Learning Curve

Learning Curve (1998) This flick could be one of many high school teachers’ favorite movies. From the coming attractions, this appeared to be a standard horror/slasher movie about high school students being kidnapped by a loony teacher. It turns out to be somewhat of a wry satire on today’s educational system and one person’s solution to the problem, not a horror movie at all. Directed by Andy Anderson and shot in and around Weatherford, Texas, it portrays a high school where the students have more power than the teachers, administrators are primarily concerned about keeping things quiet (education being low on their priority list), books are unavailable due to an oversight committee‘s complaints about all the textbooks, and teachers frequently get assaulted and then sued by the students doing the assaulting.

Into this madhouse of a system comes a substitute teacher who may be certifiably mad. The teacher he is replacing dies from a heart attack and he winds up as a permanent temporary teacher. He develops a plan to take his class of unruly students on a bit of a crash course in college prep. This includes kidnapping, electrocution, imprisonment and other unusual but effective non-standard teaching aids. Listening to the director’s commentary on the DVD, he claims that the teacher’s guidance program shown in the movie is actually a real program used in Texas. In that program teachers were warned that making eye contact for more than ‘x’ times per period with a student of the opposite sex could be considered sexual harassment. However, making eye contact with that same student less than ‘y’ times per period could be considered prosecutable as student neglect. Jeeze, no wonder education appears to be in such a sorry state. The best line went to the loony teacher lecturing his captives about their net worth: “You’re less interesting than a fever blister.” The movie is rated R for: naked student body, excessive oath hurling, electrical conduction via organic salt solution, bad propane tanks, and for the general sorry state of public education as suggested by this flick.