Projected up on the whiteboard of my classroom before two dozen high school seniors, Saoirse Ronan, wearing a green jacket over a white polo and pink arm cast, presents a truth that has remained unspoken up to this point as she declares, “I think we’re done with the learning portion of high school.” In Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a film that uses academic milestones and holidays to mark the passage of time, this exchange between Lady Bird (Ronan) and her friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) falls some time in late October or early November, after a homecoming dance but before Thanksgiving. Mercifully for me, the teacher of these student viewers, we have come to this agreement in late May, filling the months since the fall with reading, writing, and thoughtful discussion in this “Fiction and Film” course, the culmination of four years of required English classes in our suburban New England public high school.
Lady Bird is the closing film of our class, presented to my students as a look back at senior year through a film that gets a lot right about the high school experience. I invite them to watch from a vantage point closer to the events of the film than they will ever be again.
I suspect a part of why I find the film so accurate is that I, too, feel close to the high schoolers in the movie, having entered high school in 2003, the same year Lady Bird and her classmates graduate. When I watch this film, sitting among these 18-year-olds in the same kind of desks I sat in when I was in high school, the same desks that Lady Bird and her classmates sit in, I feel moments of deep resonance with the high schoolers in the movie.
It is hard for me to reconcile the fact that in the eyes of the young people around me, I have far more in common with Sister Sarah-Joan (Lois Smith), Lady Bird’s homeroom and theology teacher, and (if I flatter myself) Mr. Bruno (Jake McDorman), her handsome young math teacher, than I do with Lady Bird or any of her friends.
The teachers in Lady Bird are largely relegated to the background. The central dramas of the film are social and familial, not academic, and much of the school-based tension is around college and what comes next, not on what’s left of high school. This, I think, is one of the things the film gets right about high school in general, and senior year in particular. As much as we teachers may like to motivate ourselves with the notion that our carefully planned lessons and thoughtful assignments are the center of the high school experience, we know deep down that they largely serve as the backdrop for the rest of teenage life. Lady Bird understands this and does not concern itself with elevating us teachers to anything beyond supporting roles.
The film’s opening credits play over a back-to-school montage set to Jon Brion’s lively score, cutting between shots of classrooms, a gymnasium assembly, and the chapel where the girls of Immaculate Heart, the Catholic girls school Lady Bird attends on scholarship, and Xavier, the neighboring boys school, come together for a welcome back liturgy. Only a few adults get speaking parts here. Sister Sarah-Joan promises the young women seated in a circle in her senior theology class that Kierkegaard’s love story “will make [them] swoon.” Mr. Bruno runs through class expectations, ending in a trying-to-be-cool tone my own students now describe as cringe: “You know the rules. This is my house.” But none of these teachers gets a close up; all are framed alongside students, a visual reminder of the stars of this story and of this school. As we see students pray and take communion, a faceless priest sermonizes, “We’re afraid that we will never escape our past, and we’re afraid of what the future will bring. We’re afraid we won’t get into the college of our choice. We’re afraid we won’t be loved, we won’t be liked, we won’t succeed.” The camera here keeps its focus on the students, while the priest himself is subsumed by an inversion of a royal “we,” his own fears being overwhelmed by those of the students before him.
At the end of class that day, when we pause the film at its halfway point, a function of our 55-minute long periods, I prompt my students to jot down on an index card what the film has gotten right so far. A few students flag some part of that line, seeing in it the fears they carried with them at some point during this school year.
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The second day of our viewing starts late. Our class meets first thing in the morning, and over half the students roll in late, apparently without a care in the world. It is their last week. They are, recall, “done with the learning portion of high school.”
My colleague and mentor Rebecca introduced me to the notion of seniors ‘soiling the nest’: As the prospect of their departure grows nearer, they display increasingly unruly, disruptive, and just plain rude behavior. The psychological principle, in essence, is to make a place unpleasant so that maybe it won’t feel so bad when you have to leave it behind.
