Film school: teacher-student relationships in movies can be inspirational or downright creepy. But as Catholics it's up to us to help each other learn and grow.

ALL OF US WANT TO BELIEVE WE EACH HAVE AN IMPACT on other people's lives. Maybe this is why teaching--in spite of the low pay and bureaucratic nonsense--seems so attractive. We believe teachers can make that sort of a difference, inspiring students to be smarter, better, or nobler than they might have been.

Hollywood has produced a long chalky line of films about great teachers. In movies like The Blackboard Jungle (MGM, 1955), To Sir, With Love (Columbia, 1967), Stand and Deliver (Warner Bros, 1988), and Dangerous Minds (Buena Vista, 1995), fictional and real-life teachers not only teach their subjects but also engage and inspire their students, persuading even the most callous and embittered youngsters to imagine and reach for a world infinitely larger and better than the one they have known.

Writer/director Richard LaGravenese adds to this list of inspiring films with Freedom Writers (Paramount, 2007), the true story of a fresh-out-of-college teacher assigned to the remedial freshman English class at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) soon discovers how unprepared she is to reach or teach students trapped in a foreign, hopeless, and violent world, and decides to create the sort of encouraging space where her pupils can give voice to their experience, transforming themselves into authors with diverse and powerful stories to share.

The strength of Gruwell's approach and of LaGravenese's film is that the teacher and filmmaker actually pay attention to the students. To Gruwell and LaGravenese, the young people trapped in this classroom are not just passive recipients of her teaching or inert objects of his storytelling. They are themselves instructors and narrators with powerful lessons and tales to share, and Gruwell's greatest success as a teacher occurs when she and her class publish a collection of their journal entries in the 1999 anthology, The Freedom Writers Diary (Main Street Books).

Here is teaching at its best. Not merely a celebration of the instructor as entertainer or informer, but a transformation of silent rows of passive pupils into a chorus of voices eager to add their own understanding and contribution to the ongoing dialogue of learning. Erin Gruwell need not wonder if she has made a difference, for in learning to listen to and learn from her students she has awakened a community of discourse that will leave a mark larger and deeper than any of her own words. She has helped the mute to speak and the deaf to hear.

EVERY MOVIE ABOUT AN INSPIRATIONAL teacher includes a small cast of dispirited faculty who no longer believe in their craft or their students. For these cynical souls the faculty lunch room is a place for endless gossip about the failings of students and the folly of younger and more idealistic colleagues, and a classroom full of pupils is merely a means to an end.

In Notes on a Scandal (Twentieth Century Fox, 2006) Richard Eyre introduces us to two teachers who can only see their students or colleagues as a means to satisfy their own desperate unmet needs. Instead of the teacher as one who inspires and liberates, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) and Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) offer us two different visions of teacher as predator.

Hart is a svelte, immature thirtysomething art instructor increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage to an older professor and her inadequacy as an artist. Seeking to recapture adolescent dreams, she becomes sexually involved with a 15-year-old male pupil and resists efforts to end the affair. Barbara Covett, on the other hand, is a spinsterish history professor with unspoken hungers for a special friendship with Hart. When the older woman discovers her young colleague's involvement with a student, Covett attempts to blackmail her way into Hart's heart and bed. Not surprisingly this tale of obsession and manipulation ends badly, and hardly anyone has learned their lesson.

RUSSIAN AUTHOR AND HISTORIAN ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being," and in Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's film Half Nelson (ThinkFilm, 2006), Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a teacher with a deeply divided heart. A gifted and generous history teacher giving his all to junior high students trapped in a part of Brooklyn where childhood and dreams are endangered species, Dunne is also a self-destructive crack addict squandering his energies and resources for a few additional moments of numbing pleasure.

When 13-year-old student Drey (Shareeka Epps) discovers her teacher's secret addiction, Dunne and his pupil find themselves drawn deeper and deeper into a relationship full of promise and peril. Wanting to protect Drey from the very dealers he relies on to supply his own habit, Dunne is nonetheless incapable of behaving other than the addict he is. So the question becomes: Will the ties that bind this teacher and student be a source of liberation or destruction?

JESUS WAS, AMONG OTHER THINGS, A TEACHER--A rabbi. And the gospels constantly report on the ways he taught both the crowds that gathered to hear him preach and the small cluster of disciples that followed him from town to town.

In Luke 4 Jesus begins his teaching ministry by announcing that he has come to liberate those who receive his Good News, suggesting that his vocation as a teacher calls him to set his audiences and listeners free from every sort of human bondage. And in John 15 Jesus concludes his instruction of the disciples by calling them his friends, indicating that the purpose of teaching is to create a community of colleagues who see and care for each other as free people.

Whether we become classroom teachers or not, each of us has a vocation to mentor, transform, and liberate others, which we do by attending to them closely, treating them with compassion and respect, and creating a safe and creative space where they can grow and flourish.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.