A Young Teacher Attends a School of Hard Knocks

I'm looking forward to watching this (set your Tivo -- it starts tonight!):

“The Education of Ms. Groves,” a documentary that will be  shown on the Sundance Channel as a half-hour series tonight through Friday,  lays out the journey of this neophyte language-arts teacher as neatly as if it  were a sentence to be diagramed.
 
Ms. Groves, 21, is a volunteer in the Teach for America  program, a sort of domestic Peace Corps that sends college graduates into low-income communities to teach for two years. Ms. Groves, a University of Virginia graduate, fears that she is too young, too small and too middle class to be an effective teacher.
 
She’s right to worry. The first weeks in the classroom at Jean Childs Young Middle School consist mostly of empty words falling on deaf ears.

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Television Review | The Education of Ms. Groves
A Young Teacher Attends a School of Hard Knocks
By SUSAN STEWART
Published: August 28, 2007

When we meet the first-time teacher Monica Groves, she is hanging inspiring words on the walls of her classroom and anticipating her sixth-grade pupils.

“I haven’t met them,” she says, “but I already love them.”

You don’t need even a sixth-grade education to know what that means: Ms. Groves is in for a bumpy ride.

“The Education of Ms. Groves,” a documentary that will be shown on the Sundance Channel as a half-hour series tonight through Friday, lays out the journey of this neophyte language-arts teacher as neatly as if it were a sentence to be diagramed.

Ms. Groves, 21, is a volunteer in the Teach for America program, a sort of domestic Peace Corps <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/peace_corps/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  that sends college graduates into low-income communities to teach for two years. Ms. Groves, a University of Virginia <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_virginia/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  graduate, fears that she is too young, too small and too middle class to be an effective teacher.

She’s right to worry. The first weeks in the classroom at Jean Childs Young Middle School consist mostly of empty words falling on deaf ears.

Ms. Groves lectures, preaches, threatens and scolds her pupils, trying to get them to listen, sit still, stop rolling their eyes (at her) and in general be as orderly as the color-coded sentences with which she fills the blackboard.

The children roll their eyes more. Ms. Groves sounds tedious to them — and to us.

She knows it. “I don’t have it completely together,” she says three weeks in. And later: “I didn’t expect it to feel like such a fight.”

Ms. Groves is lovely, loving and articulate. But there’s no edge to her, a point made when we see the math teacher on her team, an older woman, quickly handle a situation while Ms. Groves agonizes.

Clearly, teachers who work in impoverished areas have to be tough, but not too tough to care about their students. It’s a delicate balance, and a delicate subject, maybe too delicate for the orderly “Education.”

This series does a great job on standard issues like testing, classroom discipline and the way trouble at home affects work at school. The last is explored through three sixth graders who have enough problems for their own documentaries.

Drew, for instance, is being reared by his grandmother, Ophelia. Ophelia, who says she is between 75 and 90, speaks to the camera as if it were an old friend.

“We are true Southerners,” she says, stirring a pot on the stove. “We eat grits every morning.”

On caring for her three grandsons: “It is not what I would choose to do, but it appears that it is what I need to do.” She is a dynamo, far more charismatic than the naïve Ms. Groves.

This documentary, directed by Izhar Harpaz, is a spinoff of a “Dateline: NBC” program that won a Peabody Award last year. In a perfect world Ophelia would get her own spinoff documentary. Or maybe Teach for America could hire her.

Or, best of all, she could move in and be my grandmother.

THE EDUCATION OF MS. GROVES
Sundance, tonight through Friday at 8 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.