A favorite moment. Here's what Esmerelda learned (while not is school):
Writers: Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo
All of the characters bear the actors' own names:
Francois Marin
Boubacar
Carl Esmerelda
Khoumba
Nassim
Souleymane
Wei
The clip above offers a moment of promise. For much of the film's two hours, though, The Class is tough to watch because it doesn't pull many punches. Cantent isn't interested in sentimentality. As John said, it feels like a documentary, but it isn't a documentary. It is a carefully crafted story, a story with a purpose. Let's try to figure that out. Here's a start:1. What is the film saying about who these children are? Is the approach positive? Do the writers have a sympathy for the kids or not? Or is the depiction more complicated than that?
2. What about the teachers? How does the writer treat the adults in this school?
3. And here's a big question: what is this school for? What is this school teaching its students?
1) I feel as though the film does not show the students or the teachers in a particularly bad or good light. They instead just show a realistic portrayal of teacher-student relationships. At times the film does show sympathy for the students but they do this for the teachers as well. When the whole situation occurs between the two girls and Francois, the viewer is forced to feel sympathy for them after such a strong word was used to describe them. Also, throughout the issues with Souleymane, the viewer can not help but feel sympathy for the ways in which the school misunderstands him and the situation he is in. The movie allows all characters to be sympathized with while also at the same time forcing them to be ridiculed.
ReplyDelete2) The portrayal of the teachers is similar to the students in that there is no clear opinion on them. At times during the movie, I could sympathize with the situation that Francois was being put in. The students clearly had no respect for him and as a teacher he needed that respect to actually get stuff done in the classroom. At other times though, I absolutely hated him. Like Khoumba said in her note, he clearly had no respect for the students. He started off on the first day insulting them and doubting their intelligence. Not to mention that it was incredibly inappropriate for him to refer to two of his students as skanks. The other teachers in the movie are similar to him in that they could be good or bad depending on the moment. Some of the teachers were helpful at some times but then at others were very uncaring and immature. This variation of adults in the movie made it seem very realistic.
3) I have a lot of difficulty actually putting into words what this school is for. Of course I want to say that this school was for learning and growing. Obviously this is not true though. At the talk on the last day of school when the students are supposed to be discussing what they learned that year, many students have difficulty even thinking of something to say. Even more, most of them are very vague with their statements. Not one of the students say that they learned something from Francois’s class which further proves that they are not actually there to learn. If the school is not for learning, though, I have few ideas about what it is for. I suppose that it is for learning how to deal and live with other people. Every person in this movie has a conflict with someone else. Somehow though, by the end of the movie, they are all friendly and playing soccer. The only thing they seemed to learn during that school year was how to deal with each other which in the long run could be more important.
ReplyDeleteI think that the director intended the movie to polarize its viewers in terms of their perceptions of the characters. While some viewers may sympathize with the children, others may favor the adults. It is made clear that every character shown has his or her own faults, as well as their own justifications for said faults. The students may be rowdy and disrespectful, but the film shows that they are not lead by the best examples. Depending on the viewers own experiences and current circumstances, they will develop a different perception of each character because of how real and raw the depictions of the students are.
Similarly to the movie’s depiction of the students, I think that the movie seeks to let the viewer develop their own opinion of the teachers. Personally, I think that the movie antagonized the teachers slightly more than it did the students. I believe this is due to their inability to handle student discipline, as adults in their situation should be readily equipped to do. It seems as though the teachers are not as concerned with the well being of their students, as denoted by their brief discussion over the topic of discipline -- a conversation that desperately needed more time and attention focused on it. The most obvious antagonization of the teachers is from the instance when Francois called the two class representatives “skanks.” Though the kids were attacking their teacher, as an adult Francois has the responsibility to not not stoop down to a child’s level by means of an insult.
