The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020
Dead poets
Dead poets and wonder boys
Academic critics have pointed to a remarkably consistent and troubling image of the teacher in the movies. They argue that in portraying the good teacher as an iconoclast who struggles against an uncaring system, Hollywood ends up depicting most educators as incompetents or functionaries—as the dead wood in the faculty lounge or the drones in the head office. The profession is damned as a few heroic exceptions to its norms are praised. Teacher features thus tend to follow a kind of Wild West narrative—as the lone teacher strides into school, stares down bureaucrats, stands up to troublemakers, and speaks out for students.
The archetypical rendering of the teacher as hero is Peter Weir’s 1988 Dead Poets Society. Critics of how teachers have been shown in movies—William Ayers (1994), Kevin Dettmar (2014), and Henry Giroux (2002) among them—have returned over and over to this film with a sort of dread fascination. (I realize I am adding to that list here.) Set in the 1950s at a New England prep school for boys, Dead Poets chronicles the efforts of a young English teacher, John Keating, to get his students to see books and ideas not as mere schoolwork but as the stuff of life. Carpe diem is his motto and Walt Whitman his hero. Much of the power of the film comes from the bravura performance of Robin Williams as Mr. Keating. Because, really, who wouldn’t want Robin Williams as an English teacher? And Keating does indeed inspire many students, who take on his tastes and enthusiasms, forming the Dead Poets Society, a group that meets secretly at night to smoke, drink, and talk about poetry, music, girls, and life—kind of a teenage version of bohemia. But Keating’s irreverent manner also rankles many colleagues and parents, and when one of his students commits suicide, this is used as a pretext to fire him.
Unlike many movies in which the profession of a character is used simply as color or backstory, Dead Poets Society is fascinated by Keating as a teacher. Indeed, we learn very little about Keating outside of his role in the classroom. I suspect that this forms a strong part of the film’s appeal. The man is the work; for John Keating, teaching is not a job but an avocation.
Three scenes in the first half of the movie define what it sees as the genius of Keating’s teaching. The first comes on the opening day of school, when Keating leads the students out of their classroom and into a hallway, where they gaze at display cases filled with trophies and photos from the past—only to be reminded by Keating that these were all won by boys who, though once young like them, have long since grown old and died. “We are food for worms, lads . . . Seize the day!” he whispers urgently to them (0:11). Talking among themselves as they leave this first class, the students pronounce Keating “weird, but different.” The next scene occurs when Keating denounces a stuffy critical preface to the class poetry anthology as “excrement” and orders his students to rip those pages from their books—which they do tentatively at first but soon with abandon, tossing the torn-out pages into a wastebasket that Keating, egging them on, carries about the room (0:21). The third and most famous (or notorious) scene shows Keating leaping onto his desk in the middle of a class lecture in order, as he tells his students, “to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.” He then directs them to climb, one by one, onto his desk, to look around for themselves before jumping back down again. Once each of them has done so, he tells the class that their next assignment, due on Monday, is to “compose a poem of your own, an original work” (0:43).
The episodes following this third scene are the only ones in the movie in which we watch a student actually trying to do some schoolwork. They show us Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), an earnest student who clearly wants to answer Keating’s call to write his own verse, as he struggles to compose a poem. We see a loose-leaf page filled with scribbling and scratch-outs, which Todd hides from his friends, and, finally, a late-night moment of anguish as he crumples up the paper he has been working on all day and tosses it away. The next morning in class, we first watch one student read a mediocre love poem, which Keating praises, and then another who reads a juvenile couplet, which Keating excuses. Then he turns to Todd, who has nothing. Keating leads him to the front of the class, where he demands that Todd utter a Whitmanesque “barbaric yawp.” Then he circles Todd, prodding and cajoling him before the class, somehow coaxing a spontaneous and improbable stream of free verse from the boy. Overcome, Keating embraces Todd in the front of the room, telling him “don’t you forget this” (0:57).
But what has actually happened? Todd has learned little about how to write a poem, except perhaps to howl in anxious if eloquent pain. Keating never shows any interest in or awareness of his student’s drafts, cross-outs, and revisions. The lesson he teaches is less in writing than in living. What he has to offer is himself. And that he does repeatedly. Throughout Dead Poets Society, students do whatever Keating tells them to—leaning expectantly toward the display case to hear voices from the past, ripping the pages out of their books, jumping onto a desk and off of it (“like lemmings,” as even Keating notes), marching in unison when he orders and strutting eccentrically when he tells them otherwise. In between, they gaze mutely at their teacher—in one rapt close-up after the other. But they also form a society to talk about books and ideas, write poetry and play music, and question authority. What they are learning, that is, for both good and bad, is how to be like John Keating.
I don’t think I know of a teaching movie whose reception has been more divided than Dead Poets Society. When I talk about the film with teachers, I can rely on hearing one of them say at some point, “I’m not jumping up on my desk.” But when I talk with students, I get the strong sense that they wish more of us might. If the stance of academics toward the film has been consistently skeptical or even hostile, most popular reviews of the film on its release were enthusiastic, including those by serious critics like Stanley Kaufmann (1989) and Pauline Kael (1989), and Dead Poets Society continues to receive high marks on internet fan sites. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards in 1990 and won for Best Screenplay (by Tom Schulman). I still recall the evening I first went to see Dead Poets Society and felt the crowd of moviegoers around me respond with laughter and warmth to scenes that made me shift uneasily in my seat. I’ve taught the film several times since—and many students have greeted it as an old favorite, while new viewers have almost always cited it as a highlight of the semester. And almost everyone I’ve talked with about my work on this book has soon mentioned Dead Poets Society.
