Recently I had a chance to watch the 1939 MGM tearjerker Goodbye, Mr. Chips, with Robert Donat aging 60 years as a shy, gentle teacher at an English boarding school. The movie was beloved in its day—Donat won an Oscar for his performance—and it still seems to crystallize the feelings many have for their old teachers. Mr. Chipping is too humble and selfless to advance in his profession, and his wife dies in childbirth, leaving him alone. His life is haunted by a sense of unfulfilled potential. As he lies on his deathbed, two caretakers hovering over him observe sadly that he never had children. This remark revives old Chips for a moment, and he insists that he had thousands. As he slips away forever, the floating image of one boy beams and calls out, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips!”
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Any such sentiment is unlikely to survive a viewing of Chalk, a riotously funny mockumentary in the style of The Office about fledgling teachers at a middle-class public school in Austin, Texas. Coproducers and improv artists Mike Akel and Chris Mass wrote the script over the course of many 6 AM sessions, before starting their jobs teaching at Austin high schools. An opening title informs us that 50 percent of teachers quit in the first three years, and the action follows four of them through nine months at the fictional Harrison High School as they deal with insulting kids, difficult coworkers, and crushing workloads. “As teachers ourselves, we both had a lot of strong opinions about the profession,” Akel writes in his director’s statement. “But we didn’t want to push an agenda. We wanted to tell a story from inside the world of teachers.” After being inside for a while, you may wonder how 50 percent manage to stay.
These three characters give Mass and Akel the chance to satirize different aspects of the teaching experience, but none of them is as gripping as Mr. Lowrey (Troy Schremmer), a hapless first-year history teacher whose students eat him alive. Mr. Lowrey has gone through a divorce and abandoned a job in computer engineering to become a teacher, and his fear and agony on the first day should strike a chord with anyone who’s ever stood at the front of a classroom. As played by Schremmer (who works as a director of Christian education at a “collegiate church” in New York), Mr. Lowrey is smart and committed but painfully shy and boring. He makes every classic teacher mistake: posing vague questions, asking students to read out loud with him, telling them he’ll operate one way and then doing the opposite. When his students rebel, he resorts to the hopeless disciplinary stunt of asking someone to take over the class, and in one excruciating scene, he tries to quell a classroom fight between two big girls by loftily invoking the preamble to the Constitution. The kids stare at him like he’s crazy.
Directed by Mike Akel
Written by Akel AND Chris Mass
With Mass, Troy Schremmer, Janelle Schremmer, AND Shannon Haragan
