Background Information

This article explains how the media can create negative stereotypes about teachers which may influence how the overall public views educators. “The perceptions of average citizens--taxpayers, voters, and parents--may be shaped by the unrealistic portrayals of schools and teachers in films and television programs.” Stereotypes of teachers in the media include ideas that “anybody can teach,” that “teachers rule with an iron hand, accept no excuses, and maintain a personal distance from their students,” and are “jerk or clown teachers.”

With an opening quote from President Obama, in regards to respecting teachers. This article explains the Hollywood trends within education. “These divergent trends — the teacher as psycho; the teacher as saint — only confirm what the film scholar Dana Polan called the “problem of the pedagogue’s embodiment”: the difficulty we have “imagining the teacher as a real person,” rather than as an icon, an authority figure or a bad joke.”

Throughout this article the reader is able to identify patterns of character traits for educators found in the media. “When fictional classrooms are filled with lower-income minority children, the teachers tend to be superheroes.” Meanwhile fictional classrooms set in the middle to upper-class tend to portray their educators as “Lazy fools, petty tyrants or, at best, genial sidekicks offering an occasional word of wisdom.”