There's no substitutes for good teachers.

Sidney Poitier won our respect - and perhaps even our hearts - in " To Sir with Love," and Anne Bancroft's Annie Sullivan proved that teachers can be miracle workers. Despite their larger-than-life characters, Hollywood's most illustrious mentors offer fundamental lessons in what it takes to teach.

If you go to the movies or watch television with any regularity, it has probably occurred to you that doctors, lawyers, and cops have the only interesting jobs in America. After all, the most intriguing characters in our films and TV shows are packing a scalpel, a brief, or a pistol, and the rest of us just seem to be walking backdrops. After a couple of hours of these films, I find myself suffering from a not-so-mild case of job envy - wishing I could do surgery, prosecute felons, or sit on stakeout and bemoaning the fact that my workaday life as a teacher lacks the luster and adrenaline rush of these photogenic profession.

So you can imagine the sort of excitement I felt last fall when two new films about teachers suddenly hit the screens, particularly when I learned that these were not movies in which the teachers are either bumbling incompetents (a la "Ferris Bueller's Day Off") or lonely failures (like Diane Keaton in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar"). Instead in the previews I saw of "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "Dangerous Minds," Richard Dreyfuss and Michelle Pfeiffer portray bright, feisty and highly attractive characters, they're teachers whose very pores seem to ooze wit, idealism, and compassion. Here at last were some vocational films for the blackboard set, movies I could rent to get me through the mid-semester doldrums.

In the end, of course, both of these movies turned out to be rather silly and inordinately sentimental Hollywood vehicles, with Dreyfuss playing Mr. Smith Goes to Kennedy High, and Pfeiffer offering us Our Miss Brooks but with costumes and attitude provided by Victoria's Secret. I admit to having cried at all the predictable turns in "Mr. Holland's Opus" and envied anyone lucky enough to have drawn a leather-clad Michelle Pfeiffer as their homeroom teacher, but overall I was pretty disappointed by a lot of romantic Hollywood hype. For here were teachers who could not only leap over tall buildings in a single bound but were actually able to rescue and save - every student they ever came into contact with.

Everything, it seems, was easy for them. Mere mortal that I am, I was so demoralized from watching these two super teachers at work that I went right out and rented a half dozen doctor/ lawyer/cop movies just to get the saccharine taste out of my mouth.

The truth is, however, that many, if not most, movies about teachers are infected with a sappy sort of romantic sentimentalism. Even the best films dealing with this subject tend to idealize teachers, remembering them in sepia tones and casting them a lot larger than life. As a result, we rarely get portrayals of teachers offering much depth or character development. But then, maybe that's not so surprising. After all, most of our teachers were bigger and older than we were, and we often knew very little about them outside of the classroom.

Still, even silly, sentimental movies can sometimes make you stop and think. In the weeks after I saw "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "Dangerous Minds," I found myself remembering and considering a number of favorite films about teachers. Jotting down the titles of some of these movies (and an occasional TV series), it occurred to me that the stories I liked the best fell roughly into three categories, each of them offering a different insight or lesson about what it means to be a good teacher and maybe even about what it means to be a good human being. So, let's look at some celluloid teachers who were idealist coaches, and students themselves.

In "Dead Poets Society" (1989 Robin Williams plays Mr. Keating, a young and highly idealistic English teacher in his first year at an established East Coast prep school, a man whose passion for teaching stands in sharp contrast to the tired cynicism of his middle-aged colleagues. Indeed, what makes the young Keating so intensely attractive to both his students and the movie-going audience is his impassioned love of life, a love that is celebrated and spills over into his feelings for poetry and for the rich joys it can bring to receptive hearts. Keating, the film argues, is a great English teacher because he loves poetry and because that passion is contagious. In fact, his young charges are ultimately so infected by the excitement Keating brings to his teaching that they are soon breaking curfew and sneaking off the property to read Keats and Coleridge by candlelight.

The best teachers are captivated by their subject matter, drawn out of themselves by their teaching, and we catch their excitement like the wake of a passing train. The very best-teachers don't tie us down, they pull us along. They are - as corny as it sounds - visionaries.

Maybe that's why some of my favorite movies about teachers portray them - sometimes rather sappily - as idealists. In "The Blackboard Jungle" (1955), Glenn Ford plays Richard Dadier, a young idealistic professor who joins the faculty of a tough urban high school and must wrestle with unruly young toughs in his classroom and bitter colleagues in the faculty lounge. Ford's character survives the trial by fire and is able, by the dint of his fierce commitment to teaching to win the confidence of most of his his students and the grudging respect of the rest of the faculty. In "To Sir With Love" (1967) and "Up the Down Staircase" (1967), other favorites of mine Sidney Poitier and Sandy Dennis reprise Ford's role in slightly different settings, once again casting the idealism of a young teacher against a collection of hard-nosed students a worn-out colleagues.

Still, what I find most attractive about these idealists is how they love or come to love their students. Unlike being a great scholar, being a great teacher requires a passion for one's field of study and for one's pupils. After all, teaching isn't just about ideas, it's about engaging hearts and minds in the process of learning. This is clearest in "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "To Sir With Love," films in which Dreyfuss' and Poitier's character have come to teaching almost by accident, with no intention of making a career of the classroom. Yet what ultimately wins each of them over to the profession (and us to them) is that they have come to care deeply about the young people in their classrooms.

