Hey, Teacher: Our Favorite Teachers in the Movies

Craig Hlavaty | August 24, 2011 | 5:00pm

With all the kids going back to school this week and college classes starting soon, it's easy to forget those fine folks that will be lording over them all year, the teachers. It's a thankless job, the pay is awful (right, Rick Perry?) and at times it can get very dangerous, what with all the gangs and rap music and robots.

Teachers in the movies range from the inspiring, like Robin Williams's roles in Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society, to insufferable bastards like Professor Jerry Hathaway in Real Genius and Bradley Cooper's character in The Hangover. On a side note, a fun drinking game related to The Hangover is to take a shot whenever Cooper looks aggravated or asks someone to "settle down" or "get it together."

We collected just ten of our favorite teachers in the movies. They aren't all good, wholesome or even efficient, but damned if they didn't all make me attempt to get a teaching certificate in 2006, only to leave it behind to write about music and pop culture for the rest of my life.

This one goes out to Mrs. Pat Dietrich, who knew in 1993 that a short, chubby, mulleted boy would one day be a writer, and looked the other way when he used the word "pussy" in a short story he wrote in fourth grade.

Stand & Deliver, Jaime Escalante