Not a Teacher in an Inspirational Movie.

I'm not one of those teachers who is desperate to be A Teacher in an Inspirational Movie where, against amazing odds & in an incredibly short time, manages to completely transform a whole class of disaffected ratbags into straight A students who all miraculously get into Harvard. 

Robin Williams probably set the standard for these films back in the eighties with 'The Dead Poets Society', where he manages to instill a love of poetry to a class of snotty rich boys with hateful parents.  Just when poor old Robin was about to get the chop from the school for being too wonderful, in a gesture of support,the whole of his class stood up on their desks brandishing rulers & shouting, 'Captain, My Captain!' 

It was Pure Torture.

And who could forget, 'Stand By Me', where  some small & ugly teacher turned a whole lot of badly behaved  Latino kids  into Quantum Physicists in one semester, just in time for them all to top some big Examination that usually only rich kids won. Everyone clapped & cheered.

But it's always the men that seem to be The Big Inspirational Ones. Never any women. 

Maybe Once.

Maybe Hilary Swank. I seem to remember that she was in a recent movie where she completely turned around a class of  sneering hopeless underachievers in a couple of weeks.

Which brings me to An Important Question: who would play me, Middleagedteacher, in a film? Certainly not Hilary, who's far too young & athletic-looking to be me.  Of course, as usual, the only actress that comes to mind is Bette Midler. But she'd have to put on an Australian accent, which, quite frankly I don't think she could pull off.  Meryl Streep comes to mind because she's good with accents & she's already played an Australian woman in 'Evil Angels', where she famously said, 'A Dingo took my Baby'. 

I wouldn't mind Helen Mirren, even though she's quite a bit older than me. I could see her injecting some Sexy Gravitas into my character.

Gravitas, sexy or otherwise was not evident in my last lesson  ever with my Senior Class. High on large amounts of sugar from hundreds of lollies that I threw at them when they answered a question correctly, the girls insisted that they support my supine body in a Class Photo. I happily obliged.

If you click on the image, hopefully it will enlarge so you can see that the girls on the left are holding up a sign commemorating my diligent 'Whiteboard Wardrobe' photographer, The Wise Twin, who was sick & couldn't make the class. Over the course of nearly a year, she has taken hundreds of photos of me at the end of the class each day so I could post them on flickr's

 wardrobe remix.  What a champion!