the groundhog day project

Then, there was The Principal . Actually, in movie terms, this movie came before Lean on Me . It's a different beast, perhaps, because it's fiction. Doesn't start with school. Rather begins in a bar. Rick Lattimer (James Belushi) is clearly an angry, violent man. Making that clear right away, as he goes after his wife's divorce lawyer/new boyfriend with a baseball bat. Afterward, cop asks him his occupation. Wait for it--school teacher. We're supposed to be surprised. I'm not sure why we should care (except of course we know already this is a movie about a principal (who could very well also be a teacher). He's also a disgusting bachelor-type. Smells the bad milk, is revolted, puts it back in the fridge, for example. (Box office aside: I saw this movie at The Academy, a second-run theater in Pasadena, so I'm not sure when I saw it. But, looking at the weekend it came out, I like that I saw all of the top 12 ( The Principal was #4), but only about ...

(I'm not done with Joe Clark.) "...any school must deal with the student as they receive them, no more and no less" (Clere, 2015, April 1). An interesting line from an article at ethosreview.org , this past April, that is partly about Lean on Me and partly about recent North Carolina policy that grades schools based on standardized test scores (not a novel idea, certainly). And, I both agree and disagree with the sentiment. On the one hand, yeah, a student comes to school with certain values and beliefs instilled in the home (or from the places outside the home where they spend time). A student is limited by his or her socioeconomic conditions. All students are not created equal. Case in point: Kaneesha (Karen Malina White) was a student at School 6 where Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) was previously principal, she seems set up in the film as one of the good students. Yet, at the end of the movie, she's the one who has gotten pregnant. Children make stupid decisions...

Naught but a few seconds into Lean on Me and I had to pause the movie and do some factchecking. I already knew there were some factual problems with this "true story"--and I'll get to some of those below--but right away, the opening text crawl quotes an "official report" that called Eastside High a "cauldron of violence." I was curious what kind of "official" report said this. According to a piece at northjersey.com , 22 October 2009, it was a county prosecutor in the 1970s who dubbed Eastside a "cauldron of violence." A prosecutor. So the evidence here in the crawl that Eastside is bad--and trust me, the movie is going to offer up some more evidence as soon as the crawl gets done--is a man or woman... I tried to check who specifically said it and found a New York Times piece that says it was Joe Clark. I.E. the protagonist of this film. Not a prosecutor. So, 1) if it was a prosecutor, then it was a man or woman who was legally r...