Of course such passion can sometimes have a challenging face, and some of the best teachers in film and on TV come across as extraordinarily tough and demanding coaches who push and stretch their charges to the very limits of their capacity and endurance.

My all-time favorite in this category has to be Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan in "The Miracle Worker" (1962). In an Oscar-winning performance, Bancroft plays the teacher who finally gets through to Helen Keller (Patty Duke), a teacher who will not let her young pupil retreat from the rigorous demands of learning, who constantly - even fiercely - challenges Keller to fight her way out of the darkness and silence surrounding and engulfing her. And in the end, it is this very passion for her student that keeps Sullivan from being defeated by all the ploys and temper tantrums that have driven is away a string of other tutors and ultimately provides Keller with the strength and courage she needs to achieve the impossible.

In another personal favorite, "Stand and Deliver" (1988), Edward James Olmos plays real-life math instructor Jaime Escalante, an intensely dedicated teacher in a tough East Los Angeles high school, where under-privileged students are warehoused but not well educated.

Refusing to accept society's abandonment of his students or their surrender to racial and ethnic stereotypes that relegate them to dead-end careers, Escalante dares his underachieving pupils to prepare for and take an advanced-placement test in calculus. With incredible tenacity, he confronts his students with increasingly difficult problems, setting higher and higher goals, and making tougher and tougher demands, until at last they find themselves, like Helen Keller, achieving what no one else thought they could.

The best teachers are the ones who inspire us to compete against ourselves, to take on tasks that seem to exceed our grasp, to discover and develop our real mettle as thinkers. At the same time, the very best teachers also seem to be the ones who never stop learning themselves; they're the folks who never quit reading newbooks, listening to new voices, or discussing new ideas, and whose quest for understanding is never finished. In other words, the very best teachers are lifelong students, people who still know how little they really understand about life and how much they have left to learn about all the important questions, people open to having their assumptions challenged and their minds changed.

Most of us don't have much trouble spotting such student-teachers in the classroom. They have a sense of wonder about them, a sense of awe before the mystery of life. Teachers like this are always finding something fresh and provocative, even in material they've been over several times before. They're always making new connections, uncovering deeperinsights, and positing original and interesting questions. There is something untidy, unfinished, and definitely exciting about their teaching, and there is something inspiring in their courageous willingness to be taught new things.

Anthony Hopkins does this student-teacher motif very nicely in "Shadowlands" (1993), a film about the Oxford don and popular author C. S. Lewis. At the outset of the film Hopkins portrays Lewis as a man who has fashioned something of a hermetically sealed life for himself - a comfortable, well-lit place where students and audiences hang on his every answer, and where he himself has long ago ceased struggling with life's tougher questions. The film's point, however, is that Lewis only becomes interesting as a character or a teacher when the self-satisfied don's world is thrown into tumult by his wife's cancer and impending death. Now this middle-aged academician must finally wrestle with searing human questions about suffering, frailty, and love, holding the hand of his beloved and trusting in the God he cannot see. Lewis the professor is forced to become Lewis the pupil, and, ironically, becomes in this way someone who might really have something to teach us.

Sometimes, however, the lessons student-teachers have to learn aren't personal but social. In "A Dry White Season" (1989) and "The Official Story" (Argentina: 1985), Donald Sutherland and Norma Aleandro portray instructors who have something extremely important and painful to learn about the world outside their classrooms.

Sutherland is a South African teacher, Ben du Toit, whose investigation into the brutal police execution of his black gardener brings him face-to-face with the full scope of apartheid's violence. In an educational process that shatters his most sacred myths about South African society and the justice it doles out to blacks and whites, du Toit unlearns much of what he believes about himself, his family, and his nation. Similarly, in "The Official Story," Aleandro plays Alicia, an upper-middle-class teacher who is forced to acknowledge her husband's complicity in widespread government programs of torture and murder. Confronted with the corruption and malice of people and systems she had once trusted, Aleandro's character refuses to retreat into ignorance, choosing instead to face the truth, even if it means changing the very direction of her life.

In the end, we like good movies about teachers because they remind us of something important about ourselves - that we are, and always will be, learners.

This also means, however, that we spend much of our lives teaching, passing on to the next generation the knowledge and wisdom we've managed to glean from our predecessors and our own experience. In or out of classrooms, whether we like it or not, we are the teachers of younger hearts and minds, educating them by what we say and do and how we live our lives.

How are we to teach? It seems to me that we could do worse than to take three lessons in pedagogy from these films about teachers. First, good teachers have a passion in their lives and a deep regard for other persons. That is, they love. Second, they lead challenging and demanding lives that set high standards and inspire their charges. In other words, they're prophetic. And third, they are always fully engaged in the mystery of life, with hearts and minds full of wonder and awe, open to learn new things and understand new realities. It seems to me that Jesus was a teacher like this. Perhaps that's why they called him Rabbi.