Imagine Teacher Ds
Lorri Dent
Imagine: Teacher is a 2008 video game for the Nintendo DS, developed by Magic Pockets. Play as a rookie teacher who takes over a class in a newly built modern school. At the beginning your class only has a few kids because most of the kids in town are used to going to a school located in the next town over. It is your job to bring those students back to make your classroom and school the best place to learn. The game really begins when you meet some characters who don't want you to succeed.
In the game, you play as April, a young teenage girl who takes up the job as a teacher in a small school outside a big city, and she happens to be the only teacher in the school. She gets assistance from the school's retiring principal, Mr. Coddleton, who shows that most students are out attending school in the city and their school isn't as popular. It's up to April to bring the school back to life while helping the students learn and grow. You start with a few students at first, but as you do your job well, more children will eventually enroll.
The aim of the game is to teach the students different subjects, such as math, reading and art, over the course of a five-day week. Each school day is divided into two classes separated by recess, and each lesson consists of the introduction, the activity, and finally the correction of the students' work. For each week though, you need to focus on a certain subject, which appears more often than the others. You may also need to find a lost item as you clean the classroom, or invite a student over for a night class. Also, you may have to obtain materials to celebrate an event in the game.
- Anime Hair: April has this sort of hairdo, consisting of several spikes that stick up and curl forward.
- Big Damn Heroes: Mr. Coddleton showing up near the end of the final arc to prove April was innocent and it was Mr. Fricke who robbed the school.
- Big Good: Mr. Coddleton, who guides April through the ropes of being a teacher and giving her all the encouragement she needs.
- Birthday Episode: The third week revolves around the student Louise's birthday, and the player gets to set up a surprise birthday party for her at the end of the week.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
- What Ms. Sharpe was revealed to be in the finale. She seemed sweet at first, but she framed April because she was jealous of her for getting the job and not her. She is rightfully punished by Mr. Thistle and is fired from the district for good.
- When Keith was introduced, he was shown to be nervous and seemed excited to be enrolled in April's school. Once there...not so much.
- Frame-Up: The final arc of the game has the school be robbed and Ms. Sharpe accuses April of doing such, because April is the only one with a key to the school which the thief would have used to break in.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Ms. Sharpe is revealed to be this to April in the ending; she was jealous over April getting the teacher job over her that she hired Mr. Fricke to rob the school and frame April for it to get her fired.
- Happy Birthday to You!: At the end of the third week if all party materials are bought, the students sing the actual song to Louise, one student per line at a time, at her surprise birthday party.
- Jerkass: Keith has huge shades of this, unlike all the other students. Mr. Thistle also shows this time to time.
- Laser-Guided Karma: After Ms. Sharpe is revealed to be the one responsible for setting up the theft, Mr. Thistle fires her from the school district for good.
- The Man Behind the Man: Mr. Fricke was responsible for the school being robbed at the end, but it wasn't his idea; it was an order given to him by Ms. Sharpe to get revenge on April for getting the job instead of her.
- Nice Guy: Jeremy is described as being the nicest of the students and is very friendly to the others.
- Nice Mean And In Between:
- Among April's students, three of them stand out the most. William is the nice and friendly Shrinking Violet, Keith is always mean and complaining, and Louise is the girly Motor Mouth who stays in-between.
- The school staff other than April has: Mr. Coddleton the jovial retiring principal, Ms. Sharp the strict inspector who is secretly jealous of April, and Mr. Fricke, the less strict but more level-headed para professional.
- There's also additional staff related to the school board: Mr. Manset the kind and caring guidance counselor, Mr. Thistle the grumpy and demanding boss, and Mr. Goodman, the mayor of the city who stays in-between the two due to being less demanding but more assertive.
- Only One Name: All of the students plus April only have their first names known, with the exception of Mr. Manset's son William. The rest of the staff barring April only have their surnames revealed.
- Retired Badass: Mr. Coddleton serves as this, even before retiring at the beginning.
