Precious: The Tricky Business of Teaching Onscreen

New York, NY —

In the movies, if often seems like a failing student just needs one really charismatic teacher to succeed. That’s what happens in the films “Dangerous Minds,” “Stand and Deliver” and “Freedom Writers.” All portray dynamic educators who help their students overcome tremendous obstacles. The new movie “Precious” follows a similar script. But as WNYC’s Beth Fertig reports, it’s hard to portray the real work of teaching.

REPORTER: For Clareece Precious Jones, being illiterate often seems like the least of her problems. She’s sixteen years old and still in junior high. She lives in a rundown apartment in Harlem with a mother who beats her.

MOTHER: Precious! Precious! Precious!

REPORTER: Precious is also repeatedly raped by her father. And she’s pregnant with his second child. But her life turns around when she’s sent to an alternative school where she meets a teacher named Ms. Rain.

TEACHER: Something you do well?

CLAREECE: Nothing.

TEACHER: Everybody’s good at something.

REPORTER: Ms. Rain is the perfect Hollywood teacher. She’s warm, she’s beautiful, and she has a gift for teaching illiterate young women. She encourages them to write whatever they can in their personal journals. And within a year, Precious goes from the ABC’s to an 8th grade reading level.

That seems incredible to someone who was illiterate in real life.

YAMILKA: They put it so easy.

REPORTER: That’s 26-year-old Yamilka, who doesn’t want to give her full name to protect her privacy.

YAMILKA: They send her to this classroom with this amazing teacher, give her a pencil, give her notebook, and just write, and that’s it.

REPORTER: Yamilka won a settlement from the city in 2005 because she got all the way through high school without learning to read. Her learning disabilities were never addressed, in violation of a federal education law.

REPORTER: Of course, “Precious” isn’t a real person. The movie is based on the novel “Push,” by the Brooklyn-based writer Sapphire. If the film glosses over how Precious learns to read, Sapphire says that’s because the filmmakers were more interested in capturing the big picture.

SAPPHIRE: School becomes about community building, it becomes about bonding, it becomes about where she gets social services to find a place to live. So those things are shown in more detail because they can be shown in a film. I’ve never seen a film that is watchable that actually details the process of learning to read.

REPORTER: Saffire’s novel does go into that process. She drew largely from her experiences teaching illiterate adults in the Bronx and Harlem during the 1980s and 90s. She used a technique called the dialogue journal. She’d ask a student to try to write something even if he or she barely knew the alphabet.

SAPPHIRE: You’re learning sound letter correspondence.So they say Dear Miss Saffire.Well what does Dear start with? Dear starts with a D. What does Miss start with. I don’t know. What do you think it starts with? It starts with M. What’s the next letter that you hear? I hear a I, so they’ll write an I.

REPORTER: She says some of her pupils learned to read within a year or two. But she didn’t teach students with learning disabiltiies, like Yamilka.

Reading teachers are familiar with Sapphire’s technique. Esther Friedman, who works with schools in need of improvement for the city’s department of education, read the novel “Push” and has this to say about the method we briefly see in the movie.

FRIEDMAN: You would definitely see dialogue journals today. I cannot imagine that anybody would tell you that this is the way we are teaching this child to read.

REPORTER: Today the teaching of reading is often highly structured and based on scientifically proven techniques like phonics. But in the 70s and 80s, Friedman says, educators wanted to empower students and get them more involved in learning by writing about their own lives. Friedman says dialogue journals can still help young children learn how to write as well as older teens who slip through the cracks. And those students DO need the safe community the film “Precious” depicts.

FRIEDMAN: To me the classrooms where I see this a lot now are in the transfer schools, which are the alternative high schools, in some cases kids that have already dropped out, GED schools. But what you see in those schools, there is a lot of effort now to try to figure out the reading part.

REPORTER: Maybe that can’t be shown on the screen.

PRECIOUS: Nobody loves me!

TEACHER: People do love you, Precious.

PRECIOUS: Please!

REPORTER: It’s easier for Hollywood to show a teacher trying to connect with a student emotionally than it is to show the nuts and bolts of reading. Yamilka, who needed intensive help with speech and language therapy, agrees with that premise. She also acknowledges she saw a little of herself on the screen when Precious didn’t want to admit she was illiterate.

YAMILKA: Being like the outsider part. Not feeling like I belong in that room with the other kids. So I could relate to that part.

REPORTER: She just doesn’t want anyone to leave the movie thinking that learning to read comes easy for everyone. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.