Category: Films

Dangerous Minds tells the story of LouAnne Johnson, a discharged U.S. Marine, applies for a teaching job in high school, and is surprised and pleased to be offered the position with immediate effect. Showing up the next day to begin teaching, however, she finds herself confronted with a classroom of tough, sullen teenagers, all from lower-class and underprivileged backgrounds, involved in gang warfare and drug pushing, flatly refusing to engage with anything. They immediately coin the nickname “White Bread” for LouAnne, due to her race and apparent lack of authority, to which LouAnne responds by returning the next day in a leather jacket and teaching them karate. The students show some interest in such activities, but immediately revert to their former behavior when LouAnne tries to teach the curriculum.

The Ron Clark Story is based on the real-life educator Ron Clark. It follows the tale of an idealistic teacher who leaves his small hometown to teach in a New York City public school, where he faces trouble with the students. The film was directed by Randa Haines, and was released directly on television.

The Class is set wholly in a secondary school in a working-class district of Paris, where many inhabitants are foreign-born, the film follows the year of a young teacher, François Marin, and the 25 pupils aged 14 or 15 who he takes for an hour each day in French language. A loner, he walks the narrow line between maintaining discipline and gaining co-operation.

To Sir, With Love is about Mark Thackeray, an immigrant to Britain from British Guiana via California, must wait a long period to hear about an engineering job he applied for. He accepts a teaching post at North Quay Secondary School in the tough East End of London, as an interim position. Most of the school’s students have been rejected from other schools, and their antics drove the last teacher to resign. Led by Bert Denham and Pamela Dare, the students’ antics range from disruptive behavior to distasteful pranks. Thackeray retains a calm demeanor, but loses his temper upon discovering something being burned in the classroom stove (implied to be a used sanitary napkin). Thackeray orders the boys out of the classroom, then reprimands all the girls, either for being responsible or passively observing, for what he says is their slutty behavior. Thackeray is angry with himself for allowing the students to get the better of him. Changing his approach, he informs the students they will no longer study from textbooks. Until the end of term when they graduate, he will treat them as adults and expects them to behave as such; they can discuss whatever issues they wish, including relationships, marriage, sex, and applying for jobs. Thackeray gradually wins the class over except for Denham, who continually baits him.

Coach Carter is about Ken Carter who takes over the head coaching job for the basketball team at Richmond High School, having played on the team himself. Carter quickly sees that the athletes are rude, disrespectful, and in need of discipline. He hands the players individual contracts, instructing them to attend all of their classes, sit in the front row of those classes, wear dress shirts and ties on game days, refer to everyone (players and coach alike) as “sir”, and maintain a 2.3 (C+) grade point average, among other requirements. Carter also asks the school staff for progress reports on the players’ grades and attendance. He teaches them how to play a disciplined brand of basketball.

The Principal, Rick Latimer (Jim Belushi) is a high-school teacher with a drinking problem. Spotting his ex-wife Kimberly (Sharon Thomas Cain) in a bar one night, Rick gets into a fight with the man she is with, culminating in his beating the hapless man’s car with a baseball bat. The board of education finds that Rick’s behavior is reflecting poorly on the school district’s image. They unanimously decide to transfer him to another school, in another district: Brandel High, a crime-ridden and gang-dominated institution, where he is made the new principal. Initially, Rick is under the impression that this move is a promotion for him — but he soon comes to realize that it is actually a punishment, because he is viewed as being as lost, incorrigible, & hopeless as the students of “Brand X” (the nickname that everyone derisively uses to refer to the school).

The Movie Precious – In 1987, 16-year-old Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) lives in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City with her unemployed mother Mary (Mo’Nique), who has long subjected her to physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Precious has also been raped by her now-absent father, Carl (Rodney “Bear” Jackson), resulting in two pregnancies.