The avian metaphor feels apt given our final film, and we might consider some of Lady Bird’s behavior through this lens as the film progresses into her second semester. When Sister Sarah-Joan writes the wealthy, popular Jenna (Odeya Rush) a citation during a skirt check, Lady Bird sees an opportunity to get in good with this crowd. “She’s a cunt,” she tells Jenna bluntly, doubling-down on the comment when her friend Julie reminds her that she likes Sister Sarah-Joan.
The nest-soiling continues as Lady Bird skips auditioning for the spring play and instead leads Jenna in pranking Sister Sarah-Joan by decorating her car with streamers and a poster reading “Just Married to Jesus.” From there, it escalates into screaming arguments at home, and culminates in a disruption during an anti-abortion assembly at school that leads to a suspension.
It is in moments like these, with second-semester seniors, that I find it hardest to relate to the image of a teacher who emphatically and unfailingly loves all of their students. Indeed, I often find myself pushing against the notion that love between us needs to enter into the equation at all. Calling teaching a labor of love can often be a tool for extracting even more labor from a population already working above and beyond the call of duty; if you love your students, how can you ever justify doing less than everything you can for them? But if I do my job well, if I develop their skills and thinking and interests with care and attention, isn’t that enough?
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When Lady Bird returns to school from her suspension, she meets with Sister Sarah-Joan in a scene that could serve as the central thesis of the film.
Looking across her desk, papers in hand, Sister Sarah-Joan tells Lady Bird, “I read your college essay. You clearly love Sacramento.” Lady Bird is slightly taken aback by this remark. “I do?” she asks, before insisting, “I was just describing it.”
“Well, it comes across as love,” Sister Sarah-Joan responds. Lady Bird acquiesces. “Sure, I guess I pay attention.”
Here, Sister Sarah-Joan asks her, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?” She leaves space before and between those last words, giving them extra resonance, drawing our attention. Gerwig does the same, leaving us in the quiet moment between teacher and student for a beat before cutting away.
Back in November, before we were done with the learning portion of high school, we learned about composing and framing shots via the film tutorials accompanying Dave Monahan and Richard Barsam’s Looking at Movies. From these videos, I would routinely lead students in reciting in the narrator’s resonant monotone a central principle for analyzing a shot: “The viewer identifies with the lens.”
Applied to Lady Bird, these words make clear that Gerwig believes deeply in Sister Sarah-Joan’s words. In her screenplay, she writes of Marion, Lady Bird’s mother, driving home from work: “It is romantic somehow. She loves these streets, loves the turns she knows so well. When she’s not resenting the stuck-ness of her own life she has an enormous capacity to love it.” And how to depict this love? Gerwig trains the camera on “these streets” and “the turns,” capturing in the warm glow of the early morning sun the river, highways, train tracks, and houses of the city. Under this all plays the nostalgic ache of John Hartford’s “This Eve of Parting,” a song whose gentle strings carry a feeling of familiarity even the first time you hear it. As viewers, it is hard for us not to share in the trace of an affectionate smile that plays on Marion’s face as her eyes take in the view through her windshield. It really is romantic somehow.
At the end of the film, when Lady Bird asks her mother via a message left on the answering machine, “Did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento,” and Gerwig returns us again to the same streets and sites shot with the same warmth, we do not need to hear an answer to know the answer. So long as we were paying attention, we have identified with the lens. We can remember feeling Marion’s love the first time that we drove in Sacramento with her.
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Two days after we finish the film, and just two class meetings away from our last hour together, we return to Sister Sarah-Joan’s words about love and attention. For one final writing assignment, I send my students out to spend 15 minutes walking around our campus paying attention, finding the places where they have significant memories and digging those memories up to examine them. They are required to leave technology behind and encouraged to ignore their friends should they cross paths. The assignment is about them, this place they’ve spent the past four years, and their memories.
