As If Teachers Don't Have Enough Pressures

[Annie]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070123/ap_on_re_us/film_teachers_free

Free `Freedom Writers' tix for teachers

9 minutes ago

AMC Entertainment Inc., the nation's second-largest theater chain, said Tuesday it will offer free tickets for teachers wanting to see the movie "Freedom Writers," starring Hilary Swank.

The offer is good from Friday through Feb. 1 for teachers in grades kindergarten through 12th who show a valid school identification or pay stub.

The Paramount Pictures movie, released three weeks ago, stars Swank as an idealistic English teacher who goes into a Long Beach, Calif., high school and tries to overcome racial intolerance among her students.

AMC and Paramount said the offer was a way to honor teachers.

"We hope this will help express our sincere gratitude and appreciation for all that they do, often with very little `thanks' in return," the Kansas City-based exhibitor said in a news release.

The movie, showing at 2,286 locations, has earned $26.5 million in box office so far and came in fifth this past weekend, according to Media By Numbers LLC.

AMC last year held a similar promotion for the spelling-bee movie "Akeelah and the Bee," handing out around 10,000 free tickets.

I'm not sure if this guy is one who's blogged under the name, Mr. Babylon, but it sounds like him:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/opinion/19moore.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

January 19, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Classroom Distinctions
By TOM MOORE

IN the past year or so I have seen Matthew Perry drink 30 cartons of milk, Ted Danson explain the difference between a rook and a pawn, and Hilary Swank remind us that white teachers still can’t dance or jive talk. In other words, I have been confronted by distorted images of my own profession — teaching. Teaching the post-desegregation urban poor, to be precise.

Although my friends and family (who should all know better) continue to ask me whether my job is similar to these movies, I find it hard to recognize myself or my students in them.

So what are these films really about? And what do they teach us about teachers? Are we heroes, villains, bullies, fools? The time has come to set the class record straight.

At the beginning of Ms. Swank’s new movie, “Freedom Writers,” her character, a teacher named Erin Gruwell, walks into her Long Beach, Calif., classroom, and the camera pans across the room to show us what we are supposed to believe is a terribly shabby learning environment. Any experienced educator will have already noted that not only does she have the right key to get into the room but, unlike the seventh-grade science teacher in my current school, she has a door to put the key into. The worst thing about Ms. Gruwell’s classroom seems to be graffiti on the desks, and crooked blinds.

I felt like shouting, Hey, at least you have blinds! My first classroom didn’t, but it did have a family of pigeons living next to the window, whose pane was a cracked piece of plastic. During the winter, snowflakes blew in. The pigeons competed with the mice and cockroaches for the students’ attention.

This is not to say that all schools in poor neighborhoods are a shambles, or that teaching in a real school is impossible. In fact, thousands of teachers in New York City somehow manage to teach every day, many of them in schools more underfinanced and chaotic than anything you’ve seen in movies or on television (except perhaps the most recent season of “The Wire”).

Ms. Gruwell’s students might backtalk, but first they listen to what she says. And when she raises her inflection just slightly, the class falls silent. Many of the students I’ve known won’t sit down unless they’re repeatedly asked to (maybe not even then), and they don’t listen just because the teacher is speaking; even “good teachers” are occasionally drowned out by the din of 30 students simultaneously using language that would easily earn a movie an NC-17 rating....