I would like to say the school succeeds to expand the knowledge of the students that attend it; however, I am not sure this is true. The last scene in which the kids were describing what they had learned (or hadn’t learned) showed that students found difficulty in retaining the information taught to them. I also wish I could say that this school was helping kids to build their character and become moral people, though I do not think these statements are correct either. This question should be a matter of what the school is failing to teach its students rather than what it is teaching its students.
1. I think the movie tries to depict the kids as realistically as possible. The movie shows that the kids have legitimate struggles in and out of the classroom as they worry about their parents being deported and teachers who assume the worse. However, the movie does not completely let the kids use these hardships as justifications for their bad behavior because it depicts students like Wei who struggle with these things and still succeed. The movie does not exonerate or condemn the kids, but instead tries to show them as the complicated people they are. Ultimately, the movie is saying that these kids are people who deserve respect and to be thought about just as much as the adults.
ReplyDelete2. The movie also tries to depict the adults in this movie as complete characters. The movie is harsher on the adults than the kids because the adults are the people in power and should be more mature than the kids. The movie shows where characters like Francois mess up and act like the children by using name calling and other childish means to feel in control. Additionally, the movie uses the faculty meeting to show the us vs. them attitude of the teachers towards the students. The movie also depicts the kids' disrespect for the adults, but after showing the adults' shortcomings, that help cause the disrespect. This takes away from the teachers' argument that they act the way they do to counteract the disrespectful kids. The adults are realistically depicted as full people just as the kids are, but they come off as less sympathetic than the kids.
3. The school is there to educate the kids and help prepare them for high school and beyond. However, the school has failed. Students like Souleymane and the girl who approaches Francois on the last day of school fall through the cracks and learn nothing. The school has lost sight of its original goal and now functions almost as a warehouse for students to spend time at before moving on. The school is teaching its students how to live in a system that repeatedly fails them and then blames them for acting out. Instead of teaching students to improve their situations, the school just reenforces the socio-economic injustice that made the school terrible to begin with.
1. I feel like the film is trying to show the most realistic depiction of the interactions between students and teachers in this environment. There are no entirely good characters and there are no entirely bad characters. The film also does a great job at showing both the side of the student and the side of the teacher. It shows that being a teacher in this environment is very difficult to properly teach the kids while also showing that the kids are often mistreated and misunderstood which causes them to feel unfairly targeted.
ReplyDelete2. The teachers are shown to have obvious parallels to the kids. They are portrayed as just more educated versions of the kids (just as immature and distractable). A great example of this is when they spent about a minute talking about the important issue of a proper discipline system before running out of ideas. They then immediately change the topic to the coffee machines at the school. Another example of this is when it is announced that Wei's mom is likely to be deported. Shortly after the news is received someone announces that they are having a baby and they drink champagne just seconds after.
3. School is supposed to be for learning, but, judging by the final scene where everyone says what they learned, is not the case. The kids seemly retain very little information that they are actually taught. This school (maybe unintentionally) teaches the students how to interact with people they don't get along with.
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ReplyDelete
Delete1. What is the film saying about who these children are? Is the approach positive? Do the writers have a sympathy for the kids or not? Or is the depiction more complicated than that?
I think the depictions of both sides (teacher and student) are very complicated. I think the director chose to have the teacher call Esmerelda and her friend “skanks” to make sure that each character, even the authority figures, displays their negative side at some point. The director chose to portray the class as rowdy so that there's no easily definable good guy and bad guy. I think the writers do have sympathy for the students because they have a few moments in which we have a small view into their worlds outside of school; we discover that Carl’s brother is in jail, that Souleymane could be sent back home if he's expelled, and that Khoumba has the courage and respect for her teacher to write an essay about their rocky relationship.
2. What about the teachers? How does the writer treat the adults in this school?
Because they are teachers and they aren't evil, the viewer automatically assumes they're the guy guys. However, the writers and director again decided to show both positive and negative aspects of the teachers. For example, Francois is depicted as witty and likable (at least to me he is), but then he calls two students skanks and dodges around the subject when confronted.
