Education Films Series III, Our Town: The kind of teaching and learning that we all want in our towns
A few weeks before Waiting for Superman came out, I watched a documentary called Our Town. It's about an English teacher in Compton, California, who leads a group of students through putting on the first play, Thorton Wilder's classic "Our Town," their high school has produced in years. It is a pure documentary--there's no agenda (or at least not any obvious one to me), moralizing, politics, or what my husband terms, "auto-hommage."
I liked this film on so many levels. It's not flashy, it's not sexy, mountains are not moved, it's not Glee. Instead, it's real. Putting on a play is painstakingly hard work and the challenges of being a student and teacher in an