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Uploaded by Lotu Tii on August 13, 2012

My Posse Don't Do Homework""

Louanne johnson. st. martin's press, $4.99 (0pp) isbn 978-0-312-95163-4.

Reviewed on: 11/28/1994

Genre: Nonfiction

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ISBN: 0312956207

Dangerous Minds

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A former Marine recounts her first years as a teacher in an inner-city high school in California, describing the tactics she used to persuade her students to take school seriously and her frustration... This description may be from another edition of this product.

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Dangerous minds is a great book -*jaclyn*-, couldn't get any better, one of my favorite books, good book for english teachers, a must-read for all teachers, popular categories.

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"My posse don't do homework"

By louanne johnson.

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Dangerous Tropes

How the michelle pfeiffer hit dangerous minds put an overtly paternalistic twist on a saccharine genre..

Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver , Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love , Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds , Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers , and Sandy Dennis in Up the Down Staircase .

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Film stills via Warner Bros, Columbia, Buena Vista/Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros.

When Dangerous Minds opened 20 years ago this week, the critics couldn’t tell their readers loudly enough just how totally over it they felt. The film “tells another one of those uplifting parables in which the dedicated teacher takes on a schoolroom full of rebellious malcontents, and wins them over with an unorthodox approach,” began Roger Ebert in his unrelenting slam of the film . The New York Times ’ Janet Maslin hit the same theme: “ [It’s] formatted to match every other account of a dedicated teacher taming rebellious teens .”

Such critiques were not without merit. By 1995 the inspirational teacher movie, otherwise known as the “ save our students ” trope, was already several decades old, and Dangerous Minds stuck closely to its formula. That formula is simple: A new teacher takes on failing or at-risk kids who have long been abandoned by the system (usually in a poor, urban neighborhood) and helps turn their grades, and thus their lives, around. At some point, the teacher will reach a point at which she will want to quit, but an out-of-the-blue grand gesture by the kids will change her mind by the third act. It’s a subgenre that is naturally prone to sentimentality, so even the good or at least watchable examples of the form—like To Sir, With Love and Stand and Deliver —are at least somewhat cheesy.

Dangerous Minds stands out from its predecessors and many of the films that followed as a particularly egregious example of the inspirational-teacher idiom, particularly when it comes to its feel-good oversimplifying of two of its themes, pedagogy and race. The drama, loosely based on the memoir My Posse Don’t Do Homework by retired-Marine-turned-teacher LouAnne Johnson, doesn’t just stick to a well-worn path; in heightening the genre’s worst tropes so effusively, it elevates the condescendence and, more embarrassingly, the white-savior narrative that so frequently rests at its core.

Dangerous Minds starts off like most save-our-students films: with a depiction of a broken, or at least not particularly affluent, neighborhood. In movies like Blackboard Jungle , Up the Down Staircase , and Stand and Deliver , the eventual hero teacher is seen walking, driving, or riding the bus to his or her first day on the job. The point is to emphasize the cultural dissonance and long odds the teacher faces by positioning him or her as a fish out of water, and by positioning the students who come from these neighborhoods as at-risk youth. (The trailer for Up the Down Staircase explicitly asks what Sandy Dennis’ character—“a nice girl”—is “doing in a crazy place like this.”) In 1955’s Blackboard Jungle —one of the pioneers of the genre—new teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) arrives at the school and looks around bewilderedly at the kids who are smoking, playing around, and dancing to “ Rock Around the Clock ”—which in 1955 passed for a rebellious, raucous song enjoyed by wayward youth. Dangerous Minds takes this notion a step further: Over the rebellious strains of the Coolio hit “ Gangsta’s Paradise ,” it channels The Wizard of Oz and opens with the grainy black and white imagery of an impoverished California neighborhood, painting a dour, bleak scene of life for the kids we are about to meet. (The scene only bursts into color as they arrive by bus at their school.) In deploying that harsh cinematic technique, director John N. Smith renders the dire station of this particular group of students with an unsubtle brushstroke, setting up LouAnne for an even more triumphant “victory” than the teacher-saviors who came before her.

