The Class

Last week we watched the movie "The Class" for Educational Studies. It is about a teacher (Mr. Marin) who tries to manage a quite difficult classroom at a school in Paris. The movie shows how difficult it can be to deal with pupils from different cultural backgrounds.

 Esmeralda - Khoumba - Mr. Marin - Souleymane - Henriette


Esmeralda and Khoumba are very noticeable during the whole movie. They have a bad attitude towards their teacher and query everything he says. They have no respect and make it nearly impossible for Mr. Marin to conduct a lesson without being disturbed or to create an effective learning environment.

Obviously these two teenagers have a lot of things to deal with outside the school. Despite their bad behaviour Mr. Marin doesn't give up and always tries to remain sympathetic and professional. Although Khoumba shows no respect to her teacher Mr. Marin asks her about her problems. He wants to get to know his pupils in order to understand them better. 

Esmeralda is a member of the student representation. While the teaching staff discusses about Souleymane who hurt Khoumba during the lesson she doesn't pay attention to this serious topic. The teaching staff tries to find a solution for Souleymane's case and after some time they decide to expell him. As a student representative it should be Esmeralda's job to defend her colleagues and to campaign for their interests but she just makes fun of the other teachers.


Surprisingly none of the teaching staff tries to stop her. In my opinion that's something you can observe during the whole movie: on the one hand the teachers are desperate because they can't get through to their students and on the other hand they are lacking fortitude in order to make sure "Who is the authority in the classroom?"

Mr. Marin for instance tries to teach in a loose way but I think this method is not really appropriate to the students' behaviour and attitudes. He just focuses on the "noticeable" students while other students don't participate at all. I think that's one of the reasons why Henriette who is one of the very quiet girls in class says that she learned nothing during the whole school year. It seems that the teacher has focused too much on the "troublemakers" and totally forgot the other students.

But at least Mr. Marin's teaching methods had a positive effect on some of the students. They had to write self-portraits in order to show who they really are and also to learn something about themselves.
I think it is always important as a teacher to know your students. Because then you can sort of understand why they show this special behaviour.