Holland learns that knowing your subject is essential, but it isn't enough to make you a teacher.
Some movie critics are saying the new film "Mr. Holland's Opus" is pretty good but a bit too sentimental or too long or too preachy. Don't be put off This movie tells some important truths about what it means to be a teacher. It's also fun, and moving.
You don't have to be a teacher, or have a deep interest in education, to appreciate Richard Dreyfuss' s superb portrait of a nightclub pianist who reluctantly takes a high school teaching job to feed his wife and his dream of becoming a composer. But it has special power for people who know something about the teaching life. The movie attempts an ambitious feat: to show us the development of a teacher over a 30-year career. Most movie stories span only a brief period, so you don't see how a character develops over time and is shaped by different experiences. But that's what becoming a skilled teacher is all about; it's the ongoing process of learning from experience that forges professional expertise. This is the first film to focus on that and convey its significance.
In the standard blackboard-jungle movie, an eager young teacher is thrown like fresh meat to the worst students in a tough school. A cynical senior teacher warns the new recruit not to "care" too much. After hair-raising confrontations attempting to reach the classroom thugs, the heroic teacher intervenes to help the toughest kid in a personal crisis; the class then rallies behind the teacher and they soon become the best students in the school.
"Mr. Holland's Opus" upends these clinches. The students in Mr. Holland's music appreciation course are ordinary middle class kids in a suburb. They're polite; they don't disrupt lessons; mostly, they're bored. Their teacher isn't even remotely eager. He wants to punch the time clock, keep his distance, sit quietly between classes and work on his musical "opus." Chided by the principal for his lack of involvement in the school, he sputters in frustration, "I do my job, don't I?"
But Holland has absolutely no idea what the job is. He woodenly stands with textbook in hand, asking such questions as, "Who can tell me what music is?" When he is met with silence and blank faces, he continues, "O.K., nobody here knows. Turn to page 28 in your textbook. There's a definition of music there." Then he reads it.
Indifference turns into desperation in Holland's classroom, but it's not the students'; it's his desperation to figure out how to teach. The movie shows the awful isolation of the green teacher. There's no "how to" manual, nobody around to help; it's sink or swim behind closed doors. Holland's struggle to learn is a seat- of-the-pants, trial-and-error, intuitive process; the movie has it right that a teacher who is going to be any good is constantly groping for ways to improve. Holland has decent instincts -- wearing a jacket and tie, he establishes decorum, explaining that he will call students Mr. Or Miss So and So and they will call him Mr. Holland. But he can't seem to get anything more than order out of his class. Until one day, on the edge of panic, he turns to the piano that has been sitting unused and plays a theme from a pop song the students all know. "Who wrote this?" They snicker. "Johann Sebastian Bach." Jaws drop. But it's Holland who has made the breakthrough. He's learned that knowing your subject is essential, but it isn't enough to make you a teacher.
We watch him become increasingly skilled at connecting what he knows, loves, and is able to do with the world of his students. He teaches to the whole class and expects everyone to "get it," but he also figures out ways to reach students individually. Like many teachers, he also starts taking on lots of additional responsibilities -- tutoring after school, building the school orchestra, starting a marching band, directing the annual student musical. Mr. Holland, in fact, has become a teacher and a very able one.
"Mr. Holland's Opus" is good on a lot of things about teaching. It suggests how physically grueling and emotionally demanding the work is; how great a commitment of time and self is required; where the motivation to teach comes from (love, not money); and how odd and unexpected gifts, and more than a little courage, can make an ordinary person an extraordinary teacher.
The movie is also an impassioned demonstration that art and music are not educational frills. They are academically sound ways to engage young people in learning, some of them kids who may not be reachable in any other way. But at Holland's school, the budget ax spares football, not art and music. This is happening all across the nation. I agree with Glenn Holland that it is ridiculous to suggest that the arts and music -- primary means of transmitting human culture throughout history -- are not among education's "basics." Without culture, he cries, students eventually will have "nothing to read or calculate." Right.