The family resides in a Section 8 tenement and survives on welfare. Her first child, daughter Mongo (short for Mongoloid), has Down syndrome and is being cared for by Precious’ grandmother, though Mary forces the family to pretend that Mongo lives with her and Precious so she can receive extra money from the government. When Precious’ second pregnancy is discovered, her high-school principal arranges for her to attend an alternative school, where she hopes Precious can change her life’s direction.

Inspired by her new teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton), Precious finally learns to read and write. She meets sporadically with social worker Ms. Weiss (Mariah Carey), who learns about the sexual assault in the household when Precious reveals who fathered her children. While Precious is in the hospital giving birth to her second child Abdul, she meets and develops a crush on John McFadden (Lenny Kravitz), a nursing assistant who shows her kindness. When Precious returns home, Mary asks to hold Abdul; however, when Precious’s back is turned, Mary purposely drops him on the ground and attacks her, angrily declaring that Precious’s revelation about the abuse has resulted in them being cut off from welfare.

In The Movie Precious, Precious fights back and runs away with Abdul, and Mary deliberately tries to drop her television set on them; she eventually breaks into her school classroom for shelter. When Ms. Rain discovers them the next morning, she frantically calls local shelters looking for a safe place for Precious and Abdul to live in, but they end up staying with Ms. Rain and her live-in girlfriend. The next morning, Ms. Rain takes her and Abdul to find assistance for them; Precious will be able to continue her schooling while raising Abdul in a halfway house.

Mary soon returns to inform Precious of her father’s death from AIDS. Precious later learns that she is HIV-positive, even though Abdul is not. Feeling dejected, she steals her case file from Ms. Weiss’s office. As she shares the details of her file with her fellow students, she begins to hope for the future. Later, Precious meets with her mother, who brings Mongo, at Ms. Weiss’s office. Ms. Weiss confronts Mary about her and Carl’s abuse of Precious, going back to when Precious was a toddler.

Mary tearfully confesses that she always hated Precious for “stealing her man” by “letting him” abuse her, and for eventually “making him leave.” Precious tells Mary that she finally sees her for who she really is, and that she will never see her or the children ever again, leaving with both Mongo and Abdul. Mary begs Ms. Weiss to retrieve her daughter and her grandchildren, but Ms. Weiss silently rejects her and walks away, leaving a distraught Mary alone in the room.

Planning to complete a GED test to receive a high-school diploma equivalency, Precious walks out into the city with both children in tow, ready to start a new life and have a brighter future.

After reading “The Movie Precious” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

Mr. Hollands Opus In Portland, Oregon in 1965, 30-year-old Glenn Holland is a talented musician and composer who has been relatively successful in the exhausting life of a professional musical performer. However, in an attempt to enjoy more free time with his young wife, Iris, and to enable him to compose a piece of orchestral music, Holland accepts a teaching position at John F. Kennedy High School.

Front of the Class is about a twelve-year-old Brad lives in Missouri with his divorcée mother, Ellen, and younger brother, Jeff. He constantly gets into trouble with his father Norman and his teachers at school due to his tics. In one class, his teacher calls him to the front to make him apologize to his class for disrupting the class and promise he won’t do it again. Determined to find out what is wrong with her son, Ellen seeks medical help. A psychiatrist believes that Brad’s tics are the result of his parents’ divorce. One lady suggests an exorcism. Ellen takes her search to the library and comes across Tourette syndrome (TS) in a medical book. She shows this to the psychiatrist, who agrees with the diagnosis, and says that there is no cure. Brad and his mother attend a support group for the first and last time. From then on, Brad aspires to never be like the other members of the support group and to become successful

Teachers tells the story of a typical Monday morning at John F. Kennedy High School in the inner city of Columbus, Ohio, there is conflict between teachers, a student with a stab wound, and a talk of an upcoming lawsuit. Vice Principal Roger Rubell, Principal Eugene Horn, and lawyer Lisa Hammond, who is in charge of taking depositions for the Calvin case, in which a recent graduate is suing the school for granting him a diploma despite his illiteracy.