3. And here's a big question: what is this school for? What is this school teaching its students?
I think this school (or at least Francois places emphasis on social/conversational skills. Whenever the class went on a tangent, Francois would almost encourage it by asking the student to express more or clarify their feeling. We don't get any insight into the other classes or teachers, which makes me wonder if this group of students is somewhat of a special case or not. This choice to focus only on Francois’s class is intentional, but I can't exactly place meaning behind it.
The movie is trying to break the standard perception that separates students and teachers/ adults and children, by showing that, even though they are only in the junior high, each and every one of the students in the film is capable of thinking on a higher level and of being independent from the adults in their lives. I believe that the depiction of the children is positive. The Director is making an active choice to empower adolescence through this film by showing their independence and deeper thinking that goes directly against how the adults in the film view them.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the teachers are treated less positively than the students in the film. Even from fairly early on in the movie where there is a scene of a teacher essentially breaking down after getting fed up with his students. Throughout the film, the teachers are shown to be disconnected and distant from their students, and sometimes the teachers are shown to handle situations in very childlike ways, bringing in to question who the more mature party really party.
The school seems to be more of a daycare for the children in a way. Yes, there is homework and assignments, but, besides that, the school is just a place for the children to go for a day. The reason I say this is because the school isn’t really empowering its students, and, in fact, there are a few times where the cycle of poverty in even brought up and enforced. So instead of proposing a future for these kids enabling them to look ahead and move forward, the school is simply a place the kids go to sit idle and be berated by the teachers whenever they misbehave.
1 ) I think that the film is very neutral on its view of the children. I don’t think that the film makers thought that the kids were good or bad. I do however think that they did feel some sympathy for the kids. Khoumba’s letter was an example of their sympathy for the students. The letter showed the side of the students and showed how the students felt disrespected by the teacher. The film did not side with the adults but they also did not side with the students. The film showed both sides of the story well.
ReplyDelete2 ) Though the writer did not really take sides I think that they did have some issues with how the teachers treated the students. The writers showed the main teacher as acting rather childish after he insulted the two girls in his class. He also escalated the situation with Souleymane by trying to forcibly stop him from leaving the class. I think that the writer of the film portrayed some of the teachers as being rather immature.
3 ) The school is trying to help students learn but it is failing. All that the school Is doing is teaching its students to be distrustful of teachers in the future. All of this distrust between the students and the teachers is only making the students hate learning. A school is supposed to encourage students in the learning. The school is trying to teach the kids to be submissive and live under the rule of others.
1. I think the way the film portrays these kids is positive and negative. The kids are not afraid to stand up for themselves and voice their opinion, but they don’t respect the teachers at all and that made me dislike them. They were brave and would not accept bullshit so that is a positive portrayal in my opinion, but their attitudes were not as positive. I don’t think the writers have sympathy for the kids. It felt like the kids were alone every cause they fought for which sometimes made sense since it was outrageous, but they definitely were not heard. François listened to them the most but he still didn’t achieve anything that helped the kids in the meetings so the writers weren’t really giving the kids any victories.
ReplyDelete2. I think the teachers were not portrayed in a responsible way, but the writers gave them all the authority. For example when François sank down to the kids’ level it was disappointing, but he still got away with it. He was able to do anything without repercussions because he would still have power over the students. I think if François was looking at the situation he would thank the writers for his authority but it did make me dislike him. I don’t know what that means for if the portrayal was positive or not.
3. This school thinks that they teach the students, but it lacks structure. I think it is there to teach but also there to kind of remind the kids of their responsibilities. A lot of them have a home life where the parents don’t know how to discipline as much as needed. The kids come to school and it is like a wake up call. They don’t like to think about what lies ahead but the school forces them to.
