First-Time Teachers Babes in the Wood

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Fifty percent of new teachers leave within the first three years. In the first scene of the film Chalk, you get a clue as to why. Mr. Lowry, a first year history teacher, asks a bored-looking Latino student “What does history mean to you?” The kid looks up, looks down, avoids eye contact, doesn’t respond. The silence drags. Finally, in a stern, yet unconvincing voice, Mr. Lowry declares, “Well, that’s what we are here for.”

Mr. Lowry can’t teach, and no one is there to help him. His isolation is apparent—there is no “mentoring system” at this school, and no one whom he can admit his failures to. Near the end of the year, he reflects that “being a teacher is a gift. Maybe it’s something you could learn, but no one has taught me.”

In that sense, Chalk, which follows the lives of four teachers mockumentary-style throughout one school year inside a multi-ethnic Texas public school, is the antithesis of Hollywood classroom simulations, like Dangerous Minds (starring Michelle Pfeiffer), or Freedom Writers (starring Hilary Swank), where upper class white super-teachers swoop down into gang-ridden urban schools to save their young students from themselves, showering on them Mother-Teresa-like love and devotion.

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