ABSTRACT
There seem to a parade of such heroes in films about teachers, including Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets Society, and Conrack. (See Ayers, chap. 11, and Lowe, chap. 12, this volume.) As I thought about Music of the Heart, the latest in the larger-than-life teachers on film stories, I searched my memory for teacher-heroes of that dimension in literature for young adult or adolescent readers. I struggled for awhile and finally came to the conclusion that a book based on a teacher hero would probably not make it in the world of young adult fiction. That is because the heroes in this genre are the youth themselves. They play the major roles and the teachers are the supporting actors. There are teachers who do extraordinary acts and who genuinely change the playing field of the plot. However, the notion of “hero” is recast when we move from the big screen to a work of literature. I explore this phenomenon in this chapter and try to determine what is unique about the act of reading that shifts focus and influences upon the imagery surrounding teachers.
