should have been Roth’s main idea: that good teachers are incredibly passionate and even more difficult to come by and that something needs to be done to preserve these people and their positions because it’s our children who ultimately pay for it. This is because these other voices don’t add to the conversation, but they make you feel like you’re being lectured, so any motivation to rise up and demand change is inflated.
Education is still an incredibly important issue and something that needs to be a part of the national conversation, but this film never speaks loudly enough to add to it. I’d suggest doing an educational double feature by watching this film and WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, which presents its information in a more engaging way and focuses more on the impact on students, in order to get a more holistic picture of the problems in public education. Just have some prozac handy.
