Teachers on TV
Part One
If you haven’t watched ABC’s Emmy-winning Abbott Elementary or FX’s English Teacher, I’d highly recommend both. They are comedies, in the classical sense (“Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity” – Wikipedia), and often pack thoughtful content into their half-hour (22minute) format. The protagonists are bright, reflective, caring --- but flawed --- characters and their colleagues (sometimes broadly painted) are interesting, amusing, and, at times, touching. Watching these shows as a retired educator led me to reflect my own history of seeing Teachers on Television, starting in the 1950’s. I, of course, began to research the whole “teachers on tv” phenomena and immediately ran into this question raised by former Stanford Professor Larry Cuban in December of 2023:
Why Do Teachers Portrayed on TV and in Hollywood Films Have to Be Either Heroes Or Losers?
Introducing the topic, Cuban writes:
In television shows like “Those Who Can’t” and “Teachers,” the schoolteacher as clueless wag or inappropriate role model is getting another workout this spring.
These tropes, immortalized in movie portrayals from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to “Bad Teacher,” are nearly as common as the saintly sages who unlock the hidden creativity of their students or rescue downtrodden minority children.
Neither cliché has much connection to reality. And yet they frustrate those trying to attract more talented people to teaching.
As one who spent more than 40 years in classrooms, I am not only sympathetic to what Cuban is highlighting as a problem for the profession, but I’m also interested in investigating my own “interaction” with TV Teaching over the years --- going back to my childhood. This essay will focus on Television’s portrayal of teachers, as I remember it, saving an investigation of Hollywood’s treatment for a later day.
As further introduction to my own state of mind regarding this topic, though, I believe it’s important to set the frame of this investigation. Robert Bulman, a professor of sociology at St. Mary’s College of California and the author of “Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools and American Culture,” says:
On the one hand, we expect them to be competent and heroic, and after all, our children are in their hands for a big part of the day, so it makes sense that we would like them to be heroic. On the other hand, there is a certain cultural belief that teachers are poorly trained and apathetic, and they are the scapegoat for any crisis that exists in the public school system. We tend to assume that teachers are to blame, so we often get representations of these buffoonish characters. Stereotypes of teachers have remained remarkably consistent. What’s more, the portrayals correspond roughly to the economic class and race of the students in the movies. In middle- or upper-middle-income suburban settings, educators are likely to appear as lazy fools, petty tyrants or, at best, genial sidekicks offering an occasional word of wisdom (think Paul Gleason in “Breakfast Club,” Jane Lynch in “Glee” or Ken Jeong in “The Duff”). Yet when fictional classrooms are filled with lower-income minority children, the teachers tend to be superheroes who triumph over poverty and racism by sheer force of personality and perseverance. If pedagogy has anything to do with it, these teachers come off as renegades who deploy tactics never before tried by their colleagues. (Cue “Freedom Writers,” “Dangerous Minds” and “Stand and Deliver.”)
That’s a lot, I know, but the points that jump out at me are these: teachers are poorly trained, they are the scapegoat, buffoonish characters, and are lazy fools, petty tyrants, or genial sidekicks. It’s only in the most desperate situations that teachers by sheer force of personality and perseverance become superheroes. It’s important to recognize the power that television (and now, any screen) has on creating images that are believed at face-value by the general public (I won’t go off on a Trump tangent here but his riding The Apprentice and then capitalizing on tv stereotypes to fuel his racist and misogynistic politics is a prime example of how tv can corrupt our society). That many people have, of course, encountered less-than-stellar teachers during their educational journey, helps reinforce the negative images projected about teachers. Going back to Washington Irving’s 1820 Legend of Sleepy Hollow and his portrayal of the shallow and awkward schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, teachers have been subject to negative stereotypes. With the advent of television, we have seen a steady stream of teachers, starting in the 1950’s.
Our family was definitely a TV Family. My Dad particularly liked watching TV, so I have early recollections of that early “Golden Age of Television.” I remember Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, as well as Lucy and The Goldbergs (the 1949-1957 version) and other, early TV shows. Two I recall, regarding the topic of teachers on TV are Mr. Peepers and Our Miss Brooks. I was too young to really understand much but I do clearly remember they were shows about “school” and that made them interesting to me, even at that early age. Here are the Wikipedia summaries for those shows.
Mister Peepers is an American sitcom that aired on NBC from July 3, 1952, to June 12, 1955. Wally Cox starred as Robinson J. Peepers, Jefferson City's junior high school science teacher. Others in the cast included Tony Randall as history teacher Harvey Weskit; Georgiann Johnson as Harvey's wife, Marge; Patricia Benoit as school nurse Nancy Remington; Marion Lorne as oft-confused English teacher Mrs. Gurney; Jack Warden as athletic coach Frank Whip; and Ernest Truex and Sylvia Field as Nancy's parents.