The difference is that most non-teachers say they really like the movie and most teachers say they don’t. Let me be clear. I agree with the critics of Dead Poets Society. You can’t simply tell new teachers that their job is to be unorthodox and alluring. Most of us aren’t up to such a task, and even if we were, the aim of teaching shouldn’t be to foster a cult of personality. Still, though, I think we need not simply to resist but to build upon the attraction of Dead Poets Society. What does the film promise its viewers that is so powerful? Is there any way real teachers can deliver on that promise?
Dead Poets Society strives to connect the world of ideas and books to everyday life. In this film, reading and writing matter. Invoking Whitman, Keating tells his students, huddled around him in the classroom, that “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse” (0:26). That is powerful stuff, and the film’s many close-up shots of students gazing awestruck at Keating reinforce the message. But the weakness of Keating’s pedagogy is that it sticks at the level of exhortation. Keating inspires, incites, provokes, but we don’t see him doing any actual work with students as they struggle to develop their voices as writers.
Rather than reject Keating, then, I think we need to continue his work, to push it a step further—to argue that a good teacher not only encourages students to talk, write, and question but also helps them do all those things better. The problem with John Keating as a teacher is not that he is impossibly charismatic and inspirational but that he is only charismatic and inspirational. Similarly, the problem with Dead Poets Society is not that it misrepresents teachers but that it shows such little interest in the work of students. We can out-Keating Keating. We can tell students that, like John Keating, we care deeply about what they have to say but that, unlike him, we are willing to demonstrate this care in how we work with them as writers.
The figure of the dead poet has recurred in movies about teaching since the 1950s. Rick Dadier in Blackboard Jungle (1955), Mark Thackeray in To Sir, with Love (1967), Sylvia Barrett in Up the Down Staircase (1967), Katherine Anne Watson in Mona Lisa Smile (2003), Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers (2007). These are movies about young and passionate teachers who buck the system, connect with students, and work hard and selflessly on their behalf. But while there’s good reason to be skeptical of a view of teaching that stops there, as all of these movies do, we also need to acknowledge its power. Dead poets succeed as teachers because they earn the trust and affection of students. While such movies may mistake a starting point of teaching for its end, we slight that starting point at our peril. It may well be that you can’t teach writing without first connecting with writers.
In an insightful piece titled “The Professors of History,” the film scholar Dana Polan (1996) notes how movies tend to caricature science professors as socially inept geniuses who are more at home with their computers and lab equipment than with other people. Still, Polan observes, scientists are also imagined in the movies as having access to arcane and useful forms of knowledge, of being able to create monsters and cures, theorems and rocket ships. Humanities professors, on the other hand, are rarely shown in the movies as possessing any sort of specialized knowledge. What they know about instead is people, feeling, life. Urbane and charming, their effects are felt not on the world but on the minds—and often the bodies—of students. In contrast to the dispassionate inquiry of science, the teaching of literature and writing is portrayed as a kind of dance or seduction. Scientists study the world; humanists move students. (Polan goes on in his essay to argue that the movies show history professors as caught in the middle, lacking both the authority of scientists and the personal magnetism of humanists.)
The dead poet embodies this charged and dynamic view of humanist teaching. It is striking how much of movie pedagogy is physical. Teacher features are filled with out-of-class excursions and events—trips to museums and ball fields, guest speakers, parties, dances, bake sales. And the dead poet as teacher is almost always shown in motion. Keating strides about his classroom and leaps upon the furniture. The turning point of Freedom Writers comes when Erin Gruwell dares students to step up to a line she has taped down the middle of the classroom. Later she dances, clumsily but enthusiastically, with them. The manly heroes of Blackboard Jungle and To Sir, with Love have cathartic fistfights with bullies that earn them the respect of other students. And To Sir, with Love ends with a stiff but affectionate dance between teacher and student, Sidney Poitier and Lulu. While some of all this activity might be traced back to the simple need to keep things moving onscreen, I suspect there is more to it than that. Dead poet movies insist on linking ideas to bodies and actions.
A key task of the dead poet as teacher, then, is to set students in motion. And so, while we rarely watch dead poets respond to student work, we often see them assign it. In Freedom Writers, for instance, we watch and listen as Erin Gruwell (played by Hillary Swank) describes, patiently and in considerable detail, how she wants students to write in the copybooks she is giving them as journals, what she will or will not read, where the books will be stored, and so on. It’s actually quite a lot of teacher-talk to sit through for a popular movie, but then the pace quickens. We soon read with Gruwell (through voice-over) the spontaneous, movingly detailed, and seemingly unedited stories her students write in their journals. And then we watch as they work on computers to transcribe those handwritten journal entries into the stories that will become the Freedom Writers book. (Many of these stories were incorporated into a 2007 spin-off book, edited by the actual Erin Gruwell whose work as a teacher inspired the movie.) Throughout this process, Gruwell cheers students on and lobbies school bureaucrats for support. But at no point do we see her offer students advice about how to shape their stories or translate their experiences into language. Her intellectual work as a teacher, that is, seems to come to an end once she has given students a reason to write.
But that was always Gruwell’s aim—to inspire, to help students see that they have something to say. To move students, dead poets have to entertain, to perform. They are not anti-intellectual; on the contrary, they want to excite students about writing and ideas. But neither do they seem much interested in the details of actual intellectual work. Dead poets are young, attractive, energetic, committed, irreverent—in a word, sexy. But the question is unavoidable: What happens as the dead poet grows old?