Throughout the movie, Dangerous Minds portrays a dynamic between LouAnne and her students—of the doting authority figure and the infantile teenager—that borders on parody. LouAnne, for her part, is initially portrayed as a fragile woman whose students easily break her composure on Day 1. (It’s an unlikely speed bump, considering her background as a Marine.) She walks out in the middle of her class to vent to the colleague and friend who helped her get the job in the first place: “I can’t teach them!” At home that evening, a montage shows her diligently reading a book called Assertive Discipline and eventually reaching an epiphany—she’ll project authority and command respect by donning a leather jacket and wowing the kids with karate instructions. The students, meanwhile, are largely portrayed as fatalistic about their own lives and antagonistic toward their teacher because she’s white. They call her “white bread”; in one scene, the grandmother of two of her students calls her a “honky bitch.” Facing such resentment, LouAnne has her work more than cut out for her.

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker

The disconnect between a white teacher and his or her nonwhite students is a recurrent feature of these films, but the structure of Dangerous Minds bungles it more clumsily than usual. By having the students exert prejudice upon their teacher rather than make any explicit mention of how the education system overwhelmingly fails black and Latino students in turn, the students are largely responsible for their own failures. Blackboard Jungle at least tries to address racial and ethnic differences in a meaningful way. In that film, Richard Dadier’s students are a diverse bunch rife with conflict because of their different ethnic and racial backgrounds. It’s a tension he frequently has to ease by reprimanding his kids for using derogatory slurs toward one another, and by incorporating the appreciation of other cultures into his lessons. In a scene with his student Miller (Sidney Poitier), who’s planning to quit school to become a mechanic, Richard points to opera singer Marian Anderson and boxer Joe Louis as reasons Miller shouldn’t give up on higher aspirations because of his race.

That’s a rather pat kind of encouragement (this was the 1950s, after all), but at least the teacher is acknowledging race, and racism, in a somewhat useful way. Similarly, in 1988’s Stand and Deliver , calculus teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) warns his Latino students that their names and complexions will be judged in the real world, but “math is the great equalizer.” (He and his students soon get a hard dose of reality that this is not always the case, when they are accused of having cheated on their Advanced Placement exam.) Such complexities are absent from Dangerous Minds —LouAnne doesn’t attempt to reach out to her students from their point of view or realistically confront the odds they face. To get her kids to enjoy poetry, she uses the not-very-relevant Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and describes the lyrics as a metaphor for dealing drugs; she bribes them as if they were 5-year-olds, with prizes and a field trip to an amusement park. (In the similarly plotted Freedom Writers starring Hilary Swank, her character is shown using the lyrics of Tupac to engage her classroom, perhaps because 12 years after Dangerous Minds , rap was no longer the vilified art form it once was.)

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker.

All of these moments add up to a film made up of relationships that don’t ring true, even though the intent behind the story, in line with its predecessors’, is clearly an honorable one. In fact, much of the real LouAnne Johnson’s My Posse Don’t Do Homework didn’t make it to the screen—after selling the film rights, she had no involvement with the script, which is credited to screenwriter Ron Bass ( My Best Friend’s Wedding , The Joy Luck Club ). When it first came out, “I was really upset and so were my students by the way they were portrayed,” she tells me. What bothered her most about the final movie was the grandmother who called her character a “honky bitch.” Johnson says she actually had a good relationship with the woman, and that they worked together to help keep her twin grandsons on the right track and graduate. “I asked them why did they put that in,” she says, “and they said, ‘Well, we were sure that a lot of the black and Hispanic parents resented you … for being white.’ ” Johnson says that while she did have a student who told her he hated white people, she otherwise didn’t encounter such blatant name-calling or hostility.

