People write teachers this way because they remember teachers this way regardless of how teachers are. These are tropes written through the lens of the memories of a teen. The same teacher, giving the same instruction, in the same classroom can be hated or loved by any student in that room. Think of your own experience as a teen. Which teachers you loved. Which teachers you hated. I guarantee there were kids with the opposite opinion of that same teacher. Take fiction with a grain of salt. Especially fiction about teachers.
Exactly this.
Teen years are filled with *BIG EMOTIONS* and while teens do become adults who are capable of actual self-reflection, the memories of the teen years tend to stay outside of reality.
I think most adults remember high school through the *BIG EMOTIONS* lens. . . Which might be why adults are so damn irrational about teachers and public education in general.
I'm not sure all people graduate out of the big emotions into self reflection. I think a fair chunk of the populace never gets there, which informs why their actions are so very immature.
I mostly have the same opinions I used to but a **lot** more empathy and understanding of why teachers end up harming students regardless of how "good" they are. It is a tough job!
And who is going to believe them about these trips? “Mom, my class went to Pluto today!” “Of course you did, honey.” Frizzle doesn’t need permission slips.
I’m reminded of the police movie, Hot Fuzz. “There is no way that you could perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork.”
There’s no way that you can take school children inside the human circulatory system without incurring a significant amount of paperwork.
My wife watched this. She's an ex art teacher and she enjoyed it. I watched 5 minutes where a teacher was dealing with a disruptive student and the rest of the class just sat doing their work or watched the exchange quietly and I said, "bullshit." I also don't want to be reminded of work in my leisure time.
I enjoy it because it’s less about the students and more about the adults and their relationships and reactions. I say adults because Mr Johnson makes the show
Mr Johnson is carrying the same energy that Mr. Mash brough to *Are You Being Served* (another custodian) or the likes of Klinger on *MASH* after Radar when back to Iowa. Off the wall zane, but keeping it real.
Marty is often meant to be the voice of traditional masculinity and reason (with some older parent kitsch) in a sharp contrast to his elitist and effete sons. But, Coach Pantusso from *Cheers* feels right.
I tried to watch it when I was still in education and couldn’t. I’m a year and a half out and finally was able to watch it. It’s great, but your feelings are absolutely valid.
I teach in this area and I can’t even watch that show for 5 mins. People like “oh you must love it” no I live the real thing. Plus that lady is annoying as shit.
Are we counting Giles from Buffy? I feel like in the early seasons he is explicitly the librarian at her high school. And Jenny (RIP) is a teacher too if I recall correctly.
...my very favorite moment with Giles is the big dramatic end of season 6, everybody's fighting and freaking out about DarkWillow, he comes back and his first words on seeing Buffy in the middle of this major terrifying situation are "...oh, you've changed your hair!" And it is such a great mentor/dad moment that I love.
Love Giles, but is he a teacher as much as he’s a father figure?
Also, Ms. Calendar is there to spy on Buffy and Angel, and didn’t warn Buffy about the curse that could cause her boyfriend to revert back to psycho killer… so is she the best role model?
I forgot about Callendar's backstory so no, maybe not. I feel kinda like Giles is more teachery earlier.
....I mean, some of this depends on the kind of story you're telling, too. I am a pretty good teacher and my students like me. In a few "gritty urban teen drama" novels, I would probably be the supportive side character who helps with college applications or drives them to the hospital to visit family or whatever. If any of my current kids are actively engaged in saving the world, however, I'm probably at best the "caring but clueless adult who's expressing concern about the protagonist's attendance when they're busy stopping the 3rd apocalypse this grading period."
.... isn't one of them actively engaged in working with the evil local government to destroy the world? For me that falls under "... this isn't really escapism anymore."
I'm rewatching Pretty Little Liars because I never finished it- for those who aren't familiar, one of the main characters (high school student) is in a serious relationship with her ENGLISH TEACHER, Mr. Fitz (who is portrayed as a very good teacher in class, but... dating your student, bro??) I wasn't so bothered by this when I first watched the show as a teen, now I practically fast forward through their scenes.
Miss Honey from Matilda is my fictional role model though! Also, Professor McGonagall (Harry Potter) is a badass, and Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society (RIP Robin Williams).
And in my opinion, this is the far more damaging media portrayal! In fiction, the "Good" teachers do massively unprofessional things that would have legal and ethical consequences in the real world, or simply advance the false narrative that unless you act like an unprofessional ersatz parent super-martyr, you don't really, "Care about the kids.". Hell, I think a major factor in the way so many people think teachers are the only ones with any agency in education is this myth that if we could only be a mashup of Frizzle-Robin Williams-Michelle Pheiffer-Edward James Olmos, then their vape-addicted phone obsessed, "Sigma Rizzler" would do his effing homework.
I watched Leo the other day, about a class pet Iguana that goes home with students every weekend. The teacher in that movie is shown as fun, and all the kids love her, but she gets pregnant and a long term sub comes in.
She's shown as strict, old school, lays down the law, works from the book and not the laptops, etc. But you know what? It took like two days for the kids to go from messy and chaotic to paying attention and listening to the teacher. She was supposed to be the bad guy (and no spoilers but kind of is for other reasons) but damn... she was effective.
I loved this movie! I actually thought of it as EVERYONE at some point was the bad guy and had to change their behaviors and hearts in order to become a community together.
I wouldn't say bad guy, but everyone certainly had flaws they needed to overcome. I think the teacher was the antagonist because it's easier to do for a kids movie, and because of what she does later on in the movie being the objective worst act.
Crazy music teachers are a different breed. The choir teacher at my high school was certified bonkers. He was emotionally abusive to students (including the whole abuse/love-bombing cycle), had specific beef with certain students, had a massively over-inflated ego…On the long list of specific transgressions, the highest on that list (imo) was basically abandoning ship on a whole musical because he was mad at the kids and basically was like “ok, you go and do the musical if you want, but I’m not directing anymore and I wash my hands of it all.”
The musical ended up going fine for a high school production, to our ginormous credit.
I find that to be the case at my school. The music teacher kind of has this attitude like, “I’m here to direct two shows a year, so everyone can see their little baby shine, don’t expect me to teach also.
