Movie Comparison

For the movie comparison paper, the two movies I watched are The Dead Poet’s Society and The Freedom Writers.  Both of these movies show the lives of teachers who are extremely dedicated to the learning and success of the students in their classrooms.  In Dead Poet’s Society, Robin Williams plays the role of a teacher in an all-male boarding school, where he inspires the students to think outside the box and in an untraditional way that is not entirely understood or accepted by his colleagues.  The other film I watched, The Freedom Writers, shows Hilary Swank playing a teacher who is put into a classroom full of students who don’t take as much of an interest in learning as she had hoped.  Both of these films depict great teachers and how they overcome obstacles during their teaching careers.

            In The Freedom Writers, the movie follows the story of Erin Gruwell, a teacher at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School, who encounters a group of students who are all having struggles with racism and gang violence in Long Beach, California.  In the beginning, her class is not motivated to do work, and they have problems getting along as a class.  One of my favorite scenes in the movie, and a turning point for the students, is when she has them all stand on a line she creates, and has them stand there if they know someone who has been killed due to gang violence.  She keeps raising the number of people killed, and many of the students continue to stand on the line.  At the end, she points out to the students that they are not all as different from one another as they thought.  I really like this scene in the movie because it shows how great of a teacher she is, and how much she wants her students to get along as a class, which will make her more effective as a teacher.  There are other instances in the movie, such as one scene where she tells a student she refuses to let him fail, that continue to show her dedication to her students, which is one of the most important aspects of being a teacher.

            The second film I watched, Dead Poet’s Society, showed Mr. Keating, a teacher at the Welton Academy for Boys, which is a school that prepares students to be leaders and have great academic achievements.  At the school, most of the teachers practice a traditional approach to teaching, while Mr. Keating shows the boys an entirely different way of learning, where they can challenge what they are being taught, and can learn in an entirely new way.  For instance, in one scene, he has the boys rip out the entire introduction of their poetry textbook, because he finds it to be ridiculous, due to its use of mathematical equations to rate poetry.  In another scene, he has the boys all go outside, and has a few of them walk around in a circle.  The longer they walk, the more they begin to walk together, at the same pace, with the same foot forward.  Then, he has the rest of the students do the same exercise, and the point of it is to show conformity.  This is a very important lesson at this school, because the boys are taught to believe in the beliefs of the school, while Mr. Keating is trying to show them that they need to be their own person, and do things that they believe in.

            In each of these movies, both teachers show how much they care about their students, and show different teaching methods with which to connect with them.  They try to think outside the box in order to get through to their students and show them a new way of thinking.  Additionally, both teachers can be seen as great role models for their students, which is essential in a classroom.