Chalk

Once upon a time, I thought I might become a high school teacher. It's hard to understand how I ever got this remarkable idea, especially when you consider that it occurred to me while I was a high school student myself. Nothing I knew about either my teachers (with a couple of exceptions) or my fellow students should have led me to believe that I would enjoy teaching. I guess I liked history and math, and naively believed that it would therefore be fun to teach those subjects to kids.

Seeing the movie Chalk would have swept away any such illusions. I could have seen myself as Mr. Lowrey, a shy first-year history teacher, standing nervous and tongue-tied before a restless, giggling class.

Lots of movies show high school from the kids' perspectives. Chalk gives us the teachers' side. It follows Mr. Lowrey and three other teachers through a school year at an urban Texas high school. The film, co-written by two former teachers, uses the "mockumentary" format, and does it so realistically that I could easily believe it was a true documentary. The lines and action are spontaneous and unforced. These are not professional actors playing cute high school kids, brimming over with witty one-liners. The girls are usually obese and unattractive; the boys are pimply, in need of shaves, and sullen. Most of all, the students look desperately in need of sleep.

For the teachers, the school year is a wasteland of long days, hostile or indifferent students, conflicts among themselves and with the administration. A broken copier or a "stolen" stapler is enough to push them over the edge.

Nevertheless, each of the four featured teachers makes personal progress during the year, and each develops some rapport with his or her students. We are given to understand that some learning by the kids does occur during the year, although we never see how it happens. This is not a Hollywood movie. None of the teachers even faintly resembles Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

I left the movie with enormous respect for the underpaid and overworked teaching profession. Although the movie gave some reason to question the quality of the education that the teachers themselves had received, it is clear that even the less sympathetic of the teachers cared deeply about the students and about their profession.

My short-lived desire to be a teacher was not without idealism, but it was an idealism on behalf of the academic subjects that I thought I wanted to teach. But for the vast majority of real high school teachers, their devotion is to the kids themselves -- somehow, anyhow, begging, enticing and forcing them to learn the very basic information they will need for life after graduation. As Mr. Lowrey remarks, as his year in hell comes to a close, "teaching is hard work." It is also extremely valuable work that deserves far better compensation, and far more respect than it receives from the rest of us.

One half of all new teachers quit the profession within their first three years. This movie shows us why. It was left up in the air whether Mr. Lowrey would sign the contract offered him for his second year.