Not Another Dangerous Minds Story
Challenging the Teacher-as-Savior Myth
by NStanford
It was my first time teaching an evening class at a community college, and I was nervous. I’d heard about how tough these night students are: not your typical, fresh-out-of-high-school, no-extra-job, too-much-time-on-my-hands learners, but cynical, busy, non-traditional students, some returning after flunking out years prior and some just trying it out for the first time. I had been shocked to hear the failure statistics at my community college just a few weeks before: only 20% of them were likely to receive their associate degree in the next ten years.
Everybody said I should just give easy assignments and pass these students if they came close, because this was their only chance out of poverty, but I had a problem with that. I believed that the failure rate wasn’t due to poor student ability, but to the very prevalent notion that passive memorization amounts to education. These students needed to be challenged to think critically and learn to see obstacles as problems that could be solved.
So the first night of English class, I decided to challenge my students by telling them the statistics about themselves. I had students get out their calculators and find 40% of 30 students (our class size). The answer was 18, so I apologized to 12 students and told them they wouldn’t be returning the next year. Then we calculated 60%, and I apologized to six more students and told them they wouldn’t return the year after and, unfortunately, their failure to return wouldn’t be due to graduation because, as our next calculation revealed, only 2% of them would finish their associate degrees in the allotted two years. That 2% was a little more than half of one student. We went on to project that, according to current statistics, only six students out of the 30 would finish their degree. I was down to one row of students.
I knew I was taking a risk; everything could have backfired. But it worked! After that night, the class committed itself to turning every assignment into an opportunity to defy those community college statistics. In fact, at the end of the semester, the students elected to write their research papers on how they would surmount the obstacles between them and their chosen careers — everything from the money, GPA, contacts and time required of them, to job market projections and the average burn-out rate within their career choice. That class ended up being the most —
Wait. That’s a story about how marvelous I am, and how I saved my students from certain… certain something. Night class students aren’t scary at all, and I don’t even know if that research paper changed any statistics or not. Let me try again.
Last semester, I had a student who rarely came to class and never spoke, a young African-American man who slouched in his desk and surveyed the room from beneath his oversized cap. He was bored with everything, and he resisted my every attempt to involve him. I had a pleasant surprise, though, the day I assigned an exercise in audience awareness. I had students break up into groups to “design” cell phone ads — one geared toward business people, one toward stay-at-home mothers, and one toward Beyoncé fans. As the groups each presented their ads to the class, this fellow actually raised his cap and stared intently at the board where the drawings were happening. I didn’t know what to think, but when he came to me after class and announced he’d decided to go into marketing design, I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day. I was —
Wait, there it is again: the teacher-as-savior myth. Chicken soup for the teacher’s soul.
These stories are true (well, the second one is really exaggerated), and they do affirm my teacherly self-worth, but maybe it’s because of what I’ve come to expect from myself as a result of all those inspiring movies in which young teachers break convention and students rise above expectations: Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets Society, Mona Lisa Smile, Freedom Writers, et cetera. These movies have grossed millions, meaning a lot of people are buying this myth (literally), and I know I’m not the only teacher affected by it. One of my colleagues told me about her friend who interprets all her teaching assignments in teacher-as-savior terms. “My class this semester is so Dangerous Minds!” she declared, having already selected the actress who will play her part in the movie.
It’s odd that such a banal task as teaching is associated with a near missionary zeal for saving students. To teach is simply “to impart knowledge or skill to,” but these teacher-as-savior narratives rarely end in good grades or good jobs — rather, things like cross-cultural friendships, higher social standing, and saved lives. But it’s even more disturbing to note that another name for this type of narrative is “white-teacher-as-savior.” What are teachers saving our students from? The ghetto? Status quo? Conformity to class expectations?
What’s problematic about my stories is that I didn’t change any social conditions; I just helped my students fit nicely into an unequal society that will perpetuate itself and likely subject their children to the same inequalities. In other words, I taught a few people how to “play the game,” like most white-teacher-as-savior narratives. These coping strategies, shortcuts, and trapdoors within the system serve the same purpose as tapping the top of a soda before opening it. You help mitigate the frustrations of those at the bottom of the system — working-class and minority students — so that their individual lives are better, but they never build up the impetus they need to actually challenge the entire system. It gets worse. Foucault’s whole thesis was that it is impossible to liberate another human being; we can only transfer her or him from one subjugating system to another, so no student has ever been truly saved from subjugation by a teacher.
The good news is that teachers are responsible neither for saving students nor damning them with a failing grade or otherwise, and we’re still in positions to challenge inequalities by doing exactly what we profess to do: teach, and blatantly explain how to make good grades and good money, as well as why that system is unfair. This strategy is the kind of critical pedagogy sometimes espoused by Dewey, Freire, Shor, and a number of others.
First, though, I think it’s important to examine the metaphors in which we interpret our positions and decisions. Teacher as gatekeeper? hero? disciplinarian? nation builder? It would be nice to be a savior, but I’m trying to be a teacher-as-fulcrum. Remember that physics lesson? If I can manage to stay under the middle of the lever, I’m the pivot point for each student’s actions and the equal reactions. Teachers-as-fulcrums encourage good decisions but try not to interrupt the process of cause and effect because, like us, students have a right to learn from their mistakes.
So I made an agreement with my students this semester: they can do anything they choose as long as they own the consequences, good or bad. Skip class … miss grade-bearing assignments. Do homework … score well. Walk out of class with no explanation … evoke a negative response from the teacher. Anything, as long as they acknowledge their human agency and don’t rely on me to be the authoritarian crusher of rights or merciful redeemer who can save them in spite of their decisions.
Being inundated with all this teacher-as-savior rhetoric, however, it’s difficult not to feel responsible for every student’s actions. Last week, I asked a student to leave because he was disrupting the lesson and, certain he would never return, I was tempted to berate myself in savior terms: perhaps I had been too harsh; perhaps I should have sacrificed the lesson for my relationship with him. When he missed the next class, I mourned that I had lost one of my flock; I hoped he would return so I could extend mercy.
As a fulcrum, though, my teacherly worth isn’t contingent on his return; my job is to teach those who choose to be taught, not save those who resist me. There’s no role for Michelle Pfeiffer or Hillary Swank here, because it has nothing to do with my mercy or sacrifice, and everything to do with the student’s decision to learn, which, incidentally, he made by returning the next week. n