1) I think that the movie shows how a lot of teachers write students off as just being “problem children” when there is a lot more to it. These children are complex people with different backgrounds and struggles, and that is something that a lot of the teachers seem to forget when they become frustrated. The kids are seen in a mostly negative light and are made out to be really disrespectful and disruptive. However, there are a few times in the movie where the kids are seen as vulnerable, like when we hear Khoumba’s letter about respect. Those few moments are powerful. I don’t think that the writers are sympathetic towards the students at all as the students’ faults are a lot more obvious than the wrongdoings of the teachers.
ReplyDelete2) I think it takes some people awhile to realize how much the teachers have messed up and failed these students. The movie is set up so that people sympathize with the teachers for having to deal with such difficult children. However, there are so many things the teachers say and do throughout the movie that are truly terrible. Let’s just forget for a moment that Francois called Esmeralda and Louise skanks. Francois constantly disparages his class but cannot properly handle receiving the same ridicule. It is okay for a teacher to go on a whole rant about how the kids are degenerates and will never get out of their bad neighborhoods. During the first teacher meeting, there was a discussion of a point system that never got put into action. They never listened to the parent representative that told them to start praising the kids instead of punishing them all the time. They were more concerned with the coffee prices than the disciplinary issues. Right after someone announces that Wei’s mom is getting deported and offers to start a fund to help them get a lawyer, the blonde lady thinks it's appropriate to announce her pregnancy and proceeds to partake in alcohol. There are no translators provided for any of the parent conferences. They graded the kids on their behavior rather than their intellectual abilities. They knew how flawed their disciplinary system was, but they proceeded to take Souleymane to disciplinary committee where he was expelled. The teachers literally suck, but the way this is written makes you feel bad for them for the majority of the movie.
3) I guess all schools are made to teach students valuable life skills and general knowledge, but that is not the case here. It is clear that everyone has trouble sharing with the class what they learned and then Henrietta approaches Francois saying that she has learned nothing at all. Though the kids haven’t learned anything educational, I think that something that they will take with them is the idea that school has to be teachers against the students. They are in a place where respect is expected of them and they get nothing in return. They aren’t going to change until they are shown more compassion and undertstanding.
1) The director seems to hint many times that the children are a lot more complex than meets the eye. Rather than having a set list of aspects of their personality, they act in various ways depending on the situation surrounding them. Sometimes, the audience sympathizes with a certain, while other times the audience is inclined to dislike the same person. Also, depending on who is watching, some people may sympathize while others do not. I think this approach is very realistic to the actual personality of kids. There are no fully good or bad children in this movie. They are more of a mixture of every characteristic, good and bad, and it is impossible to judge the characters on simple criteria.
ReplyDelete2) I think the teachers act very similarly to the kids in this movie. One moment that stood out to me greatly was during the teacher meeting when the group left the punishment problem unresolved and skipped over to talking in depth about the coffee machine. In my opinion, the way the kids are treated and acting in a school should be one of the main focuses for teachers, rather than how much the price of coffee as increased. This discussion just seems very unprofessional and childish. It also surprised me when they paid little attention to the parent’s comment about praising the children more than punishing them so they are inspired to work harder. François as a teacher also surprised me quite a bit. He was constantly reprimanding his students for lashing out and being disrespectful, but then he would turn around and do the same thing to them. Although agree teachers deserve more respect than students, I think it is a group effort between both students and teachers to create a educational and safe environment, but many teachers in this movie placed the blame only on the children.
3) The overall goal of this school seems to be to educate children from less privileged households and teach them how to be respectful and attentive students who are dedicated to their work. Although this is the goal, I do not think that they meet it. The more the teachers try to gain their students’ respect, the less the students actually listen. One of the final scenes in the movie, when François goes around the asking what the children have learned during the year, reflects how little the children learned. When a girl admits to being confused throughout the entire year, He merely insists that she must have learned something and tells her to not worry about her future because she still has time ahead of her. This is very worrisome that the teacher never noticed a student falling behind. It seems that they spent more time in class arguing and trying t resolve behavioral issues rather than learning. Although this may have been a director’s choice to leave out the actual learning parts, I found the constant discussion interesting. Teachers seemed to teach their students more through threats and punishment rather than actual educational lessons.
