You don’t have to delve far into the realms of scriptwriting before you’ll be pointed towards a book called Story by Robert McKee, which explains why scriptwriting is more akin to engineering than art. McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.

McKee has become so influential that huge numbers of films, perhaps most of them, and many TV series are now written using his rules. But the real measure of his success is that there are even anti-McKee films such as Adaptation that attempt to burst McKee’s bubble.

Given that scriptwriting has become so formulaic, shouldn’t science have a role to play in analysing it? That’s exactly what Fionn Murtagh and pals at the Royal Holloway College, University of London have done in a project that analyses scripts in a repeatable, unambiguous and potentially-automatic way.

Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, with scripts of six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), a classic post-Mckee production, and find numerous similarities.

I’d like to add one more quality to the list: the ability to think on one’s feet. I think a good teacher needs to constantly read what’s going on in the classroom (level of engagement & understanding are the two that immediately come to mind) and be able to make changes in the “plan” accordingly. This comes into play too when you have the one kid who says, “yeah, but how does that work with … “. You’ve gotta be able to take what the students bring to the class and run with it – without being totally dragged off track.

1. Willingness to try new things. Perhaps the associated trait is that of a risk-taker. You need to be willing to throw out status quo when you can see it isn’t working.

2. Time spent on really developing those new instructional techniques you’ve thrown out the status quo for. Goes with all the talk of work-ethic that’s already been pretty well described.

3. Ability to connect on a personal level with students. I have known at least a couple teachers who met the first two traits pretty well, but just couldn’t connect to high school students. The result: students performed, but didn’t push it to the limit. Teaching is a personal activity, and personality does play an important role.

I agree that simply being able to connect with students does NOT make a good teacher. I’d rather have the person who can’t connect with students but has traits 1 & 2 than someone who only has trait 3.

One thing I would add is that you have to accept that teaching is not an 8-3, 9 month a year job. Too many new teachers I’ve known have come in and said, I leave with the kids, I won’t take home work and I won’t spend a penny of my own money in the classroom. Within a few weeks those same teachers are overwhelmed or fed up. Teaching is far from the only profession where people take work home with them so accept it and you will make your life oh so much easier in the long run – as well as become a drastically better teacher!

I split with Doug and Ben, though, when it comes to a positive disposition toward students and the ability to forge a relationship.

You take someone with a heart for student achievement and show her how much more students achieve when they’re humanized and respected, and then step back. You’ve pointed her in the right direction and lit the fuse.

Re Christian and anyone else who’d suggest I inherently own the stuff of a teacher, I promise that all I walked into this job holding was a self-abusive work ethic and an unshakable heart for student achievement. The rest has been hackwork.

Tim is right, that a flexible, easygoing personality is essential (both to deal with administrative nonsense and class management problems) and probably unteachable.

And Dan, yeah, I can’t count how many times I told myself I’d give up my prep to go walk through classes. Happened once.

At the risk of this devolving into a bitch-fest, the thing I would like most in my little teacher heart is if I could remove the kitchen sink and a few other extraneous items from my curricula. “Mile wide and inch deep” doesn’t even begin to cover it. I’m expected to cover so much that it’s impossible to do it all well. I was able to whittle my algebra 1 concept list down to 100 items, and I can’t get any lower than that. Take Dan’s list and add the more boring parts of probability, the more useless parts of statistics, geometric sequences/exponential functions, absolute value graphs, very pedestrian sets & venn diagrams, and you’d be getting closer to my list.

I hear Algebra 2 is even worse. Sigh.