- Shrinking Violet: William is the shyest, always very nervous around others, but opens right up to them.
- Token Evil Teammate: Though not technically evil per se, Mr. Goodman's nephew Keith is the least friendly of April's students, always complaining about the school's activities and not liking anything about it. Despite April letting Mr. Goodman in on it and being asked to oversee him so he can get used to it, he still acts jerky for the whole game.
- Token Minority: Aito is Japanese, while Isabella is Indian.
- Two-Teacher School: April is the only teacher in the school, alongside Mr. Manset the guidance counselor and Mr. Fricke as her assistant.
New York City Councilman David Greenfield went further and insisted the teacher be fired. In a statement, Greenfield writes: "The teacher responsible for coming up with and assigning students with this task must be held accountable for attempting to indoctrinate children with anti-Semitic beliefs. Quite obviously, this teacher lacks the judgment and common sense necessary to have a position of such great responsibility and is clearly not fit to return to the classroom."
The press too has jumped on this story, making it a national news item, covered on all the networks and in papers around the country. Writing on Jezebel, David Barry made a feint in the direction of understanding the value of such an assignment, but then about-faced and concluded:
Reading about this assignment and the heated reaction it elicited, my first reaction was to think back to Mr. Feig. Would his style of teaching simply be impossible today? Do we really live in a world in which a teacher is unable to ask students to put themselves in the shoes of evil people? Are we so far down the road of thou-shalt-not-offend that we simply cannot tolerate the exercise and effort to think from the perspective of those with whom we disagree or even those whose opinions we view as intolerable?
The outrage in Albany also brought to my mind the recent debate over gun control. For many on the left, the Newtown tragedy was an unanswerable wakeup call for gun control. I get that. As I wrote shortly after Newtown, the fact that one person without any assistance could do so much damage with automatic weapons is good reason to regulate automatic weapons. We will never stop killing. And we will never stop killing with guns. But when one crazy person can kill dozens or potentially hundreds with high-powered guns, we should work to keep such guns out of the hands of unstable people.
At the same time, I understand and respect the strong attachment that many people have to guns. Some love to hunt. Others see guns as a symbol of their freedom. In a world where people feel powerless and vulnerable, owning a weapon offers a feeling of power (real or fictional). I respect that need. It is part of the beauty of America that we imbue in people the desire to feel powerful. That is the genius of democracy: that every individual matters. At a time when most people feel alienated from our broken democracy, guns can become a crutch. I may wish people found other symbols of their power, but I do get why owning a gun is meaningful. There are times when I want one myself.
What the gun control fiasco in Congress illustrates is how neither side made any effort to really understand the other. Actually, it is worse than that. Partisans of gun control are vitriolic in their baiting of those who will argue against gun control. Gun advocates are at times even worse, as the crosshairs scandal around the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords made clear. The ill will and disgust that proponents of both positions have for the other was palpable in every editorial and every argument. In short, for advocates and opponents of gun control, the other side was so stupid and wrong and evil as to be simply incomprehensible.
It is easy to say that Nazis are not human beings and that the effort to understand them is, itself, immoral. That is the argument the Albany superintendent made. It is the same argument that leads many to say that racists are inhuman and that all bigots are sub-human. But to comprehend is not the same as to agree. Rather, as Arendt writes in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, comprehension is the prerequisite for resistance.
Of the many responses I found to the suspension of the Albany school teacher, only one defended him. Writing on the CNN Belief Blog, Stephen Prothero of Boston University told of his experience teaching Nazi theology who taught that Jews were evil and were responsible for killing Christ, amongst other antisemitic slanders. He writes:
But after giving five years of 14-hour workdays in a high-stakes environment with high expectations and little reward, all of the best teachers, one by one, left during my two-year tenure there.
When we asked them to think about new school models, many of them were immediately wary, uneasy about accepting the task of thinking outside the box to redesign their school and trusting that their ideas could influence the decision-makers to make positive change.
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