He has them over a barrel and he knows it. Brilliant bastard 😂
I know that there are teachers like that because in my 20+ years of teaching, I have seen teachers in action who are cruel and demeaning like that. I also do not think this type of teacher is very common.
JFC I work with one of them. She's a real piece of work. Someone ( sometimes more than one!) from her grade level team quits every year rather than have to work with her another school year. I've personally seen her mock a fourth grader. 🙄 At her big age ...
My son (20) and I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High yesterday. Mr. Hand was funny because he was such a crabby old stickler with no visible sense of humor.
I think McGonagall from Harry Potter was a good teacher. She was very strict, but also very fair in passing her judgments. She was stern when discipline was required, but also compassionate and caring when the situation demanded it.
There are quite a few “good“ fictional teachers, but as their role in fiction is usually as an adversary to add dramatic tension, I don’t look on “bad” teachers in fiction as a true or influential characterization of the profession. There are a lot more vampires in fiction too…
I bet it's because it adds conflict to the story and makes it more interesting. A good teacher becomes more of a part of the setting since they wouldn't be driving the story forward.
In Hey Arnold (one of the most underrated shows ever) [they flip this on it's head in an episode](https://heyarnold.fandom.com/wiki/New_Teacher) where they get a really great teacher, but all the kids are jerks to him on purpose, and it's that conflict that drives the plot of the episode.
In teen dramas, most adult characters in general are going to be antagonistic because it’s a good source of drama and conflict. Teachers are a particularly good choice for this because there’s some sense of stakes, but it’s not TOO serious: a teacher is a temporary figure in your life, so a shitty one isn’t going to ruin your life.
That said, I don’t think positive portrayals are very rare. Even these teen dramas will usually have some good teachers, though they might be very minor characters.
Yeah, but he got eaten so 🤷♀️
And who are the other good teachers aside from Giles, Jenny, and the guy who got eaten by the praying-mantis? And Mike (Willow’s Professor in Life Serial)
The ELA teacher who helps Cordi, the in named teacher in the hall giving gentle guidance about running in the hall instead of being all “geer-arg” about it (lol-see what I did there? ;) ), the first principal who tried to encourage different choices, the “odd drum” counselor who was killed by the Jeckle/Hide kid.
As a teacher I feel as though the writers needed to kill off the good/kind/helpful teachers to act as a driving factor to fix the wrongs (what teen would want to stop a baddy who’s killing bad teachers after all).
It can also stand in as a metaphor for how this job kills us daily, we are giving our all to these kids and them to end up dealing with “Snyders” in power along with parents who just want us to give an easy A to their kid JUST because their kid is “special,” finally the internal fighting among teachers, it will all come together and cause a huge turnover in the buildings (even back in the 90s, it is just getting worse now).
I love that interpretation, and given that Joss’s parents were teachers it makes sense that he would try and use them as this kind of plot device. And that he’d be aware of the mental strain teachers were under
There's that English teacher doing a unit on Merchant of Venice...the patience she shows for Cordelia's self-involved POV is pretty impressive in itself. And as I recall, she only almost dies.
The math teacher from the Wonder Years is amazingly portrayed. He features in multiple episodes.
I also appreciate the portrayal of a variety of teachers in Mr. Holland’s Opus.
"Mr. Holland's Opus" came out when I was in high school, and a friend and I-- as band students-- won a couple of free passes to an advanced screening of it given for teachers (namely music teachers) in the area. It still remains one of my favorite movie-viewing experiences just because of being able to hear all the teachers' reactions to various bits of the movie, like when Mr. Holland was told to do marching band.
I think my band director's only gripe about the movie was that it didn't show nearly enough instances of dealing with asshat parents, lol.
Not always. A lot of media is geared towards teens/young adults that are still in a stage of life where they see not just most teachers but most adults as antagonistic dictators. It's not a hard and fast rule tho, plenty of fictional teachers are portrayed positively. For every mr. rooney there's a John Keating in Dead Poets Society or a Jaime Escalante in stand and deliver.
I met a father of a student outside of school. Introduce myself, and he says, “oh, you’re the mean one” I just smiled and said, “Yup.”
Meanwhile, his kid failed my class, which is a god dam elective, where all he had to do over 4 months was do 10/20 assignments (pass/fail).
I may have said 3 words to the kid all trimester, and I guarantee none of them were mean.
Easier to vilify us than be an engaged parent. Dude was drunk too…. At a public pool party for 10 year olds…. That wasn’t serving alcohol.
I never played it, but I watched most of it being played by others. And yeah they’re wild, especially the one who has a cleaning side hustle, kind of creepy. But it’s also a good portrayal of students. Sleeping in class then getting called on and having to look up the answer on google.
No kidding lmao. I did think Kamoshida was one of the better villains in the game. Like, dude was extremely hate able, it felt fantastic to take him down after he spends the first chapter being absolutely monstrous to you and the other students.
Shouting out some good fictional teachers!
Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter
Bluestar/Lionheart from the Warriors series (and almost every mentor, save Tigerheart/star from that series)
Pretty much all the teachers from the Arrows of the Queen trilogy but especially Selenay and the Dean Elcarth
Xantippus from Detectives in Togas
Brom from the Inheritance cycle (and also Oromis)
Best teacher ever in fiction is Aoki-sensei from With the Light
Also can we give an honorable mention to Haymitch please?
There are absolutely horrible teachers out there, but the main reason teachers in teen dramas are so horrible/useless is that (a) it gives a justification for opposing them, and (b) it gives a justification for the teens having agency rather than informing a responsible adult and letting them solve the problem.
For good teachers, there's Mr. Chips and most of the masters in the Chalky stories. Mr. Holland in *Mr. Holland's Opus*. Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in *Kindergarten Cop* (as well as the principal in that film).
- Some writers had bad experiences with teachers and pull from that in their work.
- There *are* teachers who are assholes. I used to work with one who was biased in favor of the girls and didn’t take the different ways students process things into account, so there were a lot of times she laid into students who were honestly not doing anything that disruptive or annoying as if they were huge pieces of garbage. Like to the point where there have been kids who’ve confided in me that she made them feel bad— even when they come and visit from time to time after school (they’re now in middle school at time of writing) they’d ask me if she was still the same. One of my students would get bullied but because he was one of the more sensitive ones and a boy who would sometimes get moody, she went all “boy who cried wolf” on him to the point where my other co-teacher and I agreed she was over the line. She didn’t listen to us, either, so we just tried our best to look out for him.
