Love the moment of Stratt calling Grace out for wanting to be a teacher essentially just so that he can always be the smartest person in the room.
Like, I don't think that's his actual motivation. When we see him in the classroom, he's clearly keen to have the kids share their own knowledge. He mentally compliments Abby on being “smart as a whip”, like he clearly enjoys seeing the kids learning and growing.
Equally though, Stratt is right in that children can be easier than adults.
Especially since Grace, in the book at least (can't remember if they clarified this is the movie) is straight up bribing them. Like he's offering prizes to the kids who work hard and give the best answers.
Not a bad teaching tool to drive engagement, but it says something that he's living in a small flat, he's cycling for work “and it's not for exercise”, but his classroom is well decorated and he's handing out prizes.
Like some of his fellow teachers definitely hate him.
Because they get stuck with “why can't we have fun prizes like Mr Grace's class? Mr Grace let's his class play games!” and like the answer likely is a combination of “because Mr Grace has a different teaching style to me”, “because I can’t afford to spend as much money as Mr Grace apparently can” and, quite possibly, “because Mr Grace's class is SUPER LOUD and REALLY CHAOTIC and I literally would die of sensory overload if I had to teach in that environment, I don't know how he does it” but you can't tell that to the kids.
Equally, if literally any of his 'prizes' make a noise, make a mess or cause arguments between different kids then teachers from other subjects likely hate him.
I still hold murderer in my heart for the one science teacher who taught a class of year 8s how to make 'slime' and then sent them to my English lesson with it contained in fucking open plastic cups.
(Like have them collect it at the end of the day if you can’t get them a closed container! How are you a fucking science teacher and don't understand that objects in open ended containers will fall out? Are all those bunsen burner fumes going to your fucking head???)
Teaching gets valorised as a profession, which means people tend to think of it as not being a real job. Yes, Grace is going all out for the adorable little kiddies. But also Grace is like the equivalent of the person who struggles to pay their student loans but also buys communal supplies of tea and coffee for the office and constantly brings in treats because he desperately wants people to like him.
Yeah Grace is everyone's favourite teacher. But he's probably not universally beloved by his coworkers, and some of the coworkers who do like him have probably suggested before that he should maybe dial it back a bit because he's doing too much. Like dude, I promise your kids won't hate you if you give them slightly fewer stickers, and also you might actually be able to afford a bus fare.
Remember, this is a guy for whom one of his major character flaws is that he avoids adult relationships (platonic or otherwise) because he's afraid. The papier mache solar system and complicated lesson plans are definitely a symptom of that avoidance.
Like to understand Grace as a teacher, you kind of have to step away from the automatic thing that a lot of people do of imagining what it would be like to be a student in his class. This is a job. It's not a calling. None of us took holy orders. When Grace is a teacher Grace is at work, and when Grace is at work Grace is clearly working overtime and spending his own money on luxuries so that the children he works with will like him best.
Again, he's a great teacher. He clearly loves the job and cares deeply for his students. But there are self-destructive elements to his work as a teacher on Earth.
He crashed and burned out of academia because he couldn't take working in an environment where he a) wasn't The Smartest Person, and b) he had to manage friendships and social interactions with adult peers. He then went on to construct an incredibly safe environment in his classroom where he would always be the Smartest and where the kids would always love him because he's the fun teacher who gives them prizes and plays games.
And this is kind of managed on the Vat. Like he isn't on easy mode anymore, but Grace is the world leading expert on astrophage (literally named them) which means he doesn't have to deal with people questioning him a lot, and he's second in command to the Dictator Of The World, which means people are predisposed to be nice to him.
When they aren't, like Lokken, he tends to struggle with keeping it professional. (Admittedly Lokken is clearly also being unprofessional here.)
This also plays into when he gets told he has to die to save the world.
I do think that his immediate fear response is understandable (not sure I'd have reacted differently) but also he takes it way too personally. Dude leaves the room, in the book, thinking that “all my friends got together and decided that they want me to die”.
Dude is very obsessed with whether people like him and is terrified of not being liked.
But this is significant because this is actually one of the things about Grace that changes.
Grace is very well aware that Rocky is smarter than him. In fact Rocky has to be the one to disagree with him when he tries to claim that Eridians as a whole are just smarter than humans.
Eridians have better memory and can instinctively do complex mathematics in their heads (carapaces?). Rocky is hugely impressed by Grace's scientific skills, but he also regularly calls him stupid and has zero patience for him spiralling into anxiety or neglecting self-care for the sake of the mission.
Grace is awed by Rocky's engineering skills and basically spends the whole book admiring him every other sentence. Literally states that he would trust the guy to do open heart surgery on him.
Grace meets someone who, by his own standards, is better than him in every way (especially when he remembers how he got on the ship) and Grace still gets to be liked. Grace gets to be admired, and joked with, and told when he needs to stop being an idiot and go to bed, and it's got nothing to do with him being a Super Genius or the other person being a literal child.
Same goes for him being a teacher on Erid. Like I think that's a pretty big deal actually.
Yeah Grace is gonna be the Weird Alien Teacher, which will definitely help the kids warm up to him, but he's also gonna be significantly less good at maths and remembering things than his students. He's going to forget things, he's going to mess up calculations, he's going to miss stuff because his hearing isn't as good as theirs or because he is the person in the room least experienced in their planet's culture.
Grace deciding that he wants to teach again, is him deciding that he's okay putting himself in a situation where he's going to fuck up (a lot) and where he's not going to be able to have the same level of control over the situation that he would have had on Earth.
And he loves it. He's exactly where he wants to be. Grace is the worst mathematician and owner of the worst memory on Erid, is consistently dependent on other people to explain things to him and help him in his day to day life, and he fucking loves it.
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