But there were other crucial alterations, as well: Johnson didn’t teach her students Bob Dylan; in My Posse Don’t Do Homework , she recalls bringing in the lyrics to Public Enemy’s “ 911 Is a Joke ,” and asking students to choose their own song lyrics to bring in to class. (They weren’t all rap songs, either—the kids also brought in heavy metal, jazz, and country lyrics.) And while she did visit her students and their parents at home without administrators’ knowledge—“it’s much easier to get forgiveness than permission,” she says—she didn’t go so far as to bribe them with candy or an inappropriate field trip to an amusement park.

Johnson isn’t the only person involved with Dangerous Minds who would have approached the final film differently. Bass, the screenwriter, tells me, “The movie you saw wasn’t the screenplay I wrote. My name is on the script, because the writer who came in and did very substantial rewriting”— Elaine May —“didn’t want credit, and I was asked to take the sole credit.” In his version, Bass had hoped to convey the strong bond he’d witnessed between Johnson and her students while sitting in on one of her classes, and how much they gave to her as she did them. Bass is well-aware of how the final version of Dangerous Minds can be seen by some as being overtly paternalistic, with the white hero coming to save the day. But he also insists that that was never the intent of those who worked closely on the movie. He told me:

I admire the work that Elaine did … I wonder if in retrospect, hearing that said sometimes over the years, if anybody would say I didn’t realize that the balance was such that it could make people wonder if that was in the mix. If I had to go back, I’d certainly switch scenes back in, I’d readjust the balance so that everybody knew that the relationship was a two-way street.

(According to Johnson, this imbalance was apparent to at least one actor from the film. When visiting the set, the actress who played Callie, Bruklin Harris, asked her why it always has to be a white person lifting up the “poor little Negroes.” Johnson’s blunt response: “I wrote the book, I have to be white.” And: Hollywood at the time simply didn’t embrace stories with black female protagonists.)

This imbalance and oversimplicity reaches its peak at the end of the film, when LouAnne pleads with her most troubled student, the brooding Emilio (Wade Dominguez), to go to the school administrator Mr. Grandy (Courtney B. Vance) and tell him about a kid just out of jail who is threatening to kill him because of a grudge. The kid, who is addicted to crack, would go to detox for substance abuse at school, she says, and by the time he gets out, he’ll have “forgotten” about his grudge. “You asked me once how I was gonna save you from your life,” she says. “This is how, this moment, right now. This will make the difference in your life forever.”

Mr Grandy is one of the only school authority figures of color in the movie, and it’s ultimately his refusal to see Emilio—because he wasn’t “respectful” enough to knock on his office door instead of barging in—that gets Emilio killed. (In real life, Emilio didn’t die; he spent four years in the Marine Corps and started a family.) This moment—and the subsequent scene in which the remaining kids beg LouAnne to stay because she’s their “tambourine man” and their “light”—encapsulates the narrow, patronizing worldview of Dangerous Minds . It is also egregiously maudlin, even compared to To Sir, With Love , in which the teacher’s climactic triumph comes in the form of a gooey No. 1 pop song . In that film and others, at least, the teachers and their students interact with one another in a way that feels more like the “two-way street” Bass described—like in the end of Blackboard Jungle , when Dadier has decided he won’t quit teaching, and Miller has decided he’ll stay in school after all. “I guess everybody learns something in school, even teachers,” declares Miller.

Despite the critical beating it took, Dangerous Minds was a surprise hit that opened atop the box office, besting a post- Speed Keanu Reeves war drama and legendary bomb Waterworld , then in its third week. Its soundtrack, and more specifically, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” became a cultural phenomenon. It even spawned a short-lived television series that replaced Pfeiffer with Annie Potts as Johnson. What’s most fascinating about the film 20 years later is the fact that it lives on as a paradox: It continues to be remembered in large part because it lends itself to parody so well—its one-dimensionality spawned some pretty hilarious pop-culture moments in film and TV shows, like Hamlet 2 and 30 Rock —and stands as a glaring example of the white-savior narrative. The irony, though, is that despite all of this, it did manage to do the one thing all save-our-students movies set out to do: inspire. “I think it’s emotionally manipulative,” says Johnson. “But … I realized a lot of people became teachers because they saw that movie, and I had hundreds of kids who wrote to me and said they were going to finish school because the kids in the movie finished school.”