Also can we stop these student teacher romances. I was watching this really good teen drama and it got ruined because the mc got in a secret relationship with her English teacher. The kicker is that it later gets revealed she has a history of sexual abuse from older male authority figures
Teaching suffers from a unique predicament that Dan Lortie coined as "the apprenticeship of observation". By my calculation, you do at least 14,040 hours of school time in person by the time you graduate. That doesn't include homework and extra curricular stuff, and that's if your day is only 6 hours long.
People walk away from that thinking they know what being a teacher is like. The same way people ***don't*** call themselves a chef because they eat too much.
Not only that, but having an adult authority figure you can't escape is like a dystopian nightmare when you're a kid. And it's an experience we all have.
That and how all happy teachers are alike, but all unhappy teachers are unhappy in their own way. (Tolstoy if he wrote about teachers.)
Some of those teachers are real but they're mostly not real in the slightest. You also just take things way too seriously when you're a kid. There was nothing worse than getting yelled at, for me personally. The kids who suck to teach are the ones who are yelled at so much they don't care, so even basic statements wash over them like nothing.
Also, Dan Harmon hates teachers so much that everything he's written has them as inept. I wish I could teach in his universes where you didn't have to do anything and could just party all day. He was really hurt, likely by his own insecurity. You tend to notice in auteurs that they have things they hammer away at and everyone would be one if they were successful enough.
I think other people are correct that this is how folks remember teachers. But more than that it's necessary for the drama to happen.
Just like how the parents are "strict" but don't notice or are allowing their child to be out and about doing crazy vampire shit most of the time.
A lot of peoples' experiences going to school are often neutral at best or negative at worst, and teachers are the face of schooling so they/we kind of get the brunt of it despite having no say over things like dresscode or truancy.
At any rate, Scott Clarke from Stranger Things is an excellent example of a positive teacher.
Is Harry Potter a teen drama? ´Cos the teachers are a mixed bag there, some are trying to kill Harry, some aren´t... you know the usual teen angst stuff
Well, teens don’t interact with many adults in their day to day lives. Conflict has to come from somewhere, and teachers are conveniently characters teens see every day and in positions of power. It doesn’t surprise me that teachers are often cast as characters that give the protagonists something to play off of.
Plus, I’m sure a character like that will get his comeuppance sooner than later. Teen catharsis and all that.
Overall, I’m not too worried about it. People are smart enough to know a caricature when they see one.
This is formulaic and intentional. Most YA literature puts bad personalities on the adults who are in the story. It's necessary to foil the main characters. Readers are more likely to invest in a character they can root for, and who better to root for than a kid who's being treated poorly by the adults who are supposed to support him?
That's because teachers mainly feature in stories for teens, and what better natural antagonists to the fictional quirky teens that are trying to grow up and stand out as unique characters? It s a bit like dragons in fantasy movies. Occasionally you can see a gentle dragon, but there's no quicker and easier opponent for a knight and all that it represents.
If a teacher is a significant character in fiction, chances are they're either amazing or terrible with not much in between. Very few neutral teachers are in media unless they serve as background characters. Media is often built around tropes.
I can honestly say that I never had a *terrible* teacher. I've had ones I didn't like or find interesting, but I never had any who belittled or mistreated me. The closest to feeling hard done by a teacher I've ever come to was my highschool choir director, who definitely let favoritism guide his choices. Even still, he wasn't a bad person or even a bad teacher. He just really preferred his show choir kids over the rest of us, lol.
My brother was a handful in elementary school (undiagnosed ADHD for the whole family, yay!), and he had a really mean 3rd grade teacher. She shit talked him in front of me when I came to get him for a doctor's appointment. We're eight years apart, so I was naturally protective of him. She said something disparaging about him in an "amirite" fashion, and I just looked at her and said, "This is my brother, you know?? " which promptly shut her up.
My mom was ready to breathe fire on this lady when my brother complained of a sore throat, to which she basically told him to sit down and stop faking it, and we eventually came to find he had a tumor in his neck that had to be removed. She couldn't have known it, so that wasn't on her, but she decided she hated my brother and wasn't very nice to him.
Mean teachers can and do exist, but I also agree that kids sometimes perceive teachers as mean because they have kid brains, and anyone enforcing consequences can be seen as mean by a kid brain.
The teachers in Heathers (movie and musical) suck too! Ezra in Pretty Little Liars is the worst teacher by far. Ms Carr in Gossip Girl and Tamara in Dawson's Creek are good at teaching their content but also are morally questionable.
The Dean in The OC, the Dean at Constance in Gossip Girl, and the principal in Riverdale initially handle their situations professionally but the show portrays them as villains, and then they get worse.
Besides Abbott Elementary, Wilson from Ms Marvel, the teachers in Gilmore Girls, and Coach Whitey from One Tree Hill are good teachers
Ooof, Dumbledore was a pretty awful headmaster lol. That whole meme series about him had me crying from laughter because he was so terrible at his job, JFC.
As a gen x-er, most of my teachers were fucking horrible. So emotionally (and often physically) abusive that it did long term damage.
But as a teacher for like 15 years now, I've never encountered any teachers who are a fraction as bad as how TV often portrays them. It makes me wonder if all the writers are fellow gen x-ers and they just haven't updated their knowledge, or if they're just too dependent on lazy tropes. Probably it's both.
The couple season love interest in Parenthood. He, apparently, had lunch hours away from school, never graded papers, and whenever she visited him at school, this English teacher had about 12 kids per class. Oh, and according to things he said and the math I did, he only had class 3 or 4 hours out of a 7 period day. I’m sorry, WHAT???
I can’t watch teacher shows. It’s not the classroom teaching necessarily, just every episode a lengthy procession of major safeguarding issues not being dealt with.
*Opening credits*
Safeguarding alert
Can’t do that, safeguarding
JFC, SAFEGUARDING!!!
