If you ever wanted to understand why teaching puberty-ridden, curious, and rebellious high school kids is a tough job, just watch the Oscar-nominated French film, The Class (Entre Les Murs). This movie dives into the deep end of the complexities of teaching a multi-ethnic, socioeconomic diverse class in the new immigrant rich France.
The Class (2008) takes place inside the narrow confines of the high school campus, which may sound limiting, but it was a careful choice made by director Laurent Cantet. The docudrama is based on a book and screenplay written by François Bégaudeau, the author and teacher who plays himself in the movie. It is a somewhat loose day-in-the-life story of his struggles to teach a diverse class of challenging students.
Most viewers realize the teachers are in for a rough time from the very first scene. Smartly foreshadowing the year to come, a group of teachers meet to prepare for the incoming students. The team shares its words of encouragement and advice, especially for the rookies. A retiring teacher said “[He’d] like to wish the new arrivals plenty of courage” because he knew they would need it.
The complexity of courage and respect are played out in the film’s French classroom and in “real-world” classrooms internationally. François, and the other teachers, wear a shield of courage each day to face the brutal, disruptive and demanding students. Like the new France, François’ class had students of all nationalities—Moroccan, Mali, Chinese as well as other African and Middle Eastern nations. The Class proves that teachers also needed respect to understand the daily battles their first and second-generation immigrant students encountered in their tough French neighborhoods. These constant clashes between teacher and student for understanding left the audience with mixed sympathies.
This push-pull tension around respect in the classroom played out perfectly. Several students, like Khoumba, a sharp-tongued, moody African girl, were quick to demand respect from their snappy and exasperated teacher. In one power play, she is scolded by François for her insolence in class after refusing to read aloud. In a tug-of-war after class discussion, François demands a sincere apology from her. Feeling a lack of respect shown, she offers a half-hearted apology and runs off to join her friends who waited and snickered in the hallway. Seeking to provide balance to the commentary on respect, the film shows another side of Khoumba, as a sensitive, emotional teenaged girl. In a well-written note to François, she explains how she feels disrespected by him.
In various scenes, teacher François attempts to unravel the multiple layers inside each child while trying to teach the class French. The major class project is a self-portrait, which each student is allowed to approach in his or her own way. Despite numerous interruptions and outbursts about everything from homosexuality to spoken imperfect subjunctive French, all of the students miraculously create a picture of their personality – and a window into their personal challenges, fears, uniqueness and beauty.
One student, Souleyman, a sullen Malian teenaged boy is surprised when François gives him praise for his pictorial self-portrait. Originally uninterested in the project, he told François, “I have nothing to say because no one knows me but me.” Depicted as the troublemaker in the film, he is used to more negative feedback than positive.
Similar to real life, The Class showed that the students were also misunderstood and at times underestimated. Revealing his own bias and shortcomings, François was shocked when students like Esmeralda, a quick-witted Middle Eastern teen, read books like Plato’s “Republic” because it exceeded his expectations of her. In earlier conversations, François had difficulty selecting books for the class to read because he assumed his students had low reading abilities. Other students like Wey, a gifted Chinese young man with French language challenges, and another intelligent male student who dressed in Goth fashion were often ignored in favor of their loudmouthed, rambunctious counterparts. Thus, the slower students led the pace of François’ teaching – remarkably similar to critiques of American public schools.
The Class shines with multilayered complexity, and reveals that teachers are human and also make mistakes, especially after being pushed too far. It also depicts the reality of public schools in which mutual respect between teacher and student is often not the standard. The film illustrates that in order to get respect, you have to earn respect.
The Class succeeds because of its real world critiques on respect and the complexities of student – teacher relationships as well as the challenges of navigating unfamiliar immigrant worlds fraught with language and cultural differences. In the daily trials between student and teacher in the real world and cinematic classroom, the audience is left wondering who is really teaching who?