1. This film portrays children as people who are dealing with a lot of issues and are just trying to figure things out. They are confused about who they are and who they what to be. They act out a lot partially because they want to be liked by their peers and want attention and also partially because they don’t know how else to channel all the emotions that they feel. On the surface, it seems like these kids don’t care about their future, but I think they actually care about their future a lot. It’s just that they feel the teachers don’t think they will amount to anything, which makes them feel like doing well in school doesn’t even matter. When they feel like the teachers respect them, they are able to do well, but when they think the teacher doesn’t respect them, they don’t respect the teacher, and they lash out. I definitely sympathized with the students, even though they were portrayed as very flawed people.
ReplyDelete2. The adults are ultimately trying to help the kids, but they really don’t know how. They are in a position of authority, and the teachers don’t really know how to handle being in that position They don’t have much faith in their students, which was really upsetting to watch, but I also understood their feelings of frustration. Even though I sympathized with the teachers and even though I feel that this movie is just as much about the teachers as it is about the students, I sympathize for the students a lot more than I sympathize with the teachers. Like in many of the films we’ve watched, the young people in this movie are looking for guidance from the adults, and they are not getting the guidance they need. Because the teachers don’t have faith in the students, many students often end up not being able to achieve anything.
3. School is place that puts people on the track that they are set to go on for the rest of their life. Schools aim to put people on a “good track,” but oftentimes, instead, school plays a major role in getting kids on the wrong track. It feels like the teachers in this mover have very little faith in their students. When teachers don’t respect their students and believe they won’t amount to anything, they are inevitably putting their student on a bad track. We see Francois lack of faith in Souleymane and how this puts him on the wrong track. Another example is when a history teacher is suggesting books to Francois for his students, and Francois says that those books would be too hard for his students.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to me to compare the role of school in this movie and the role of school in Dead Poets Society. Both schools are putting their students on a very narrow path, but they are both very different paths. Welton is preparing students to follow the “perfect” path, which is very limiting. Even though it is good that they have faith in their students, they expect too much from their students, and they limit their students even if they limit their students in a very different way than this French school does. Then, in Dead Poets society, Keating comes in and tells his student to rebel and step off that narrow path (note: it is debatable as to whether they are truly stepping off the path or if they are simply stepping onto a new path that just seems more rebellious). Although I loved Keating while watching the film, when I thought about the movie, I realized how unrealistic he was being about how the world works and how he was setting his students up for disappointment and how if the students follow his advice, they will live a life of hardship, which made part of me like him a lot less. In contrary to both Welton as an institution and Keating, Francois is very realistic about his students abilities and does not have much faith in them. This puts his students in a box and limits them and puts them on the path for failure.
None of these three paths seem to be the right path, so that leaves us with the question, how can adults properly help adolescents transition from childhood to adulthood? I definitely don’t know what the answer to this question is. Idealistically, I like to think that school should be a place where students are not pressured to follow any one particular and gain the knowledge to do whatever they choose to do, but I know I am being unrealistic and sound like Keating when I say this. Teachers can’t simply tell students “Just follow your dreams and everything will be great” like Keating did, but I also don’t think teachers can tell their students “here is a strict recipe for success that you must follow” like the other teachers at Welton did, and I also don’t think it is right for teachers to expect students to achieve so little and as a result, see students achieve so little like the teachers in The Class.
1. I feel that the film is trying to show the struggle of the children and the complexity of their character. A lot of adults want kids to act in a cut and dry way and be very plain and open even though children are people just as adults are. I don’t really think that the approach was really negative or positive it really just showed the children as they were and how they acted in each situation. The writers seem to be on no one’s side or anything of that regard. It feels like a documentary, just the fact of what happened. The movie is really all about the children and their relationship with a a certain teacher. A majority of the movie happens in one setting the classroom of Mr. Marin.
