'Teach' and the challenges of real teachers

In a new documentary by the director of “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman,” a fourth-grade teacher explains why he gave up managing a Radio Shack.

“Who’s going to remember the guy who sold me the Sony versus the guy who taught me to add,” says Matt Johnson, a second-year teacher at McGlone Elementary in Denver.

Johnson is one of four teachers featured in Davis Guggenheim’s latest documentary, “Teach.” While many teachers considered Guggenheim’s “Superman” a poison pen letter, “Teach” is more of a lilting sonnet.

The documentary doesn’t expose indifferent teachers or entrenched bureaucracies as did the highly charged “Superman.” It lets teachers and their struggling students tell the stories.

Each teacher faces the same challenge: catching up students who are a year or more behind.

At MLK Early College in Denver, ninth-grade algebra teacher Lindsay Chinn tests a new classroom approach created by her assistant principal Sean Kavanaugh. Frustrated with traditional math instruction, Kavanaugh erects whiteboards on all four walls in the classroom and gets students out of their desks and at the boards, turning them into the performers and the teacher into the audience.

Calling the concept 360 Degree Math, Kavanaugh and Chinn are thrilled with the results from the first round of district tests. But when the kids falter on the second exam, Chinn worries. “It is really hard to spend time with whatever you are teaching and your kids not get it,” she says. “It is easy to say they just didn’t listen, they just can’t get it. It’s really hard to look at that and say what, as a teacher, did I need to do that I didn’t do.”

Chinn perseveres, watching videos of herself in classroom to hone her teaching and persuading her least successful students to stay after school. By the year’s end, her students outperform the district.

Shelby Harris’ middle school in Idaho is also experimenting with a new approach to raise math performance, equipping every student with a laptop to access a computer-based Khan Academy math program.

Discouraged by the early results, Harris says, “I wasted a month trying to figure out this program and how does this work in a classroom. I may have just failed these kids.” But Harris begins to absorb her new role as a coach and even lets students tutor one another. She harnesses the performance data to target student weaknesses and to create small groups. In a remarkable transformation, a student in danger of failing math becomes a top performer.

Johnson is a talented math teacher who has dramatically raised his students’ math performance. Now, he has to also improve his fourth graders’ reading. The documentary follows his one-on-one sessions with struggling readers, painfully capturing children attempting to sound out “pilot” and “chair.”

Los Angeles high school teacher Joel Laguna is the hip teacher every student wants. Determined to teach his 43 AP students critical writing skills, Laguna falls apart when their major essays are terrible.