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• Publisher St. Martin's Press
• Publication date 1993
• ISBN 10  0312951639
• ISBN 13  9780312951634
• Binding Paperback
• Number of pages 278

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THE GIRLS IN THE BACK OF THE CLASS

by LouAnne Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1995

A sequel to the lively recounting of life in an inner-city high school. The original, My Posse Don't Do Homework (1992) is soon to be a major Michekle Pfeiffer motion picture (called Dangerous Minds, it's also due for release in May). That book dealt with Johnson's experiences in a mini-academy set up within an East Palo Alto, Calif., high school. The English teacher's students were hand-picked as children who could make it, given enough attention and encouragement. This volume aims to put the emphasis on young women in the academy, neglected, Johnson feels, both in the first set of tales and in the classroom. She blames herself as well as the system, suggesting that girls are simply overwhelmed in the classroom by boys' noisy demands for attention. Girls whisper, Johnson theorizes simplistically, ``wring their hands in quiet desperation for a few weeks, then disappear.'' She introduces Simoa, who, terrorized into leaving home, finally returns to school pregnant; Tyeisha, whose mother abandoned her; Araceli, an artist, who challenges whether Johnson is truly color-blind. Unfortunately, she doesn't introduce their stories until halfway through the book, and then is often distracted by the noisy demands of the boys in her class. But whether it's about boys or girls, Johnson, an ex-Marine, is also a good storyteller, bringing drama and suspense to tales from her classroom, and total dedication to her students. She gives up her Sundays to take them to concerts, museums, and plays, hugs them, remembers their birthdays, cries for them, and at year's end sees most of them graduate, with many—girls included—headed for college. She too heads back to college—``to get a life,'' as her students have urged her, and a graduate degree in New Mexico. Every student, girl or boy, needs a teacher like this— caring and committed to helping them succeed in school and in life. (26 b&w illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: May 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-312-13081-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

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Film / Dangerous Minds

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They say I got to learn but nobody’s here to teach me If they can’t understand it how can they reach me? I guess they can’t, I guess they won’t I guess they front That’s why I know my life is out of luck, fool — Coolio , “Gangsta’s Paradise”

Dangerous Minds is a 1995 American drama film, directed by John N. Smith. It is based on My Posse Don't Do Homework (1992), an autobiography of Lou Anne Johnson. Like the book, it narrates the experiences of a former marine turned teacher while teaching at Carlmont High School, a California-based high school, where African-American and Hispanic students are the majority.

The film begins with Johnson (played by Michelle Pfeiffer ), a retired marine, applying for a teaching position at Parkmont High School. To her surprise, she is almost immediately hired. It turns out Johnson applied for a position nobody else wanted, teaching literature to a rather tough audience. Her new class includes "tough, sullen teenagers, all from lower-class and underprivileged backgrounds". Several of them involved in criminal activities and all of them indifferent to whatever school has to teach them.

The film focuses on her efforts to gain their respect, teach them to appreciate literature, and change the teaching methods to better apply to their needs. Some of her methods, such as bribing them with rewards, anger the senior staff such as George Grandey ( Courtney B. Vance ) and Carla Nichols (Robin Bartlett). She also takes personal interest in the lives of individual students, trying to help them out in situations rather removed from school. The first is Callie Roberts (Bruklin Harris), a promising student experiencing Teen Pregnancy . The teacher convinces her to keep pursuing further education even as a single mother. Her second case Raúl Sanchero (Renoly Santiago), a reluctant gang member who has to be taught the basics of self-respect and getting used to operating outside a pack.

