4.2 Life Education: Comparison and Contrast of the Two Stories, DPS &
4.2.2 Bradley as Teacher: Compared with Mr. Keating
Even though the principal helped him regain confidence in himself, and hence he started to see his sickness positively and found his dream of being a teacher, his later life path and the way leading to his dream were never smooth. Because of his sickness, the school administration and students’ parents distrusted his ability to teach and concerned that he would pose negative influences on students. All these problems from the school administration and parents blocked his road to be a teacher. As for Mr.
Keating, school administration and parents were also big challenges to him. He was able to break through traditional teaching approaches and introduced innovative teaching to the class, but he was still defeated by traditional and conservative thoughts rooted in school administration and parents’ mind. Both Bradley and Mr. Keating were challenged by the tradition of education, school administration and students’
parents. Finally, Bradley ended the passive state and was chosen to be Teacher of the Year, but Mr. Keating’s positive state in the beginning collapsed and was kicked out
of the school, never allowed to teach anymore. Bradley and Mr. Keating were compared in terms of the similarity and differences, which was illustrated in Figure 4.3. What took effects on their different results will be emphasized in this section. We will first look into the challenges they encountered, and second contrast the resolution they used to cope with the challenges.
Figure 4.3 Factors Influences Bradley’s and Mr. Keating’s Teaching Career
4.2.2.1 Challenges Bradley Encountered as a Teacher
(a) Bradley’s challenges from the school administration (SA)
When Bradley was interviewed for a job to teach, the entrances for Bradley to teach were closed as soon as the interviewer found his sickness. As one clip from the movie whose screenshot and transcription were displayed in Table 4.14, we could see how Bradley was negatively treated. At first, the interviewer seemed satisfied with Bradley’s resume. He even started to communicate with him the problems of the classes he would teach and discussed the solution with him. However, as the symptom of Tourette burst out, the interviewer’s attitude apparently changed. He couldn’t be persuaded to believe that Bradley possessed the ability to teach even though it was manifested on his resume that he was a successful teacher. This is the first challenge
he needed to overcome if he wanted to be a teacher.
Table 4.16 Transcript and Screenshot of Bradley’s Interview (35:47-37:47)
SA: Sorry about the air conditioning.Supposed to already be fixed by now.
Brad: That's all right.
SA: Well, umm, your resume looks okay.
And we do have an opening in fifth grade.
Brad: OK.
SA: But I do have to tell you: this is a tough place to work. We've got some really hard cases.
Brad: Well, I take that as a challenge. I don't believe that any kid is hopeless. You know, they all want to learn you can't ever give up.
Let me just... You just gotta find the right way to teach them.
SA: Ahh, you got something stuck in your throat? Would you like a drink?
Brad: I have Tourette Syndrome. I'd like to tell you about it. It's a
neurological...
SA: Tourette's? Isn't that where you yell out obscenities?
Brad: That's coprolalia, It's, ahh, it's a rare symptom that a small percentage of people with
Tourette's have. I don't have that.
SA: OK, listen. They did not tell me that you were going to be handicapped.
How do you expect to handle a bunch of wild students with a handicap like that?
Brad: Well. By educating them. By
letting them know it's okay to talk about it. It's okay to ask
questions...
SA: These students would laugh at you.
Brad: Not...not when they understand it's simply a matter of ...
SA: OK. I have seen teachers with disabilities before ...but never with what you've got. I just don't see how you could ever teach a class.
Brad: I can teach! Look at my resume.
Look at it! Ok? I was very successful as a student teacher.
My Tourette's never posed a problem! I can teach!
SA: OK. Bottom line: I need somebody now for fifth grade. You want to teach here, you're gonna have to refrain from making these noises in class.
Brad: You know what? Thank you very much for the interview.
SA: But, don't you want the job?
Brad: Yes, actually. I want it really bad.
But I would never, ever work for a man who doesn't care about his students. So, I'll take my portfolio and, ahh, and take no more of your time.
(b) Bradley’s challenges from students’ parents
Parents are always one of the hardest challenges for teachers to deal with and it’s never an exception for Bradley. They might have concerns about their children’s learning due to Bradley’s uncommon physical behaviors. This problem was also depicted in one scene of the movie (see Table 4.15). In the movie, the student,
Amanda, liked Bradley’s teaching and wanted to stay in his class. In spite of that, her father, Mr. Wright, worried her daughter’s ability to concentrate in Bradley’s class and transferred Amanda to another class. Bradley was obviously frustrated about that.
Table 4.17 Transcription of Bradley’s Challenge from Parents (1:07:28-1:08:01)
Brad: Amanda? Is everything all right?Amanda: I wanna be in your class, Mr.