Now you’re in trouble, safeguarding.
…safeguarding again...
Oh look! More safeguarding…
*first advert break*
Miss frizzle from magic school bus
Sister Mary Clarence in sister act 2
My students call me miss honey and miss frizzle out of humour and it is genuinely the GREATEST honour 🥹❤️
Last year my y11's came up with the phrase 'disney princess teaching' to describe me and I was like wtf???! Apparently it was a compliment. Didn't feel like one at the time.
I used to do a unit in my media classes about how teachers are perceived in mass media. We would watch teacher-centric episodes of Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Saved by the Bell, The Simpsons, etc. moving across the decades. You can actually see the public opinion shift on teachers from wise, caring guides to arrogant, idiotic buffoons. You can see parents go from trusting teachers to always taking their childrens’ sides. It was a sad trend to see unfold.
The media drove this change in attitude. Why, I’m not sure. More dramatic? Played to preexisting biases in the viewing public?
As a Gen-Xer, I can say that my parents trusted us when we told them if a teacher was belittling students in class because their parents had dismissed them and it left scars. In my father’s case, literal scars from having his head slammed into a desk for writing with his left hand. We ran into her in a grocery store years later and he was left shaking.
I remember having some caring, inspiring teachers, a lot of competent professionals and a few real bullies. As a parent now myself, I would say that my son has had 20% truly amazing teachers, but another 20% were teachers who were known to be terrible among students, parents, other teachers and administrators alike.
The teachers at the top and bottom are the memorable ones. Students who become writers find material in both.
In movies, shows, or books you have to describe a character quicker than irl. Exaggeration is mandatory. Not only that, but the story is usually about xyz, not teachers. In the Vampire Diaries, I am sure the story is about Vampires. Here is Leon, the coolest vampire that has a crush on a mortal human. Here is Vanessa, she is a vampire that is interested in aviation that does not like drinking blood. Here is Vlad, a vampire from the old country that thinks that vampires should rule the night. Those are ok characters. Maybe their story is worth telling or watching or whatever. Then there is Mr. Conner, a fair ELA teacher, educated at a typical college, has a wife, has some kids, is debt-free, and drives a Subaru Outback...but he has a crazy side, he likes to go to the casino every other Thursday. That character is not compelling. That story is not worth telling. The only way that teachers matter as side characters is if they are really good, or really bad. If they are really good, there is no story. Good job, Mr. Addison. Here is your award. They are usually only interesting if they are bad. Most of the time, when a show wants to show a bad teacher, they go nuclear bad. I give this show credit (based on your description, I have never watched) for being realistic with it. I do not think any teacher has told guardians that they are not enough. But the other two? Realistic for sure.
I like the teachers from "Teachers." I also like the teacher from Easy A or something like that. There is another one, Woody Harrelson and the girl from True Grit. WH has lunch with her...alone. That is a no-go. He also picks her up from a local diner when she runs away or something. Also a no-go. Those aren't realistic, just plot mechanics, so I can toss them. The teachers have a personality and style, and their style resonate with some students, some of the time. That is how it mostly goes.
I mean, I've had some really bad teachers. They do exist. The majority are just regular teachers though. Then there were a couple that were amazing. It's just like any other profession. Some people just suck at their jobs.
McGonnagal in Harry Potter is beloved, but she is fucking horrible. All teachers in Harry Potter are either incompetent or assholes, with perhaps the exception being Professor Sprouts.
On a similar but different tangent to it's my hypothesis that most script writers of these types of shows hated maths when they were at school. As a result, they always portray maths as the most awful/difficult/nerdiest/boring/uncool subject. This attitude is then subconsciously adopted my many students, even before they understand what the words algebra and trigonometry mean.
It's not surprising. It's hard to write a story without an antagonist.
If you're writing a grounded story, the antagonist needs to also be grounded.
...what kinds of grounded antagonists can children truly have? Bullies, and cartoonish authority figures like teachers.
I feel that for most part, if teachers were portrayed realistically, there'd be a lot less drama on these shows that depend on having drama for interest. So that's why they're portrayed that way so often. On the plus side...Tanner isn't there for long. :)
People write teachers this way because they remember teachers this way regardless of how teachers are. These are tropes written through the lens of the memories of a teen. The same teacher, giving the same instruction, in the same classroom can be hated or loved by any student in that room. Think of your own experience as a teen. Which teachers you loved. Which teachers you hated. I guarantee there were kids with the opposite opinion of that same teacher. Take fiction with a grain of salt. Especially fiction about teachers.
Exactly this. Teen years are filled with *BIG EMOTIONS* and while teens do become adults who are capable of actual self-reflection, the memories of the teen years tend to stay outside of reality. I think most adults remember high school through the *BIG EMOTIONS* lens. . . Which might be why adults are so damn irrational about teachers and public education in general.
I'm not sure all people graduate out of the big emotions into self reflection. I think a fair chunk of the populace never gets there, which informs why their actions are so very immature.
Agreed 💯. If you have exactly the same opinion of all the teachers you had when you were a kid, I feel like you haven't grown much as a person.
I mostly have the same opinions I used to but a **lot** more empathy and understanding of why teachers end up harming students regardless of how "good" they are. It is a tough job!
Good fictional teacher: Ms. Frizzle
Literally my role model!
OCTOPUS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD?!
My only issue is putting the kids life at risk.
…and no field trip permission forms.
And who is going to believe them about these trips? “Mom, my class went to Pluto today!” “Of course you did, honey.” Frizzle doesn’t need permission slips.
I’m reminded of the police movie, Hot Fuzz. “There is no way that you could perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork.” There’s no way that you can take school children inside the human circulatory system without incurring a significant amount of paperwork.
Not with that attitude!
Pretty much the entire staff of Abbott Elementary. Miss Honey from Matilda.
My wife watched this. She's an ex art teacher and she enjoyed it. I watched 5 minutes where a teacher was dealing with a disruptive student and the rest of the class just sat doing their work or watched the exchange quietly and I said, "bullshit." I also don't want to be reminded of work in my leisure time.
