World Teachers’ Day: We’re Grading 6 of Tubi’s Best and Worst Teachers
Celebrate World Teachers’ Day with six memorable movie and TV teachers on Tubi who make the classroom anything but ordinary.
Teachers spend enough time grading everyone else. Today, we're returning the favor.
World Teachers’ Day has arrived just as Abbott Elementary prepares to reopen its classroom doors for Season 6 on October 7, putting Janine, Barbara, Gregory, Melissa, and the rest of our favorite Philadelphia educators back on the lesson plan. They've set a pretty high bar for what makes a memorable TV teacher, although anyone who's watched Ava run a school knows professional standards can occasionally be flexible.
Which got us looking at the faculty over on Tubi.
Because everyone remembers a teacher. Maybe they made one impossible subject finally click. Maybe they believed in you before you did. Maybe you still think about something wildly questionable they said in third period 10 years ago. Movies and TV have been collecting all of the above for decades, giving us educators we'd happily request next semester and a few who make skipping class feel like self-preservation.
Tubi's High School Drama collection has even more hallway politics, classroom chaos, and after-school problems once the bell rings here. First, we're checking in on six teachers who made one thing very clear: being memorable and being good at your job are not always the same assignment.
Freedom Writers - Erin Gruwell
Erin Gruwell walks into Room 203 with enthusiasm, lesson plans, and the kind of optimism that gets tested almost immediately.
Hilary Swank stars as the real-life Long Beach teacher in Freedom Writers, where a classroom divided by racial tension, violence, and distrust makes clear that simply standing at the front of the room and teaching from a textbook isn't going to be enough. Erin starts changing the curriculum, bringing her students stories they can connect with and eventually encouraging them to write their own.
The journals become more than an assignment. They give students who are accustomed to being talked about somewhere to speak for themselves, while Erin gradually learns that wanting to help isn't the same thing as understanding what her students need. Good intentions? Plenty. Actually listening is where she starts earning the class.
Available until
Stand and Deliver - Jaime Escalante
Calculus. We lost half the class already.
Jaime Escalante doesn't have that luxury in Stand and Deliver. Edward James Olmos brings the real-life East Los Angeles teacher to the screen as someone who looks at students others have underestimated and decides the answer isn't making the work easier. He raises the expectations instead.
Getting them ready for the AP Calculus exam requires long hours, discipline, sacrifice, and a teacher stubborn enough to believe they can do something the system doesn't expect from them. When their success itself becomes grounds for suspicion, Escalante's faith in his students matters just as much outside the classroom. We have to say though, making teenagers willingly spend extra time doing calculus? That's its own achievement.
Available until
The Ron Clark Story - Ron Clark
Ron Clark arrives in New York looking for a challenge. He finds one.
Matthew Perry steps away from Chandler Bing territory to embody the real-life educator in The Ron Clark Story, following Clark from a successful teaching job in North Carolina to a Harlem classroom filled with students who have already learned not to expect much from the adults cycling through their school. Rather than writing the class off, Clark gets creative. His methods can be unconventional, his energy occasionally seems superhuman, and getting through to his students requires understanding them before expecting them to buy into what he's teaching.
The real lesson isn't that one magical teacher walks into a classroom and fixes everything. It's that expectations work differently when students realize the person setting them isn't planning to give up halfway through the semester.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Bad Teacher - Meredith Davis
Here's where our faculty roster starts making the principal rub their temples.
Meredith Davis gets a teaching job at Nixon Middle School in Bad Teacher despite education not exactly being her lifelong calling. Ari Graynor gives the recently divorced Meredith plenty of shameless determination, even if her career pivot has less to do with shaping young minds and more to do with finding herself a wealthy new husband.
Her methods are inappropriate. Her priorities are questionable. Her relationship with professional ethics could best be described as long-distance. Yet Meredith occasionally stumbles into helping someone precisely because she isn't approaching the job like everyone around her. It's nowhere near enough to earn her Teacher of the Year, but it does keep her teaching status from becoming a complete disaster.
Available until
School for Scoundrels - Dr. P
At first, Dr. P's class sounds useful.
Roger is tired of being overlooked and pushed around, so he enrolls in a confidence-building course run by Billy Bob Thornton's Dr. P in School for Scoundrels. The lessons are aggressive, unconventional, and designed to turn timid students into people willing to take control of their lives. Then the teacher decides to compete with his student.
Dr. P's interest in Roger stops looking remotely educational once he begins interfering in his life and pursuing the same woman Roger likes. The mentor becomes the antagonist, and class turns into an increasingly personal contest between teacher and pupil. Confidence building? Fine. Psychological manipulation? Less fine. Trying to steal your student's crush? Office hours are canceled indefinitely.
Available until
The Faculty - Mrs. Burke and the Herrington High Staff
Herrington High's teachers start behaving a little strangely in The Faculty, where a group of students begins suspecting something is very wrong with the adults running their school. Famke Janssen plays the initially timid Mrs. Burke, but she isn't the only member of staff giving students reason to reconsider their trust in authority. The explanation involves aliens. At that point, faculty evaluations become somewhat secondary.
Robert Rodriguez's teen horror takes the familiar feeling that your teachers occasionally seem like they're from another planet and makes it inconveniently literal. The stacked cast including Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, Salma Hayek, and more helps turn high-school paranoia into a sci-fi horror problem where figuring out whom you can trust matters considerably more than making it to next period.
So, in honor of World Teachers’ Day, we'd like to thank the educators who listen, challenge, encourage, improvise, and keep showing up for their students. As for Herrington High? Maybe school should be canceled.
Available until