IMDB describes “Mr. Peepers” as a “shy science teacher . . . always faced with problems but never outwitted.”
Our Miss Brooks is an American sitcom starring Eve Arden as a sardonic high-school English teacher. It began as a radio show broadcast on CBS from 1948 to 1957. When the show was adapted to television (1952–56), it became one of the medium's earliest hits.
IMDB describes Miss Brooks this way: Miss Brooks is an English Teacher who has a low paying job, a lousy boss, has a crush on a teacher and whose student drives her to school. She lives in a boarding house.
Ah, where to begin? In some ways Mr. Peepers fit the Ichabod Crane stereotype (being socially awkward) but he was, at least, clever. As I recall, there was little interaction with students on the program --- Peepers mostly dealt with colleagues and other adults outside of school Miss Brooks, on the other hand, was a popular teacher, driven to school by her student Walter Denton ( a very young Richard Crenna). I do remember Brooks butting heads with, and outsmarting, her buffoonish Principal, Osgood Conklin (played by Gale Gordon) on many occasions. The depiction of teachers in the ‘50’s, then, was primarily comic and fit the cultural stereotypes of educators in that era.
Then came the Sixties. The two “teacher” shows I recall from the ‘60’s (one of which I watched regularly, the other, far less so) were Mr. Novak and Room 222. I’ll let Wikipedia and other sources provide the background.
Mr. Novak is an American television drama television series starring James Franciscus in the title role as a high school teacher. The series aired on NBC for two seasons, from 1963 to 1965. It won a Peabody Award in 1963 (wiki)
IMDB notes that “Mr. Novak” chronicles “the experiences of a young, stubborn, and idealistic English teacher in his first job. Novak is a symbol of the earnest optimism of the early 60's and his handsomeness and youthful idealism suggest President Kennedy.
Linda Pinnell, writing in the January 1, 1993 issue of Education Week, noted she (like I) had been a regular viewer of Mr. Novak and now, as an English teacher herself suffered from MNS (“Mister Novak Syndrome). As she describes it:
He was the quintessential high school English teacher, always in command of his subject, his students, and his audience. Every week, this paragon, who never lost his cool, managed to save at least one student from self-destruction while teaching the rest of the class an important lesson about life. It’s no wonder I’m afflicted with MNS. I’m trying to live up to TV classroom standards while teaching in the real world. The guilt is overwhelming. I’ve fallen far short of the mark.
So, we see that in the early 1960’s there’s a shift in the way the classroom teacher is portrayed --- but in keeping with tv mythmaking, the Teacher now fits Robert Bulman’s “superhero” category. Later in the Sixties, this characterization is reinvigorated in Room 222. I didn’t watch 222 as much as Novak (because I was in college, graduate school, and starting my own teaching career) but I saw it enough to know it, too, fulfilled Bulman’s “superhero” character. Again, according to Wikipedia:
Room 222 is an American comedy-drama television series produced by 20th Century Fox Television that aired on ABC for 112 episodes, from September 17, 1969, until January 11, 1974. While the series primarily focuses on an American history class in Room 222 at the fictional Walt Whitman High School, in Los Angeles, California, it also depicts other events in and outside the school, such as the home lives of the racially diverse student body and faculty.
The history class is taught by Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes), an idealistic African-American teacher. Other characters featured in the show include the school's compassionate guidance counselor, Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas), who is also Pete's girlfriend; the dryly humorous school principal, Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine); the petite and enthusiastic Alice Johnson (Karen Valentine), who is initially a student teacher, later full-time teacher whom Pete mentors; and Principal Kaufman's secretary Miss Hogarth, played by Patsy Garrett. Additionally, many recurring students are featured from episode to episode.
A breakthrough in 222, of course, is that the main character is African American, and the show began to touch on “sensitive” issues (race, class, gender). Mr. Dixon, like Mr. Novak, is beloved by his students.
What’s most notable is that the Sixties programs begin to take note of student-teacher interaction --- and create a view that “idealistic” teachers care about their students above-and-beyond their classrooms, a notion that became the new focus for Seventies shows.
By the Seventies I was a real-life classroom teacher, so my view on TV Teachers had a distinct perspective. Reflecting on Mr. Novak and Room 222, I will say that, while my personal interactions with teachers, as well as the literature I was consuming about teaching in the Sixties/early Seventies (Herndon, Weingarten/Postman, Kozol, Kohl, et al) had the most profound impact on who I would become as a teacher, I can’t totally dismiss the idea that those two TV “models” did influence what I began to think a “good teacher” should be like.
The next BoomeRant! will explore TV Teachers from the Seventies to the Present.
Stay tuned.