"Bad Teacher"
06/30/2011
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From my movie review in Taki's Magazine of the hit comedy with Cameron Diaz playing a bad teacher:

The second least glamorous job in showbiz is teaching schoolchildren. It's standup comedy for the risk-averse. The government employs truant officers to make sure you have an audience, and they can't fire you if you're not funny.
For years, resentment of teachers has been mounting. Public-school teachers have health insurance and pensions, but they still can't get American students to outscore Koreans. If only they'd work harder!
Idealistic young teachers willingly sweat for their students, but once they have kids of their own, their priorities change. Hence, the most common solution that societies have come up with to get their educators-such as Jesuits, nuns, and Eton schoolmasters-to care passionately about other people's children has been celibacy. (Of course, celibate teachers sometimes wind up caring a little too passionately for their charges.)

Read the whole thing there.

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