Afterwards, they settle down somewhere and write, returning with their piece at the end of the class. They don’t need to write affectionately—that may not be how they feel about this place—but they are still asked to write with care, aiming to capture a memory, a feeling, or something they may want to take away from this school.
While my students are writing in the field, I remain behind in our classroom, engaging in the activity in my own way, paying attention to the memories that come as I walk around our horseshoe-shaped configuration of desks, thinking of the students who will only sit there two more times. Joseph (a pseudonym, as all student names in this essay are) coming in each Monday with an update on the movies he watched over the weekend, his taste evolving over our year together. My many walks over to Meghan and Kelsey to redirect them away from Spotify playlists and social drama and toward the task at hand during independent work time. Cam and Nate giving their friend Daniel a hard time as the last one to pack up and leave class each day.
I think, also, of all they shared in their writing across our year. Jamie’s deep dive into the film techniques Danny Boyle used to capture the underlying emotions of Irvine Welsh’s prose in Trainspotting. Hannah’s peek via screenplay into her year at an experimental alternative high school. Wes’s account of the highs and lows of a high school rugby career under a tough coach. All these essays and screenplays, reflections and exam responses that have amounted to more time spent together, even when we were apart.
And I think of Sister Sarah-Joan reading Lady Bird’s college essay in preparation for a meeting that, in the hands of most other educators, would have been a disciplinary conversation, an administrative box to check. It the echoes the first conversation we see between Lady Bird and Sister Sarah-Joan over concerns about her campaign posters for student government. Lady Bird describes them as “just a bird head on a lady body or vice versa”; Sister Sarah-Joan calls them “a little upsetting.” Still, Sister Sarah-Joan has not brought Lady Bird here to punish her. Instead, she notes Lady Bird’s “performative streak” and encourages her to audition for the fall musical.
Here, clearly, is a teacher who leads with care and compassion. Here is a teacher who pays attention to her students.
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As my students return from their exploration and submit their pieces before shuffling off to their next class, it is apparent that not every piece of writing that comes back reflects the care Sister Sarah-Joan recognized in Lady Bird’s writing, of course—it bears repeating, one final time, “we’re done with the learning portion of high school.” Still, the majority embrace Sister Sarah-Joan’s words, providing me one last window into the places they have paid attention to in our building.
As Lady Bird predicted, few of the memories documented capture the content of academic classes. There are no memories of math tests or history presentations. Instead, we have a careful accounting of the drawings on a picnic table where Yuli spent lunch most days for four years. Jeremy drew the black box theater where he rehearsed and performed. Even the students who ventured downstairs to write about the library focused on hours spent socializing there, rather than studying. From three close friends, a triptych of pieces capturing the cafeteria overflow where I often saw them during our shared free block. Andrea returned to the room of the supportive program she joined during junior year, cataloging the memories she shared there with teachers and students before concluding “this classroom saved my life.”
In one more week, many of them likely won’t return to these places ever again.
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It is August now. Many of those seniors are fulfilling the final steps in the journey laid out in the last moments of Lady Bird as they pack bags and prepare to head to college. Some will, like Lady Bird, take down posters and repaint walls. Some will head to New York, some will stay close, others will fly far away from home. The cameras of their own high school movies will rightly follow them out into the world, where they will set up dorms, shake hands with new acquaintances, and, hopefully, call their parents with love and gratitude.
When I return to my own classroom this fall, those seniors will be gone. But those places they cared about, the picnic tables and benches and classrooms and cafeteria overflow spaces will still be there, and I will pay attention to them through a new lens, identifying with the students to whom they meant so much.
I do not need my students to have loved me or my class or books or film, just as I do not need them to believe that I loved them. But I do hope that they paid attention, and continue to pay attention, to the books and films and world that they will find beyond my high school classroom. I hope they feel I paid attention to them and their work and their ideas and their lives. And maybe that is the same thing. Love and attention.