"The Class"

    
       Hi,

    Last week before the vacation we watched a movie called “ The Class “ . This movie made me think deeply about my job in the future because to be a teacher requires an extensive knowledge about classroom management and a great deal of patience. “ The Class ” is a good sample of how to deal with the possible problems that we can experience in a multicultural class.

   In the movie, François and his collegues prepare themselves for a new year  at a multicultural high school in Paris. All of the teachers who are armed with the best intentions for their students brace each other to not let discouragement stop them from trying to give the best education to their students. Cultures and attitudes often clash in the classroom which reflects contemporary France. As amusing and inspring as the teenaged students can be, their difficult behaviour can jeopardise any teachers enthusiasm for a low paying job but François still insists on an athmosphere of respect and politeness. Over the course of a school year,  François, the language teacher in a classroom of youngsters from wide variety of backgrounds, also has to deal with his collegues who are really negative and pessimistic about the students.

   The most important thing that I observed in the movie was the teacher’s being openminded, patient, and most of the time understanding. Because of his position of being older and authority in the class, students challenged him in many occasions but he kept being polite. To go back to basic, I would like to comment about the characteristics of the class. The class consists of teenagers and they are in a period of searching for their identities. Being against of everything, denying authority, teasing the teacher is a way of establishing existence which is the common features of this age. In this point, the teacher has to keep them away from distracting him and getting him angry. Our teacher figure François was quite succesful about it till the day that he was misunderstood and failed in a relationship with a one of the most problematic students in the class.

   I would like to mention why he was misunderstood. The teachers who work together and the headmaster of the school arranged a meeting to evaluate students and two of the students joined meeting as representatives of the class. In the meeting, teachers commented on the students while representative students, Esmeralda and Louise, talked in low voices and kept chattering. As the teachers were talking about Sulaymane who is a troublemaker at school all of the teachers stressed his negative atitudes and decided to give him disciplinery punishment, François tried to defend him by saying , “ He reached his limit because he is limited scholaastically” . The other day these girls told the class what is talked in the meeting in detail and that caused a great problem. I think in that kind of evaluation meetings, the students should not be allowed to join as they are not mature enough to understand what the teachers intention is.

   The other thing that I observed about the class is that popular culture and street culture dominates the youngsters. For example, Suleymane’s agressive manners, fighting with friends, swearing, using his body language in a way that he challenges the authority of others, showing masculinity by being hard, cool, and his view of society that it is unfair and state’s institutions are unfriendly shows  that he is controlled by street culture. What is worse, his negative point of view about society and its institutions, like school, is strenghtened by the punishments that are given by teachers. He feels more like a member of this culture than the school culture. The problem is that street culture is disapproved in the school. In this situation, the teacher has to be aware of that fact and act accordingly because he has the responsibilty to orient him to school culture.

   When it comes to popular culture, I would like to give another example.While François was teaching vocabulary, the students questined him about a word which is not used in daily life. They rejected to learn it and tried to make fun of it. Here, François accepted that word to belong to high culture and explained why they should learn it, like , “One day you will be in a situation that you will need to shift your style of speech” . I relate this with Thomas Ziehe’s ideas . He says that, “The teacher should be someone who is active, pretty much engaged, and tries to understand the youngsters but he should not agree everything they want”. What is more , this is also related to his ideas about intensity.  As he mentioned in his book named “ The Islands of Intensity in an Ocean of  Routine” . François’s teaching that kind of words means he tries to iclude something from high cultureand Ziehe states that “Intensity is something that you normally do not experience in your everydaylife” and I think this is a good sample what Ziehe suggests.

   Another thing that have noticed in the movie, the teacher is succesful about relating students self worls with school. For example, he wants them to prepare self portraits and in this assignment he helps Sulaymane to express himself by encouraging him to add pictures of his mother or his tattoo. Again this is related to Ziehes ideas .He thinks it is teachers responsibility to open the kids even though it is hard job.

All in all, there is a lot say about this movie. Anything can be found in terms of effects of etnicty, popular culture, street culture, having self fixed students, outcomes of being understanding and flexible , teacher-family-student cooperation, respect and relience to teacher, how to have control over the classroom,etc. As I stated in the begining, being a teacher requries a great deal of patience and an extensive knowledge of classroom management. People should think twice if they can handle it or not before taking that  kind of responsiblity.