The “Unteachable” Stephanie DuBose

The “Unteachable” Class

A group of students that have spacific learning difficulties and/or behavior problems

The school casts them off as the bad or stupid kids and the “unteachable.”

No one seems to care if they learn and the students show the same apathetic approach to education.

Blackboard Jungle 1955

A classroom full of inner city, Chicago, street gang members.

One student in the class is considered mentally retarded.

The class is mixed race. At one point the film speaks of broken homes

due to the war.

Blackboard Jungle Cont.

One of the veteran teachers refers to the class as “garbage” and tells the new teacher that “they don’t want to learn”

When the teacher, Mr. Dadier, says that he will see them tomorrow the students respond, “you’re coming back tomorrow?”

In the end Dadier gets through to the kids with a film that he is able to connect to their lives.

The students are amazed that he stays with them after all that they put him through and therefore they begin to respect him.

Stand and Deliver 1988

A computer programmer sees a need for math teachers in his neighborhood schools

He is assigned to a classroom where the little is expected of the students because of their academic history.

The class is almost all Hispanic. Many of the students are in gangs or from broken

homes.

Stand and Deliver Cont.

Through some unorthodox teaching the teacher is able to inspire the students to rise above the low expectation that the school has for them.

They learn to believe in themselves and they learn calculus.

The class performs so well on a national test that they are accused of cheating because even those officials believe that this class of students are unteachable.

It proves that the beliefs associated with these unteachable students transcends far beyond the individual school.

Renaissance Man 1994

The class is a group of underachieving army recruits called the double Ds. (Dumb as dog sh**)

The army believes that the soldiers need to be in a class to learn basic comprehension to try and make them succeed in boot camp.

The class is comprised of students form mostly broken homes and poor backgrounds.

Renaissance Man Cont.

After the supposedly “stupid” soldiers learn to read and understand Shakespeare, the teacher wants to give them a test

The army still does not believe they are capable of being taught and refuses to let the final be given for fear that their failure will compromise their completion of boot camp.

The teacher tells the students what the army said but the students still take the test voluntarily because of their new found respect for themselves and their learning.

Freedom Writers 2007

An upper middle class, young, white, female teacher finds herself teaching in an inner city school in Long Beach, California.

The class is divers in make up though most of the races are in constant conflict.

The students are all from lower class homes and most of those are broken.

Freedom Writers Cont.

The class she is placed in has no real supplies and school refuses to give them any because they are unruly and can not be trusted.

The teacher ends up buying the supplies for the students and has them explore literature through journals that they write about themselves.

The students begin to excel in their education when they realize that someone cares about them.

Teaching the “Unteachable” 1966

In this news article the author states that teachers mask there own failures by putting it off as the students failures.

“They see in the environment, the family, the home, the native intelligence of the child, the reasons for the children’s failures”

“When students fail to respond, it is usually not so much because they can’t as because the teacher hasn’t offered them anything to respond to.”

Who are the unteachable?

The theme in all of these movies and real life experiences, is the idea that children from poor, broken and/ or dangerous homes and neighborhoods are persevied as “unteachable” but when they are given relatable material the students succeed.

These students are from undesirable places and are, for one or more of these reasons, considered undesirable themselves.

These students are aware of the stigma that has been assigned to them and in most cases fulfill the beliefs or believe them themselves.

How do we reach the “unteachable”?

These films show how one teacher, who does not accept the common beliefs, is able to reach them by providing them with relevant material.

Teachers have to understand where their students come from and all of the cultural aspects of their life outside of school in order break the barriers that may be preventing learning.

Often the mere act of showing an interest in the students lives will create a motivation to learn.

The idea is to acknowledge the unteachable students have actually been failed by the system and they are not in fact failures themselves.