The third case proves a failure. Emilio Ramírez (Wade Domínguez) is a student involved in personal conflict with a hardened criminal acquaintance. Emilio considers it a matter of personal honor to face his problems alone, never asking for help. Johnson tries to protect him but finds no support from the school system. Without sufficient protection, Emilio is easily killed. Johnson regards it as a personal failure, announcing her intention to retire at the end of the school year. Her students take offense and protest their mentor abandoning them. The film ends with Johnson reconsidering her decision.

Along with Bad Boys (1995) and Crimson Tide , it was one of three hits in a single year by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer . Simpson died early in 1996 due to combined drug intoxication. His swan song was The Rock . The film had a television series spin-off, Dangerous Minds (1996 - 1997). It lasted one season, 17 episodes. Annie Potts was cast as Johnson.

This film provides examples of:

• In the Cracked article with her, Johnson, a former Marine Corps officer , commented on the absurdity of the scene at the beginning, in which she runs out of the room crying after a student sexually harasses her.
• For a student marked for death by a gang, Johnson personally picked him up and drove him out from a dangerous neighborhood and made arrangements to get him out of the country. None of this made it over to the film.
• The scene of Lou Anne getting called a "white bread bitch" by one of her students' grandmothers is completely made up. The real woman said most of the mothers and grandmothers were churchgoing women who would never use language like that and, when the filmmakers said they assumed she faced resentment in real life, she responded "why would they hate me for helping their kids?"
• The real Lou Anne's class was an "even split" of white, Black and Latino kids. The film shows it as being mostly Black and Latino, with a Token White in there. The real Lou Anne slammed the movie for perpetuating the myth that "only minority kids at risk, and that white kids don't have any problems".
• Lou Anne used rap lyrics to teach the kids about poetry, as opposed to the Bob Dylan vs Dylan Thomas concert.
• Badass Teacher : Lou Anne Johnson as a retired marine. Among her first efforts to gain respect is to teach the students some martial arts moves.
• Cool Teacher : Lou Anne Johnson.
• Crazy Jealous Guy : Angela’s ex Shorty
• Death by Adaptation : Emilio dies in the movie, but in real life, he's still alive.
• Do Not Go Gentle : A memorable recitation of the Trope Namer poem takes place at the end of Dangerous Minds, just as the protaganist teacher is about to give up, feeling overwhelmed and impotent to make a difference. Not exactly life or death in that situation, but facing the prospect of being a dedicated, caring teacher for one of the roughest public schools around is pretty daunting too. When her friend asks her why she decided to stay, she answers only ‘they gave me chocolate and called me their light...’
• Historical Beauty Update : Needless to say, Johnson, while certainly attractive, never looked like Michelle Pfeiffer.
• Historical Villain Upgrade : The movie made Johnson's students out to be worse than they were in real life.
• Hot Teacher : Lou Anne Johnson as portrayed by both Pfeiffer and Potts.
• Inner City School : Parkmont High School. While the high school itself might be well off, the bussed in kids are typical of the trope. The TV show is more typical of the trope than the movie.
• Mighty Whitey : An ex-Marine and sassy white girl inspires a class room full of angry minority teenagers to learn. Though based on a true story, some of the changes from the book also qualify. Johnson used musical figures popular among the kids, such as Tupac Shakur and his contemporaries, in order to teach them English. The film replaces these African-American figures with the inspirational power of Bob Dylan .
• Not Now, Kiddo : A student ‘pushes’ his way into the principal’s office to try and explain that some violence is going to happen. The principal, who has very strict rules about knocking, dismisses the student, who ends up getting shot.
• Pop-Star Composer : The film was the first major scoring project by Wendy & Lisa , not counting their contributions to Purple Rain and Under the Cherry Moon .
• Save Our Students : Johnson’s efforts.
• White Man's Burden : Caucasian teacher to the rescue. Not true of the book though.
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