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Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film

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"For as long as I have been an adult, I have been a teacher."

Jo Keroes, Tales Out of School, Acknowledgments, ix

_Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film_, Jo Keroes' recent book (Southern Illinois Press, 1999), explores sexism, racism, ambition, relationships between students and teachers, and the dynamics of the teaching life. Keroes writes about the images of teaching in novels, films and letters. Males such as Sir in _To Sir With Love_ are often portrayed as heroic as they struggle to teach their initially truculent students, while women such as Miss Jean Brodie in _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie_ are more often portrayed as sinister, frustrated, manipulative or thwarted as they try to reach pupils who are often increasingly insoucient or suspicious. Whether on film or on paper, her tales are dramas that take place in the classroom, in tutorials, in the often neglected or ridiculed situations in which teachers and students find themselves. Jo Keroes draws from literary theory and techniques, research and teaching experience to explore teachers' fictional and dramatic images, to unravel volatile mixes of feelings, ideas, participants and purposes. As she comments in the Introduction:

This tension between reality and representation, these contradictory images and expectations, are suggestive precisely because they speak to society's need to construe images that deny and in some cases counter a reality we find dangerous and/or unacceptable. More simply, they reveal our continued ambivalence about women's power. I'm interested in exploring not just the way these stereotypes continue to play out, but also the tensions the stereotypes reveal and the ways in which certain texts work to subvert them. While we often see traditional gender patterns inscribed in fiction and film, the most interesting of these patterns show disruptions and disharmonies, inconsistencies and contradictions, resistance to and variations on familiar themes (8).