Cohen.
Brad: You are in my class, Amanda.
Amanda: No. He made them take me out See you after school, honey. OK?
Amanda: It's not fair!
Brad: Is everything OK? I'm Amanda's teacher, Mr. Cohen.We met yesterday.
Mr. Wright: Oh, no, no, no. There's nothing wrong. I just have to do what's right for my daughter. Come on, Amanda. Come on.
4.2.2.2 Challenges Mr. Keating Encountered
(a) Mr. Keating’s challenges from the school administration (SA)
In DPS, Welton Academy is a school highly valuing tradition and discipline. In the beginning, the dean, Mr. Nolan, praised Mr. Keating and look at him as an honor of the school. However, Keating’s unusual methods of teaching and conflicting stance
to that of the school led him to be condemned as the cause to Neil’s death. The conflict between Mr. Keating and the SA could be clearly demonstrated in one scene where Mr. Nolan talked to Mr. Keating. The transcription and screenshot of the scene were provided in Figure 4.16. Mr. Nolan thought that Mr. Keating should follow the school’s curriculum instead of doing something crossing the line. At the end, he repeated and pressed the school’s stance again, tradition and discipline. Nevertheless, it could be detected from the talk that neither did Mr. Keating have any consensus with the educational idea of the school nor was he persuaded to compromise.
Table 4.18 Transcription of Mr. Nolan’s Talk with Mr. Keating (1:19:04-1:19:52)
Nolan: I’m hearing rumors, John…aboutsome unorthodox teaching methods in your classroom. I’m not saying they’ve anything to do with the Dalton Boy’s outburst.
But I don’t think I have to warn you boys his age are very impressionable.
Keating: Well, your reprimand made quite an impression, I’m sure.
Nolan: What was going on in the courtyard the other day?
Keating: Courtyard?
Nolan: Yeah. Boys marching. Clapping in unison.
Keating: Oh, that. That was an exercise to prove a point. Dangers of conformity.
Nolan: Well, John, the curriculum here is set. It’s proven it works. If you question it, what’s to prevent them from doing the same?
Keating: I always thought the idea of
education was to learn to think for yourself.
Nolan: At these boys’ age, not on your life. Tradition, John. Discipline.
Prepare them for college and the rest will take care of itself.
(a) Mr. Keating’s challenges from students’ parents
In addition to the lack of agreement with the SA’s educational idea, Mr. Keating also went against some parents’ expectation about how children should be educated.
Neil’s father was the best example to exemplify the problem. From one scene where Neil was scolded for he deceived his father about the acting, his father considered it was Mr. Keating who encouraged Neil to do that (see Table 4.17). This indicates that Neil’s father had been alarmed at Mr. Keating’s unconventional teaching.
Table 4.19 Transcription of Neil’s Father’s Questioning (1:22:00-1:22:31)
Neil: FatherFather: Neil
Neil: Wait a minute. Before you say anything, please let me ex…
Father: Don’t you dare talk back to me. It’s bad enough that you’ve wasted you time with this, this absurd acting business. But you deliberately deceived me! How, how, how did you expect to get away with this?
Answer me. Who put you up to it?
Was it this new man? This, uh, Mr.
Keating?
There is another scene manifesting the conflict between Mr. Keating and Neil’s
father. When Mr. Keating came up to tell Neil his admiration to the performance after the play, Neil’s father went to ask Mr. Keating to stay away from Neil, showing their divergent idea toward Neil’s development.
Table 4.20 Transcript: Mr. Keating’s Challenges from Parents (1:38:45- 1:38:54)
Keating: Neil. Neil. You have the gift.What a performance. You left even me speechless. You have to stay with …
Father: Get in the car. Keating, you stay away from my son.
4.2.2.3 Comparison of Bradley and Mr. Keating
For both Bradley and Mr. Keating, they came into the problems of traditional education, the school administration and students’ parents. Bradley had interview several times and tried different ways to convince the interviewers that he was able to teach. Moreover, he had proved his ability to those who had concerns. However, Mr.
Keating failed to have successful communication with those against him to accept his ideas. This is the difference between the two teachers; one successfully overcame the adversity, turned it into opportunity through perseverant trials and errors and was finally recognized as an excellent teacher, but the other one ruined his advantages in the beginning and made his way to a tragedy at the end because of the failure of communication and resolutions to challenges.
Table 4.21 Differences between Keating and Teacher-Bradley When Facing Challenges
Keating (DPS) Teacher-Bradley (FOC)
Challenges Administrations, colleagues, and students’ parents didn’t agree with his teaching. They thought it unnecessary and dangerous to ask students to think independently.
