How Pop Culture Misrepresents Educators
On a family vacation to the woods, Angie Scioli can only spend a few days swigging Lime-A-Ritas and strumming her ukulele before the compulsion to plan lessons pulls her back to her profession. As an award-winning social-studies teacher at Leesville Road High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, Scioli dresses in goofy costumes for video lectures that have replaced the textbooks her school’s budget can no longer provide. Charismatic, intelligent, and droll, she organizes endearingly overly ambitious community-building events and slaps red tape over her mouth at Red4EdNC demonstrations. And so, when Scioli’s teacher colleagues Rob Phillips and Jay Korreck decided to make Teacher of the Year, a documentary about teaching, they saw her as a logical star.
Following Scioli as she navigates the challenges of the 2013-14 school year, offers an authentic portrait of a teacher’s life in the context of an academic appraisal of Hollywood’s familiar model: that of the heroic teacher performer, usually an untrained), I spoke with Scioli, Phillips, and Korreck to learn more about the film. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
