PBS documentary chronicles the challenges and rewards of teaching
In October 1999, director Davis Guggenheim took his cameras into Los Angeles area schools and began a yearlong study of five beginning teachers. The resulting documentary premiered Sept. 6 on PBS. "The First Year" is a moving study of the rewards and struggles experienced by beginning teachers everywhere.
Guggenheim is an accomplished director whose career has included work on other documentaries, feature films and television programs, including "ER" and "NYPD Blue." He says he made "The First Year" as a tribute to public school teachers, and to raise awareness of the tremendous teacher shortage facing the nation, especially in California. "My hope is that my film will change the way people look at education and [that they will] start to view it as a human issue."
The five teachers shadowed in the 80-minute production represent a cross section of gender, ethnicity and subject/grade levels:
Georgene Acosta, an 11th-grade English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in Santa Monica; Genevieve DeBose, a sixth-grade language arts/social studies teacher in South Central Los Angeles; Joy Kraft-Watts, a high school history teacher in Venice; Nate Monley, a fifth-grade bilingual education teacher in East Los Angeles; and Maurice Rabb, a kindergarten teacher in South Central Los Angeles.
The film accurately shows the balance between the frustrations and rewards that teaching can bring. It follows the yearlong efforts of Rabb, a member of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), to secure special help for a kindergartner with a speech problem. Although everyone seems to agree the boy needs help, the bureaucracy remains unresponsive and the student goes the entire year without services.
Similarly, Acosta is informed that because of some "budget error downtown," funding for her program has been cut and her students will not receive special language help for the following school year. And Kraft-Watts struggles with being a teacher without a classroom in her overcrowded high school.
But there are also triumphs. Kraft-Watts successfully gets her students to examine some of their own homophobic attitudes. Acosta, a self-described activist, rallies her students to save their program when budget cuts threaten it, and is shown participating in CTA's May 2000 rally for public education funding in Sacramento. DeBose successfully deals with discipline problems and manages to engage her sometimes hard-to-reach students. Monley reaches beyond the classroom into the home lives of his students.
The film leaves the viewer with the feeling that, in spite of the challenges, teaching is a vastly rewarding profession.
How did these teachers feel about the presence of cameras in their classroom in addition to all the other challenges of starting a new profession? "At first it was a little unnerving," says Kraft-Watts, "but after a short period both the students and I adjusted, and the camera was pretty much invisible to us."
"They were very unobtrusive," says Monley. "Sometimes it was just Davis with a hand-held digital camera. And the kids were great about it."
Monley, a UTLA member who comes from a family of teachers, initially found the classroom far more challenging than he expected. "I was humbled quickly. Teaching is difficult - a combination of an art and a science. I realized right away that it's comparable to being a doctor in terms of the preparation needed to do the job well. After a few weeks I had tremendous admiration for those with more experience than I had." Monley came out of the Teach for America program, which he praised as extremely valuable training given its brevity, but he says he soon realized that his preparation had not readied him at all to deal with fifth-graders reading at a pre-kindergarten level.
Acosta, a member of the Santa Monica Classroom Teachers Association, found herself fighting a system that seemed to take her students for granted. "Many of my kids are very resistant to schooling; it's the last thing they care about and school is not really designed for their needs. In some ways the system works to defeat them." In spite of those frustrations, Acosta was thrilled when, in her second year, she watched many of those same students graduate. "These kids graduated against incredible odds in many cases. I was so proud of them."
A shorter companion piece to the film, called "TEACH," is intended as a teacher recruitment tool. Using some of the same footage from "The First Year," the 30-minute piece features Andrew Glass, a special education teacher in West Hollywood. CTA is making videotapes of "TEACH" available for local chapter use.
CTA is optimistic that such films can have a positive impact on education and teacher recruitment. "These films show both the sometimes overwhelming challenges teachers face and those moments of pure fulfillment when teachers connect with a student and make a real difference," says CTA President Wayne Johnson. "These films should be seen by anyone concerned about public education."
In spite of the frustrations they each encountered, all of the teachers involved in the film ended the year feeling that teaching is an immensely important job. Kraft-Watts eloquently describes her own enthusiasm and idealism, mirroring the feelings of teachers everywhere. "When you die, it's about the lives you have touched - that's how you are remembered. That's why I became a teacher."