ReplyDelete2. I think that the writers showed the teachers as very negative figures in the children’s lives. They were all obsessed with themselves and their own individual problems. For instance in the scene about Wei’s mother they all seem to pity the student and his situation, but then there is the announcement of the pregnancy and they all focus on that. It’s a very strange contrast. The boy who may have permanently lost his mother to the mother who will be soon raising her children very safely.
3. The school seems to be all about education children that have poor families so they can move up in life so to speak. The teachers tend to focus on the children that are doing well and not on the ones who are doing poorly. They don’t seem to try and understand what else children might be going through. Particularly with the situation of Souleymane. They all knew about the risk of being sent back to his village if he were expelled from the school, but they did it regardless. They seemed to feel that they were all doing the students a favor by teaching them rather than actually caring about the students.
1. The film depicts the kids as on edge and hard to control but also intelligent and thoughtful. I wouldn’t say that this approach is very positive because the film shows how, within the school system, more emphasis is placed on punishing the kids for their bad behavior rather than rewarding them for good behavior. Furthermore, when disciplinary action is taken, the kids and teachers are left angry and discouraged, viewing each other as adversaries, rather than bettered by the experience. I think that the writers are sympathetic towards the kids and are also angry on their behalf. The writers present the audience with a group of individual and well-rounded characters and then illustrate how the system mistreats those kids.
ReplyDelete2. The film depicts the teachers as very flawed. The adults clearly sympathize with the kids and want to help them, but most of them get too caught up in their own frustrations, morals, or emotions to do their jobs properly and behave appropriately. For example, when François tries to talk to Khoumba about her behavior in class, all he does is alienate her and winds up discouraging her from participating in class, rather than helping her to improve her attitude. François’s need to be liked and respected within the classroom came before addressing Khoumba’s needs. The writers show how much the teachers struggle to help the kids and how often those efforts fail. The film doesn’t treat the teachers as incompetent, however; they’re just very human.
3. The school is there to keep the kids from running wild. A teacher once told me that until college, school is basically just babysitting. I didn’t really agree with my teacher at the time, but I can see how that concept applies here. As François states at the beginning of the movie, a lot of class time is spent just getting the kids to come to the next class and settle in their seats. Additional class time is then spent telling the kids to be quiet and keeping them from fighting. Throughout the movie, there’s so much tension and frustration in the classroom, it always feels as if the class is about to explode. The teacher’s job is to calm that teaching and keep their students from snapping. There is really less importance placed on teaching the kids about volcanoes or Spanish and more emphasis placed on controlling them.
1. The kids are at this particular school because of their inability to learn in other academic institutions and or an extreme family issue such as poverty or deportations. The writers do not input an overall positive or negative feeling for the kids. At moments, sympathy is appropriate, other moments, the kids are shed in a more negative light. At a first glance, the students seem arrogant and shallow, but once François pushed some of the kids such as Souleymane to achieve success, we began to see their potential and intelligence.
ReplyDelete2. The film definitely depicts high school and junior high faculty as having some issues to say the least. François handles many situations very poorly, such as calling to girls "skanks." Aside that, the blond teacher (who I hated) seemed to interrupt every important faculty discussion to inform the teachers something of little value. This is especially the case when she interpreted to talk about the coffee machine instead of Wei's mother being deported.
3. The school is a place for struggling students to have a backup plan. It is for less fortunate kids, who already have hard enough lives, to have an outlet to academic possibilities. As one would think, it teaches typically, going over mathematics, literature, and the arts. But, when the girl came up to François at the end of the year only to tell him she had learned nothing, I reconsidered my once obvious assumption. Is this school really teaching? Yes. But, the problem is, there is no connection, no similarity between the teachers and students. Trust is everything, and I don't think there was any of that in this movie.