Essay #2: Working Draft

Different Strokes: Gruwell vs Keating

The question What makes a good teacher? does not procure a simple answer. Like in mathematics, there is more than one way to reach the same conclusion. If we look at it formulaically, it could look like this: Good + Teacher = Enlightened + Empowered Students. Like in 2+7 = 5+2x2, the combinations are numerous. In this essay, we will explore this equation by comparing two teachers: Erin Gruwell, the real life teacher whose story inspired the 2007 film Freedom Writers and John Keating, a fictional character from the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. Gruwell and Keating are as different as 2 and 7, but in the end, they can both be considered effectual in having enlightened and empowered their students.

For starters, John Keating is a fictional character, but for the purpose of this essay, we will assume he is a representation of a teacher (or teachers) we all might have once had. He is loud, funny and a little bit odd. Unlike Erin Gruwell, Keating taught at his alma mater, a preparatory school by the name of Welton Academy. On the first day of the new school year, we see short clips of how the classrooms are ran by various - and assumably all - teachers at Welton; students are well dressed, prepared, respectful and respond on cue and in unison. We see Keating nonchalantly enter his classroom through a front door, walk across the length of the room and walk out the door in the rear, whistling aloofly. After a beat, he then pops his head back into the room of now confused students and says, "Well, come on." This really helps set the tone of his personal teaching style and personality. In the hall in front of the school's collection of trophies and old team photographs, Keating begins by asking who among the group knows the reference of "O Captain! My Captain!" (Walt Whitman's 1865 poem about Abraham Lincoln's death). He says, "Now in this class you can call me Mr. Keating. Or, if you're slightly more daring, Oh Captain, My Captain." He relates to his students right away by sharing that he too "attended Hell-ton and survived". From day one, the main lesson Keating is trying to instill in them is to be free-thinking individuals and to "seize the day", carpe diem. He leads by example, teaching passionately and in unorthodox ways, such as instructing his students to rip out whole introductions from their schoolbooks where Poetry is described as a mathematical equation and encouraging them stand atop his desk in order to practice challenging themselves to constantly look at things in a different way. Because of Keating's ideas and methods he becomes an outcast among the faculty and some of the parents. After a tragedy, school politics come into play and he is forced to resign at the end of the movie. One student, who has taken to heart his teacher's lesson to find and fearlessly use his Voice, is expelled for refusing to play a part in Keating's removal. In the last scene, a handful of students defiantly stand on top of their desks as a sign of respect for him.

Erin Gruwell was an underdog turned rebel. As a green teacher from surrounded by a desensitized faculty, she was given at risk students that had been already been given up on by the system and not expected to achieve much - much less attend school. Bad guy doesn't always go to jail.

Both teachers were considered unorthodox not only in their methods but in their ideas as well. The staff members in (Gruwell's school) did not understand why she would even try to teach her students who were obviously unteachable. And the idea that students at (Keating's school) capable of free thinking was, ridiculous, blasphemous even!