The classroom lottery.(teacher-student relations)

"ANDREW BOVELL--who's he?" This was a Year 12 English teacher's response to a student after reading this name in the opening of her essay on the Australian film Lantana, his corrections having included two question marks above this apparently mysterious name. The student had completed an essay on Lantana, which had been checked by her teacher. The essay had been done as practice for the externally-assessed final exam, which, for this anxious student, was fast approaching.

"He wrote it," the student replied politely, doing her best to conceal her surprise that her teacher did not recognise the author of the screenplay of the text he was teaching. The student's slip in expression in her essay, by referring to Bovell but neglecting to introduce him as the author, had revealed the teacher's poor grasp of the subject matter.

When dealing with teachers, students are dealing with a section of the workforce who are, for the most part, separated from the consequences of their actions. When students make mistakes in their studies, they suffer the consequences. When their teachers make mistakes in their lessons, corrections, assessments or study advice, again it is the students who suffer.

This characteristic of the education system, which is currently reinforced by the industrial practices of the powerful teachers' unions and accentuated by the wide variations in educational standards intrinsic to "progressive" education, can have a significant impact on the motivation of teachers to produce quality work or to address their mistakes and rectify injustices. The dedicated, competent teachers are likely to do a fine job simply because it is in their nature to do so, but unfortunately there are others who will not follow their example. This wide variation in teacher quality puts the responsibility back on individual students to protect their interests by taking responsibility for their own education.

This means that clever, ambitious students, who want to do better than pass, need to treat the prevailing education system as more like a game of snakes and ladders than as a sturdy ladder of opportunity. While encounters with dedicated, competent teachers should be treated as opportunities to be seized, the inevitable encounters with teachers with a poor grasp of their course material, or of the nature of sound scholarship, present additional challenges that students must recognise and overcome.

Regrettably, that teacher with a poor grasp of Lantana is far from alone in his misunderstanding. From my vantage point as a private tutor, what I have noticed with too many English teachers is that they regularly refer to the authorship of a film with a routine phrase like "Ray Lawrence's Lantana", in a manner that incorrectly implies that the film's director is the sole source of the ideas in the film. They then instruct their students to throw this kind of phrase into their essays in a manner more akin to a reflex action rather than something based on careful thought and perceptive analysis.

Unlike most novels, a film is usually a collective effort. Dedicated, competent teachers would appreciate this and accordingly instruct their students to recognise and distinguish between the contributions of the author of the screenplay (who usually developed many or most of the film's ideas), the film's director (who contributed additional ideas by artistically interpreting the screenplay and directing its cinematic realisation), the production designer (who designed or organised the props and sets), and so on, and to incorporate this knowledge into their analysis of the film. This is the kind of knowledge students need if they are to perform well in high-risk, externally-assessed final exams.