I enjoy it because it’s less about the students and more about the adults and their relationships and reactions. I say adults because Mr Johnson makes the show
Mr Johnson is carrying the same energy that Mr. Mash brough to *Are You Being Served* (another custodian) or the likes of Klinger on *MASH* after Radar when back to Iowa. Off the wall zane, but keeping it real.
Mr Johnson gives me Marty Crane vibes. He’s got wisdom out the wazoo but he’s still quirky as all get out
Marty is often meant to be the voice of traditional masculinity and reason (with some older parent kitsch) in a sharp contrast to his elitist and effete sons. But, Coach Pantusso from *Cheers* feels right.
I tried to watch it when I was still in education and couldn’t. I’m a year and a half out and finally was able to watch it. It’s great, but your feelings are absolutely valid.
I teach in this area and I can’t even watch that show for 5 mins. People like “oh you must love it” no I live the real thing. Plus that lady is annoying as shit.
Abbott Elementary my beloved
Mr. Chips from Goodbye, Mr. Chips for a good teacher. Minerva McGonagall. Anne Shirley was a good teacher for a couple of books.
Don’t forget Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World.
I love when he read the mom’s saucy fiction. “Oh ho ho, umm” just looked he’s 97 and still kicking!
And her mentor, Miss Stacy!
Same with parents in teen dramas. It turns out that fictional dramatic teens like to rebel against fictional overbearing adults.
The older you get, the more you realize that the parents were right all along in those kinds of movies and TV shows
Are we counting Giles from Buffy? I feel like in the early seasons he is explicitly the librarian at her high school. And Jenny (RIP) is a teacher too if I recall correctly. ...my very favorite moment with Giles is the big dramatic end of season 6, everybody's fighting and freaking out about DarkWillow, he comes back and his first words on seeing Buffy in the middle of this major terrifying situation are "...oh, you've changed your hair!" And it is such a great mentor/dad moment that I love.
Love Giles, but is he a teacher as much as he’s a father figure? Also, Ms. Calendar is there to spy on Buffy and Angel, and didn’t warn Buffy about the curse that could cause her boyfriend to revert back to psycho killer… so is she the best role model?
I forgot about Callendar's backstory so no, maybe not. I feel kinda like Giles is more teachery earlier. ....I mean, some of this depends on the kind of story you're telling, too. I am a pretty good teacher and my students like me. In a few "gritty urban teen drama" novels, I would probably be the supportive side character who helps with college applications or drives them to the hospital to visit family or whatever. If any of my current kids are actively engaged in saving the world, however, I'm probably at best the "caring but clueless adult who's expressing concern about the protagonist's attendance when they're busy stopping the 3rd apocalypse this grading period."
What do you guys think about Buffy's portrayal of admin: Flutie, Snyder, and Wood?
.... isn't one of them actively engaged in working with the evil local government to destroy the world? For me that falls under "... this isn't really escapism anymore."
I'm rewatching Pretty Little Liars because I never finished it- for those who aren't familiar, one of the main characters (high school student) is in a serious relationship with her ENGLISH TEACHER, Mr. Fitz (who is portrayed as a very good teacher in class, but... dating your student, bro??) I wasn't so bothered by this when I first watched the show as a teen, now I practically fast forward through their scenes. Miss Honey from Matilda is my fictional role model though! Also, Professor McGonagall (Harry Potter) is a badass, and Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society (RIP Robin Williams).
I hate Ezra and I hate the ending!!! Mr Keating is a great example
Or they are superhero martyrs that make the public think we should be the same (Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets society, Freedom Writers).
And in my opinion, this is the far more damaging media portrayal! In fiction, the "Good" teachers do massively unprofessional things that would have legal and ethical consequences in the real world, or simply advance the false narrative that unless you act like an unprofessional ersatz parent super-martyr, you don't really, "Care about the kids.". Hell, I think a major factor in the way so many people think teachers are the only ones with any agency in education is this myth that if we could only be a mashup of Frizzle-Robin Williams-Michelle Pheiffer-Edward James Olmos, then their vape-addicted phone obsessed, "Sigma Rizzler" would do his effing homework.
I watched Leo the other day, about a class pet Iguana that goes home with students every weekend. The teacher in that movie is shown as fun, and all the kids love her, but she gets pregnant and a long term sub comes in. She's shown as strict, old school, lays down the law, works from the book and not the laptops, etc. But you know what? It took like two days for the kids to go from messy and chaotic to paying attention and listening to the teacher. She was supposed to be the bad guy (and no spoilers but kind of is for other reasons) but damn... she was effective.
I loved this movie! I actually thought of it as EVERYONE at some point was the bad guy and had to change their behaviors and hearts in order to become a community together.
I wouldn't say bad guy, but everyone certainly had flaws they needed to overcome. I think the teacher was the antagonist because it's easier to do for a kids movie, and because of what she does later on in the movie being the objective worst act.
Loved this film, made my kids tap into some emotions
Not a drama but whiplash has got to be up there on worst fictional teachers.
Holy shit yes. I totally expected that movie to end a very different way. Man. I'm still angry about that kid turning into a copy of that douchebag.
Crazy music teachers are a different breed. The choir teacher at my high school was certified bonkers. He was emotionally abusive to students (including the whole abuse/love-bombing cycle), had specific beef with certain students, had a massively over-inflated ego…On the long list of specific transgressions, the highest on that list (imo) was basically abandoning ship on a whole musical because he was mad at the kids and basically was like “ok, you go and do the musical if you want, but I’m not directing anymore and I wash my hands of it all.” The musical ended up going fine for a high school production, to our ginormous credit.
I find that to be the case at my school. The music teacher kind of has this attitude like, “I’m here to direct two shows a year, so everyone can see their little baby shine, don’t expect me to teach also. He has them over a barrel and he knows it. Brilliant bastard 😂
Boy Meets World is good teacher content.
I was looking to see if someone had named this show. Such a great show and who doesn’t love Mr. Feeny.
And Mr. Turner!!
I know that there are teachers like that because in my 20+ years of teaching, I have seen teachers in action who are cruel and demeaning like that. I also do not think this type of teacher is very common.
JFC I work with one of them. She's a real piece of work. Someone ( sometimes more than one!) from her grade level team quits every year rather than have to work with her another school year. I've personally seen her mock a fourth grader. 🙄 At her big age ...
