World’s Lamest Teacher
Darren Ford, a high school teacher in a lower income school, edges ever closer to complete burnout. Desperate to educate and inspire his students, he must navigate the normal hurdles of the profession, as well as the more intricate ones his students Lucianna and Dylan throw at him, all while keeping a watchful eye on their physical and mental well being.
Graduate Film student at the University of Central Arkansas. He enjoys hiking, basketball, and gently weeping during great movies to an extent where his wife has to repeatedly whisper, “Are you okay?” Through his filmmaking, Casey enjoys a focus on films showcasing characters moving though personal trauma and inner conflict. His greatest aspiration is to whisper, “Are you okay?” to both his wife and mom as they gently weep to a film of his creation.
I feel guilty everyday that I’m not in a highschool classroom. I was making a difference in student’s lives and in my community. I felt like the work I was doing was important, and that I was good at it. But there were enough reasons that made it impossible for me to stay. Reasons that feel universal within the teaching profession that never get talked about or highlighted. This is what my film is about. Everyone has an educator that made a massive impact on their lives. Someone who inspired them or was there for them when no one else was. It is a shared experience that our lives are better for having some of the teachers we had.
Yet the profession is held in a contradictory esteem. The pay is criminally low. The hours and workload are grueling. The job is entirely thankless. The highest praise or admission of respect for teachers that I often heard was, “I could never be a teacher. Must be incredibly difficult. Kids are so bad these days. I could never keep 30 kids in line and behaving all day.” To think that the most difficult part of the job is getting kids to behave is incredibly reductive. “But teachers get summers off, so they shouldn’t be complaining.” Roughly half of all teachers quit within their first five years of teaching. Summers off obviously aren’t enough to keep teachers around. There are a myriad of reasons teachers get pushed away, and the difficulties of the profession shown in movies are usually surface level ones.
There are a myriad of reasons why we have a nationwide teacher shortage. My hope for this film is to illuminate the reasons that I walked away. Potentially deeper and darker reasons: That micro morality decisions are constantly being made in the classroom. That doing what’s best for a student overall can be incredibly nuanced and difficult. That monitoring your students’ mental health is a much bigger part of the job than anyone wants to talk about.
This is a small film, about the occurrences of just one day, and the relationships that exist within it. There are both warm moments and chilling ones within the experiences of a few characters. But I hope that it reflects the isolation and weight that can be placed on the profession. That a culture of burnout is constantly at war with the desperate need to be there and care for students.