Movie Fantasy vs. Classroom Reality

The Class contains a much more realistic portrayal of the typical classroom situation. In this classroom, the students are very unruly. This is not the movie-style unruly where everyone is loud until the teacher must ask them to be quiet, either. The students aggressively disobey the teacher's rules and commands and continues to do whatever they can to disrupt things. Whenever the teacher gives a lecture, students chime in only to poke fun at him or try to veer off topic. The kids in the classroom are much more profane than the usual Hollywood classroom. They say things that not only contain swear words, but have highly offensive ethnic or sexist slurs that tells the viewer very much about the environment of their upbringing.

An even more important distinction between the atmosphere in The Class and that of most other school movies is the imperfectness of the teacher. The classroom movie generally has one of two teacher types: The clueless teacher with no authority over his or her class (as seen in suburban movies such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club), or the rebellious teacher who decides to go up against the system to achieve their goal of improving the lives of their students in a way that the school system fails to do (as in Dead Poets' Society). In The Class, Francois is a teacher who genuinely wants to do his job, but his class makes this as challenging as it can possibly be. He constantly attempts to get the class interested in French and to learn the material, but they are too preoccupied with doing the opposite.

In the end, this starts to wear on the teacher until he makes mistakes. For instance, sometimes he retaliates too harshly against the students. At one point in the movie, he says that he feels one of his students has met his "scholastic limit" at a teachers' meeting (a type of scene that is unique to this movie), which spreads around until it reaches the person he was talking about. He does one of the worst things a teacher can do to a student, that is, he suggests that the student cannot learn anymore. Francois is not a bad person; he is just trying to be realistic in an obviously imperfect society that he is a part of. We see that although he is doing his best to be a good teacher, he fails in some ways and has flaws of his own. In this way, the film explores much more realistic problems of today's classroom than most movies before it.