Critical Analysis Of School Of Rock And Bad Teacher

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This essay will critically compare the following two texts, School of Rock (SOR, 2003) and Bad Teacher (2011). These texts have similar representations of the teaching profession and expose a comparable message regarding the overview of education. The producers of these films have projected ideas regarding educators in modern society.
School of Rock (SoR), based in a private school, demonstrates a ‘traditional’ perspective on schooling, with the parents’ desired outcome of uppermost results with emphasis on attending ‘Ivy League’ colleges leading into elite professions. Bad Teacher (BT) is set in a public school and portrays a more ‘relaxed’ approach to education with less classroom control and failing results. Within this essay, direct focus will be placed on a mixture of scenes within both films. The three main themes which will be focused on within the essay are; Unprofessionalism, Culture and Class and Gender Identity.
A running theme identified in both films is that teaching seems to be viewed from some outsiders as a deceptive profession. The two main Characters, Dewey Finn (SOR) and Elizabeth Halsey (BT) are not the ‘ideal’, stereotypical teachers you would expect, both representing ‘bad teachers’. Hughes (2012) proposes that majority of teachers enter the profession to help improve the lives of children. However, this motive did not seem to be apparent on Dewey’s or Halsey’s list of reasons to teach. The suggestion here is that people believe teaching to be a ‘joke