Thoughts: The Kids of "Waiting for Superman" Make Me Want to Cry

I once had a teacher in 8th grade who everyone hated. For the sake of privacy let’s call him Mister K. He was a bit older. Gray hair and bags under his eyes. His face had a sort of droopy quality to it and he always wore memorably nondescript sweaters and herringbone shirts. But as I said, everyone seemed to hate him.

There were a lot of reasons why people claimed to dislike him. Either he gave out too much homework or was too easy. I heard that he was unfair and would mete out punishments on personal whims. Other people attacked his personal life, layering rumors about the campus regarding Mister K’s his ex-wife. Some people even said he used to ogle the girls.

I never had this reaction. Perhaps that was because I was a naïve geek. Or a teacher’s pet. Or both. I don’t really remember. What I do remember is that he let me borrow a very old personal copy of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” to read just before winter break when I served as his TA. Unlike a lot of the other students I was always pretty stoked about his classes. I was a big history buff and as it so happens his specialty was the humanities. In retrospect I probably got an exploitative kick out of reading about all the horrifying things that went on in the Chicago Stockyards. But to him it didn’t seem to matter. What mattered to him was that I was actually excited about the material.

The book itself was heartbreaking and affecting, if not seriously politically-motivated. “Waiting for Superman” has a similar effect.

Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Audience Award in 2010, "WFS" is a documentary by filmmaker David Guggenheim that examines the failure of the American public education system in the last few decades, drawing its name from an anecdote told by Geoffrey Canada in which his mother revealed to him as a child that Superman did not exist and, by extension, that no one was coming to save them.

Deus ex machina indeed.

But while the film grapples with larger political issues like tenure, teacher unions and the messy process of reform nationwide, the centrality of Guggenheim’s focus remains entirely human, focusing on four families of various economic and cultural backgrounds as they attempt to enroll their children in charter schools. It is the hope of the parents that this will provide their kids with at least a good chance of succeeding amidst otherwise marginal to poor circumstances.

It’s hardly an objective platform from which Guggenheim shouts. Many critics have criticized the film for its loose interpretation of statistics and for its support of privatized education.

But Guggenheim isn’t leading us on. He makes no attempt to hide what it is he’s asking of us.

The beauty of a documentary as an art form is that by definition it acknowledges, either willfully or subconsciously, its own potential for bias. It is admittedly artificial by the nature of its medium. Yet if it can spark the slightest bit of feeling or conversation, then the empathy it can generate seems to be worth the effort however the intentions fall on the political scale.

“The Jungle” caused a huge stir with the American public at the turn of the century and spurred the passing of the Food and Drug Act of 1906. And though Roosevelt was said to mistrust Sinclair and his methods, there was an undeniable ring of truth in his reports. The book was designed to focus on the struggle of immigrants and corruption, ending with a sober call to arms by the Lithuanian protagonist as he joins a group of socialists to take back Chicago.

But People were more outraged by fantastical accounts of human flesh making its way into vats of lard and onto American shelves. Sinclair ultimately admitted that his shot had glanced. He is said to have famously aimed at the country’s heart and instead wound up striking it in the belly instead.

Guggenheim’s aim seems much steadier, though no less obvious. He too ends his film with an appeal, intertitles beckoning the audience at least five times to text “77177 possible” into their cell phones. And while his film presents a bleak world in which the selfishness of adults reigns supreme, his belief remains stolid.

Whether we can make a difference owes largely to your own opinion of humanity. Are you cynical or are you optimistic?

“WFS” is a little bit of both. But if change can be measured in these two works, separated by almost 100 years of working towards a better tomorrow, one thing that a full century couldn’t break is the belief that we have control over our own destiny.

But even after I see commercials with dogs and Sarah McLachlan and I feel my heart strings snapping and I desperately reach for the remote to change the channel before I start going teary-eyed, there's still that barrier. A kind of fourth wall. What I see and hear on TV, much like the nightly news is, at bottom, an abstraction.

I felt the same way after I watched “WFS”. That is, until I thought about Mister K. The teacher everyone seemed to hate.

I remember that we had conversations about John Adams, Gavrillo Princip and Gandhi. He let me bring in VHS copies of History Channel documentaries to screen in class (much to the chagrin of my fellow classmates). And during our American Civil War project I was appointed to play General Robert E. Lee, CSA.  I even watched CNN on the morning of 9/11 in his classroom. But I couldn’t say that he was a great teacher. But his heart was in the right place.

He was passionate about the process and was passionate because I was too. He’s the kind of person that makes this film more than just another diatribe. “WFS” is filled with these types of people.

Kids in my day (man, I feel old) never wanted to learn for the sake of learning. There was always some kind of incentive, some driving force where the value of one’s mind was only worth as much as the college application or the grade point average it was boosting. As an official grown-up I’ve graduated to a world where knowledge is only as good as the pay-check I’m getting. Because the way most of us have been conditioned, learning is just a chore.

The biggest concerns a lot of the kids at my middle school ever had were about acquiring the Cliff’s Notes for “Of Mice and Men” or who asked what in the ‘question box’ during sex ed. We were always counting down the clock, waiting to get away. And in more ways than one, we still are.

So when I actually see a kid cry because he can’t go to a school, it hits me in a very real way.