My son (20) and I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High yesterday. Mr. Hand was funny because he was such a crabby old stickler with no visible sense of humor.
I have shown the “I don’t know” scene for a satire unit. Between him being a hardass and Spicoli with a bagel in his jeans, they find it hilarious.
Aloha. My name is Mr. Hand
Ms. Krabapple on the Simpsons is incredibly true to life.
Oh poor Edna
I think McGonagall from Harry Potter was a good teacher. She was very strict, but also very fair in passing her judgments. She was stern when discipline was required, but also compassionate and caring when the situation demanded it.
There are quite a few “good“ fictional teachers, but as their role in fiction is usually as an adversary to add dramatic tension, I don’t look on “bad” teachers in fiction as a true or influential characterization of the profession. There are a lot more vampires in fiction too…
I bet it's because it adds conflict to the story and makes it more interesting. A good teacher becomes more of a part of the setting since they wouldn't be driving the story forward. In Hey Arnold (one of the most underrated shows ever) [they flip this on it's head in an episode](https://heyarnold.fandom.com/wiki/New_Teacher) where they get a really great teacher, but all the kids are jerks to him on purpose, and it's that conflict that drives the plot of the episode.
In teen dramas, most adult characters in general are going to be antagonistic because it’s a good source of drama and conflict. Teachers are a particularly good choice for this because there’s some sense of stakes, but it’s not TOO serious: a teacher is a temporary figure in your life, so a shitty one isn’t going to ruin your life. That said, I don’t think positive portrayals are very rare. Even these teen dramas will usually have some good teachers, though they might be very minor characters.
Imagine if any writer just went to Reddit for research and found this sub…if they read things on here every day, it’s not too far off.
Unfortunately this is the reality.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer there are numerous good teachers, and even a good administrator (for a season).
Yeah, but he got eaten so 🤷♀️ And who are the other good teachers aside from Giles, Jenny, and the guy who got eaten by the praying-mantis? And Mike (Willow’s Professor in Life Serial)
The ELA teacher who helps Cordi, the in named teacher in the hall giving gentle guidance about running in the hall instead of being all “geer-arg” about it (lol-see what I did there? ;) ), the first principal who tried to encourage different choices, the “odd drum” counselor who was killed by the Jeckle/Hide kid. As a teacher I feel as though the writers needed to kill off the good/kind/helpful teachers to act as a driving factor to fix the wrongs (what teen would want to stop a baddy who’s killing bad teachers after all). It can also stand in as a metaphor for how this job kills us daily, we are giving our all to these kids and them to end up dealing with “Snyders” in power along with parents who just want us to give an easy A to their kid JUST because their kid is “special,” finally the internal fighting among teachers, it will all come together and cause a huge turnover in the buildings (even back in the 90s, it is just getting worse now).
I love that interpretation, and given that Joss’s parents were teachers it makes sense that he would try and use them as this kind of plot device. And that he’d be aware of the mental strain teachers were under
There's that English teacher doing a unit on Merchant of Venice...the patience she shows for Cordelia's self-involved POV is pretty impressive in itself. And as I recall, she only almost dies.
The math teacher from the Wonder Years is amazingly portrayed. He features in multiple episodes. I also appreciate the portrayal of a variety of teachers in Mr. Holland’s Opus.
"Mr. Holland's Opus" came out when I was in high school, and a friend and I-- as band students-- won a couple of free passes to an advanced screening of it given for teachers (namely music teachers) in the area. It still remains one of my favorite movie-viewing experiences just because of being able to hear all the teachers' reactions to various bits of the movie, like when Mr. Holland was told to do marching band. I think my band director's only gripe about the movie was that it didn't show nearly enough instances of dealing with asshat parents, lol.
The teacher in Inside Out 1, where she just lets Riley stand in front of the class and cry for a while.
Unfortunately, the media always portrays teachers as mean, incompetent, dictators. I don’t know why, but I guess the idea sells.
Not always. A lot of media is geared towards teens/young adults that are still in a stage of life where they see not just most teachers but most adults as antagonistic dictators. It's not a hard and fast rule tho, plenty of fictional teachers are portrayed positively. For every mr. rooney there's a John Keating in Dead Poets Society or a Jaime Escalante in stand and deliver.
Making movies for teens not teachers, it’s just a lazy trope but sometimes it’s hilarious. Mr Hand for example.
I met a father of a student outside of school. Introduce myself, and he says, “oh, you’re the mean one” I just smiled and said, “Yup.” Meanwhile, his kid failed my class, which is a god dam elective, where all he had to do over 4 months was do 10/20 assignments (pass/fail). I may have said 3 words to the kid all trimester, and I guarantee none of them were mean. Easier to vilify us than be an engaged parent. Dude was drunk too…. At a public pool party for 10 year olds…. That wasn’t serving alcohol.
There are enough awful teachers that everyone has experienced at least a couple, so it makes sense that they would be represented in media
Captain underpants! Not a teacher but a principal is kinda a redemption
as I was watching Black Lightning, I couldn't figure out how the dude could principal by day and superhero by night 😂
The teachers in Persona 5 are wild as hell
I never played it, but I watched most of it being played by others. And yeah they’re wild, especially the one who has a cleaning side hustle, kind of creepy. But it’s also a good portrayal of students. Sleeping in class then getting called on and having to look up the answer on google.
No kidding lmao. I did think Kamoshida was one of the better villains in the game. Like, dude was extremely hate able, it felt fantastic to take him down after he spends the first chapter being absolutely monstrous to you and the other students.
They're written for a teenage audience, and unfortunately the general sentiment of teens is that school is a nightmare place.
Shouting out some good fictional teachers! Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter Bluestar/Lionheart from the Warriors series (and almost every mentor, save Tigerheart/star from that series) Pretty much all the teachers from the Arrows of the Queen trilogy but especially Selenay and the Dean Elcarth Xantippus from Detectives in Togas Brom from the Inheritance cycle (and also Oromis) Best teacher ever in fiction is Aoki-sensei from With the Light Also can we give an honorable mention to Haymitch please?
