I would like to have a deeper look at the teachers of twelve forever and why I love that realistic approach to them.
In most cartoon shows they are often shown as foils, as enemies or even as danger to the protagonists. Looking especially at the Fairly Odd Parents, American Dragon or the half of the shows, that have school life in it. Even in non-animation teachers are often over the top nasty or so eccentric that it isn’t just realistic or interesting anymore (even otherwise relatively good shows like Kim Possible or SvtFoE do this).
I always found it interesting, that most shows concentrate on one teacher and that one circles around the show for most of the time. This is the case in most cartoon shows I know. There is additionally maybe the principal, or a gym teacher and that’s it for the most shows. I often wonder if this is an American thing because in my home country I had dozens of teachers with their different subjects and their different attitudes of teaching and learning. And here Twelve Forever viewpoints are rather realistic.
There are the teachers that try to help you in the future, teachers that try the best helping and supporting their students. Of course there are also teachers that aren’t like that, that try to get by every day and even insult you or don’t care about their pupils, but they aren’t the majority. In Twelve Forever, aside of the one who takes care of the library we see three different teachers a bit more and their approaches to the pupils.
We have the music teacher, who knows that Todd is better as his subject than most students but cannot go to more interesting subjects as many students won’t be able to follow. This is often the case with favorite subjects and some students feel that way to subjects, that are really interesting for them personally. There are eager students, but the school cannot help them in that direction.
The Art teacher is the most fun of them, he tries to motivate his pupils to continue their goals but, in a way, that they won’t cause trouble. We also see, that he probably acts differently in his private life than in the school, as in Dance Forever he is extremely careful what he says and would have chosen different music when it would be a party with some friends.
The literature teacher is the oddest of the three, but also rather realistic. There are some teachers, that won’t teach you everything you need or do not even bother to teach you. Sometimes the coolest teachers that everybody likes teach you very little of the subject, but tell you fun stories or do other things. Yes they can be nice, but if the subject is really interesting for you, it is extremely disturbing. I totally felt Esther who wanted to be taught about literature and not hear something about the past of the teacher that is totally arbitrary.
So I would say, that this is a rather interesting aspect of the show, which could be tackled more in a season 2 or so. And I think School Forever is one of the best episodes of the show as Reggie, Esther and Todd learn about the problems of teaching rather fast in Endless. So kudos to making teachers in the cartoons more realistic.
And now it is time to head into the weekend and:
And sorry for my rambling
