Mentor Text 2 – “To Sir, With Love”

I don’t know what was going on in the heads of people during the late sixties but they were absolutely crazy. For some reason, my mom recommended me the movie To Sir, With Love in order to get some ideas for my book. The movie was horribly put together and any parts of it that had the potential for emotion simply vanished because it was as if the director realized he only had a certain amount of time for this poorly budgeted film to air on the big screen.

First of all, the movie focused way too much on the fact that it was being made during a time of musical revolution. It over emphasized the use of crappy British punk rock from the late sixties and had to show the students dancing approximately five times. Let’s not forget the horrible, reoccurring theme where some female singer keeps saying, “To Sir, With Love.” Honestly? How cheesy is that? They seriously used a song with the name in the title as the main theme. It sounded like a bad version of Pat Benatar trying to sing seriously.

Anyway, on the topic of my actual story, this movie did have something to offer. It showed me how NOT to portray students. The actors in the film portrayed fake emotions that could not even be justified by, “they were acting anyway.” They did not seem to me like high school kids, nor did they seem like the immature high school kids that we deal with everyday. Because this movie was made in a time of social revolution, the students were all given roles that corresponded to rebelling against ‘the man’. Therefore, this movie does not apply to my story at all. All I can do is avoid what the movie has shown me.

The teacher, who the students must call Sir, is not even a real teacher. He was really an engineer in search for a real job. Thankfully, the movie was so predictable that you could tell he would fall so madly in love with teaching pain in the butt children that he would give up on his dream to be an engineer. I guess I’d give him credit there, because the experience of shaping someone’s personality through teaching is very powerful.

In conclusion, I guess I would have to say that Freedom Writers will be more of a mentor text than this movie. Freedom Writers was real and dedicated to the power that teaching had, whereas To Sir, With Love focused on the social impact of teenage rebellion in the late sixties, and then decided to throw a little bit of teaching in there. The point is, that movie was terrible, both for anyone just watching the movie, or for those seeking inspiration from it.