Administrations, colleagues, students’ parents and his own father considered him
disabled and unable to be a good teacher.
How they deal with challenges
Keating DID NOT communicate with those who against him and only kept teaching his students.
Bradley proved his ability with his own strength to those who had concerns of him and did not let Tourette Syndrome win
Results Was accused of Neil’s death and got expelled, never-ever able to teach again
Praised, recognized, and was chosen as the best teacher of the year
4.3 Summary
In this chapter, we have provided the findings of our research, including the teaching strategy and important topic of LE. By analyzing Mr. Keating’s utterances to students, we found Mr. Keating’s preference to booster over hedge. His use of booster manifests his stance on student’s development—students should go exploring wider possibility of life instead of being forced to answer the standardized answer and passively accepted the only choice for them. In his interaction with students, he used a lot of boosters in order to: 1) urge them to take action and experience the lesson he intended to deliver, and 2) to conveyed messages to students confidently and certainly.
The effects of booster could be achieved through booster words, imperative moods, or different modes of communication, such as sudden shrink of distance between interlocutors. Most of his classes were organized under the frame of experiential learning. From the perspective of the concepts of anticipatory discourse, Mr. Keating,
as a teacher, took his stance on students’ development and used boosters to convey the knowledge he possessed directly or through an activity. The immediate future event in the class made it easier for students to understand one idea and, thus, influenced their future behaviors outside classroom. The whole process then formed the cycle of experiential learning. Therefore, with anticipatory discourse and experiential learning, Mr. Keating’s teaching strategy could be broken down for a close look and serves as a model for LE instruction.
The results in the first part provide a model about how to teach LE, but what to teach is also indispensable. With the model of teaching gained from the first part of analysis, one scene of the principal’s educating students and teachers in FOC, which also serves as a turning point for Bradley, was analyzed and found almost the same as Mr. Keating’s teaching approach. The factors cause two bipolar results in the two
movies would be the important topic in LE, which is how to overcome challenges.
CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION
5.1 Summary
This paper shows a thorough analysis of Mr. Keating’s teaching strategy and the implied life education meaning of DPS. For Mr. Keating’s teaching approach, this study probed into the critical elements that constituted his teaching, including his stance, discursive strategies, and the core concept, while the messages implied in DPS was the importance of the courage to overcome difficulties. The findings had answered the research questions (RQs) researchers raised in the introduction section as follows:
RQ1: What is the stance Mr. Keating taking when communicating with students?
RQ2: What are the discursive strategies Mr. Keating used with students, and how students reacted?
RQ3: How can LE movies, such as DPS and FOC, be exploited to LE?
For RQ1, we have demonstrated that Mr. Keating tended to use booster to communicate with students with the quantified data showing 93% of his utterances to students constructed with booster. Besides, the booster words he used was 74 % overlapped with that used by other characters in the novel, but the purpose he used booster was to broaden the possibilities for students, encouraging them to have their own thought and voice. As for RQ2, in addition to his utilization of booster, Mr.
Keating would not only resort to the power of words but also the assistance of other physical tools, such as gaze, gestures, and proxemics, to achieve the effect of booster.
He also guided students to think with teacher initiating, students responding, and
follow-up conversations. The answer to RQ3 can be provided through two aspects of LE, how to teach it and what to teach. The first aspect is discussed through the investigation and demonstration of the teaching strategies of Mr. Keating, who tended to use the skills of experiential learning and let students think over the meaning by themselves. As we had learned that students’ engagement is imperative in experiential learning for that it enhances the effect (Kolb & Kolb, 2011), if the teacher wants to teach LE successfully, life meaning cannot be passed to students simply through lecturing. LE must be experienced by students themselves. As for what to teach in LE,
DPS and FOC can be exploited as the materials for teaching the students to be
determined and never give up with the comparison and contrast of the two movies.Table 5.1 summarizes the study.
Table 5.1 Summary of the Study
Research Questions Findings
RQ1:
What is the stance Mr. Keating took when communicating with students?
Mr. Keating tended to use boosters since they took up 93% of his utterances
RQ2:
What are the discursive strategies Mr.
Keating used with students, and how students reacted?
Mr. Keating used many modes of communication to reinforce the strength of boosters, and mainly guided students with IRF models
RQ3:
How can LE movies, such as DPS and FOC, be exploited to LE?
How to teach LE
Mr. Keating’s teaching strategies can serve as a reference for teaching LE.
What to teach in LE
The comparison and contrast of DPS and FOC can be exploited as the teaching materials to teach students the power of perseverance and determination