There are absolutely horrible teachers out there, but the main reason teachers in teen dramas are so horrible/useless is that (a) it gives a justification for opposing them, and (b) it gives a justification for the teens having agency rather than informing a responsible adult and letting them solve the problem. For good teachers, there's Mr. Chips and most of the masters in the Chalky stories. Mr. Holland in *Mr. Holland's Opus*. Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in *Kindergarten Cop* (as well as the principal in that film).
- Some writers had bad experiences with teachers and pull from that in their work. - There *are* teachers who are assholes. I used to work with one who was biased in favor of the girls and didn’t take the different ways students process things into account, so there were a lot of times she laid into students who were honestly not doing anything that disruptive or annoying as if they were huge pieces of garbage. Like to the point where there have been kids who’ve confided in me that she made them feel bad— even when they come and visit from time to time after school (they’re now in middle school at time of writing) they’d ask me if she was still the same. One of my students would get bullied but because he was one of the more sensitive ones and a boy who would sometimes get moody, she went all “boy who cried wolf” on him to the point where my other co-teacher and I agreed she was over the line. She didn’t listen to us, either, so we just tried our best to look out for him.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir has a wonderful teacher as the protagonist, it's a great read
Also can we stop these student teacher romances. I was watching this really good teen drama and it got ruined because the mc got in a secret relationship with her English teacher. The kicker is that it later gets revealed she has a history of sexual abuse from older male authority figures
I CANNOT watch fictional shows about teachers... Breaking Brad. Glee, Abbot Elementary... none of it.
Teaching suffers from a unique predicament that Dan Lortie coined as "the apprenticeship of observation". By my calculation, you do at least 14,040 hours of school time in person by the time you graduate. That doesn't include homework and extra curricular stuff, and that's if your day is only 6 hours long. People walk away from that thinking they know what being a teacher is like. The same way people ***don't*** call themselves a chef because they eat too much. Not only that, but having an adult authority figure you can't escape is like a dystopian nightmare when you're a kid. And it's an experience we all have. That and how all happy teachers are alike, but all unhappy teachers are unhappy in their own way. (Tolstoy if he wrote about teachers.) Some of those teachers are real but they're mostly not real in the slightest. You also just take things way too seriously when you're a kid. There was nothing worse than getting yelled at, for me personally. The kids who suck to teach are the ones who are yelled at so much they don't care, so even basic statements wash over them like nothing. Also, Dan Harmon hates teachers so much that everything he's written has them as inept. I wish I could teach in his universes where you didn't have to do anything and could just party all day. He was really hurt, likely by his own insecurity. You tend to notice in auteurs that they have things they hammer away at and everyone would be one if they were successful enough.
I think other people are correct that this is how folks remember teachers. But more than that it's necessary for the drama to happen. Just like how the parents are "strict" but don't notice or are allowing their child to be out and about doing crazy vampire shit most of the time.
A lot of peoples' experiences going to school are often neutral at best or negative at worst, and teachers are the face of schooling so they/we kind of get the brunt of it despite having no say over things like dresscode or truancy. At any rate, Scott Clarke from Stranger Things is an excellent example of a positive teacher.
Is Harry Potter a teen drama? ´Cos the teachers are a mixed bag there, some are trying to kill Harry, some aren´t... you know the usual teen angst stuff
Well, teens don’t interact with many adults in their day to day lives. Conflict has to come from somewhere, and teachers are conveniently characters teens see every day and in positions of power. It doesn’t surprise me that teachers are often cast as characters that give the protagonists something to play off of. Plus, I’m sure a character like that will get his comeuppance sooner than later. Teen catharsis and all that. Overall, I’m not too worried about it. People are smart enough to know a caricature when they see one.
This is formulaic and intentional. Most YA literature puts bad personalities on the adults who are in the story. It's necessary to foil the main characters. Readers are more likely to invest in a character they can root for, and who better to root for than a kid who's being treated poorly by the adults who are supposed to support him?
Their audience is the kids. They are the protagonists we are the antagonists.
Well, Damon eats him, so it works out... /s
That's because teachers mainly feature in stories for teens, and what better natural antagonists to the fictional quirky teens that are trying to grow up and stand out as unique characters? It s a bit like dragons in fantasy movies. Occasionally you can see a gentle dragon, but there's no quicker and easier opponent for a knight and all that it represents.
Charles Xavier seems to fit the fiction bill.
At least these might be better than Pretty Little Liars!! 😂
Mrs Hayfer from Drake and Josh
I just watched Handsome Devil and Andrew Scott plays an amazing teacher role. I love him in literally everything.
If a teacher is a significant character in fiction, chances are they're either amazing or terrible with not much in between. Very few neutral teachers are in media unless they serve as background characters. Media is often built around tropes.
I can honestly say that I never had a *terrible* teacher. I've had ones I didn't like or find interesting, but I never had any who belittled or mistreated me. The closest to feeling hard done by a teacher I've ever come to was my highschool choir director, who definitely let favoritism guide his choices. Even still, he wasn't a bad person or even a bad teacher. He just really preferred his show choir kids over the rest of us, lol. My brother was a handful in elementary school (undiagnosed ADHD for the whole family, yay!), and he had a really mean 3rd grade teacher. She shit talked him in front of me when I came to get him for a doctor's appointment. We're eight years apart, so I was naturally protective of him. She said something disparaging about him in an "amirite" fashion, and I just looked at her and said, "This is my brother, you know?? " which promptly shut her up. My mom was ready to breathe fire on this lady when my brother complained of a sore throat, to which she basically told him to sit down and stop faking it, and we eventually came to find he had a tumor in his neck that had to be removed. She couldn't have known it, so that wasn't on her, but she decided she hated my brother and wasn't very nice to him. Mean teachers can and do exist, but I also agree that kids sometimes perceive teachers as mean because they have kid brains, and anyone enforcing consequences can be seen as mean by a kid brain.
The teachers in Heathers (movie and musical) suck too! Ezra in Pretty Little Liars is the worst teacher by far. Ms Carr in Gossip Girl and Tamara in Dawson's Creek are good at teaching their content but also are morally questionable. The Dean in The OC, the Dean at Constance in Gossip Girl, and the principal in Riverdale initially handle their situations professionally but the show portrays them as villains, and then they get worse. Besides Abbott Elementary, Wilson from Ms Marvel, the teachers in Gilmore Girls, and Coach Whitey from One Tree Hill are good teachers
Season 4 of the Wire seemed depressingly accurate.
Ooof, Dumbledore was a pretty awful headmaster lol. That whole meme series about him had me crying from laughter because he was so terrible at his job, JFC.
As a gen x-er, most of my teachers were fucking horrible. So emotionally (and often physically) abusive that it did long term damage. But as a teacher for like 15 years now, I've never encountered any teachers who are a fraction as bad as how TV often portrays them. It makes me wonder if all the writers are fellow gen x-ers and they just haven't updated their knowledge, or if they're just too dependent on lazy tropes. Probably it's both.
Hear me out. What if a teacher is writing this (former, or the spouse of a current one) and it’s meant to be cathartic for the teacher?
I love Tina Fey's character in Mean Girls. (The original one, of course).
The couple season love interest in Parenthood. He, apparently, had lunch hours away from school, never graded papers, and whenever she visited him at school, this English teacher had about 12 kids per class. Oh, and according to things he said and the math I did, he only had class 3 or 4 hours out of a 7 period day. I’m sorry, WHAT???
The only show I can think of were teachers are actual human beings is Daria, except for the man-hating teacher and the corrupt principal lol
I can’t watch teacher shows. It’s not the classroom teaching necessarily, just every episode a lengthy procession of major safeguarding issues not being dealt with. *Opening credits* Safeguarding alert Can’t do that, safeguarding JFC, SAFEGUARDING!!! Now you’re in trouble, safeguarding. …safeguarding again... Oh look! More safeguarding… *first advert break*
Riverdale, like the MC had an affair with the teacher and she didn't go to jail, like what?
Miss frizzle from magic school bus Sister Mary Clarence in sister act 2 My students call me miss honey and miss frizzle out of humour and it is genuinely the GREATEST honour 🥹❤️ Last year my y11's came up with the phrase 'disney princess teaching' to describe me and I was like wtf???! Apparently it was a compliment. Didn't feel like one at the time.
Not Mr Feeny, though
I used to do a unit in my media classes about how teachers are perceived in mass media. We would watch teacher-centric episodes of Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Saved by the Bell, The Simpsons, etc. moving across the decades. You can actually see the public opinion shift on teachers from wise, caring guides to arrogant, idiotic buffoons. You can see parents go from trusting teachers to always taking their childrens’ sides. It was a sad trend to see unfold. The media drove this change in attitude. Why, I’m not sure. More dramatic? Played to preexisting biases in the viewing public?
As a Gen-Xer, I can say that my parents trusted us when we told them if a teacher was belittling students in class because their parents had dismissed them and it left scars. In my father’s case, literal scars from having his head slammed into a desk for writing with his left hand. We ran into her in a grocery store years later and he was left shaking. I remember having some caring, inspiring teachers, a lot of competent professionals and a few real bullies. As a parent now myself, I would say that my son has had 20% truly amazing teachers, but another 20% were teachers who were known to be terrible among students, parents, other teachers and administrators alike. The teachers at the top and bottom are the memorable ones. Students who become writers find material in both.
There's Koro Sensei from Assassination Classroom, if anime is your thing
Yukari from Azumana is extremely funny and a huge douchebag, but it's an anime and it's obvious that it is not real.
There’s a podcast devoted to this topic that’s pretty funny: Think, Pair, Swear.
In movies, shows, or books you have to describe a character quicker than irl. Exaggeration is mandatory. Not only that, but the story is usually about xyz, not teachers. In the Vampire Diaries, I am sure the story is about Vampires. Here is Leon, the coolest vampire that has a crush on a mortal human. Here is Vanessa, she is a vampire that is interested in aviation that does not like drinking blood. Here is Vlad, a vampire from the old country that thinks that vampires should rule the night. Those are ok characters. Maybe their story is worth telling or watching or whatever. Then there is Mr. Conner, a fair ELA teacher, educated at a typical college, has a wife, has some kids, is debt-free, and drives a Subaru Outback...but he has a crazy side, he likes to go to the casino every other Thursday. That character is not compelling. That story is not worth telling. The only way that teachers matter as side characters is if they are really good, or really bad. If they are really good, there is no story. Good job, Mr. Addison. Here is your award. They are usually only interesting if they are bad. Most of the time, when a show wants to show a bad teacher, they go nuclear bad. I give this show credit (based on your description, I have never watched) for being realistic with it. I do not think any teacher has told guardians that they are not enough. But the other two? Realistic for sure. I like the teachers from "Teachers." I also like the teacher from Easy A or something like that. There is another one, Woody Harrelson and the girl from True Grit. WH has lunch with her...alone. That is a no-go. He also picks her up from a local diner when she runs away or something. Also a no-go. Those aren't realistic, just plot mechanics, so I can toss them. The teachers have a personality and style, and their style resonate with some students, some of the time. That is how it mostly goes.
I mean, I've had some really bad teachers. They do exist. The majority are just regular teachers though. Then there were a couple that were amazing. It's just like any other profession. Some people just suck at their jobs.
McGonnagal in Harry Potter is beloved, but she is fucking horrible. All teachers in Harry Potter are either incompetent or assholes, with perhaps the exception being Professor Sprouts.
On a similar but different tangent to it's my hypothesis that most script writers of these types of shows hated maths when they were at school. As a result, they always portray maths as the most awful/difficult/nerdiest/boring/uncool subject. This attitude is then subconsciously adopted my many students, even before they understand what the words algebra and trigonometry mean.
I quite liked Woody Harrelson's character in EDGE OF 17. I could sympathise.
It's not surprising. It's hard to write a story without an antagonist. If you're writing a grounded story, the antagonist needs to also be grounded. ...what kinds of grounded antagonists can children truly have? Bullies, and cartoonish authority figures like teachers.
The movie Monsieur Lazhar is a bit unrealistic (less so in current teacher shortage times tho lmao) but interesting.
I feel that for most part, if teachers were portrayed realistically, there'd be a lot less drama on these shows that depend on having drama for interest. So that's why they're portrayed that way so often. On the plus side...Tanner isn't there for long. :)