finding forrester
Jamal is a victim of prejudice. He's just sixteen, black, and a basketball player. So when he submits his literary work for an essay competition at his highbrow school, his English teacher, Professor Crawford (F. Murray Abraham) is, quite naturally, suspicious and charges the young writer with plagiarism. Because the disciple has promised never to reveal his association with the master, he is unable to defend himself at the hearing. When Forrester finally leaves his hermetically sealed world and comes forward to take responsibility and defend Jamal, he not only saves his disciple but also gives himself one last chance at living before he succumbs to cancer. One important theme of the film is that writing is a search for self. While the disciple is able to discern the fact that he plays basketball to be accepted by the outside world, but writes to discover his own inner world, Forrester has lost himself as a result of his own literary pursuits. The one-shot Pulitzer Prize winner has not published anything since his famous work; he has been writing but not publishing. At the end of the film, he not only returns to his native Scotland to rediscover his roots and to die but also leaves a manuscript with his disciple to be publ
It is perhaps this decision-not to take the easy way out-that causes Forrester to realize that he too must make a decision to emerge from his self-cultivated forest of disillusion. Youngsters often attack life's goals the same way they attack kesagatame; that is, they aim directly toward the goal, impatiently expecting to have immediate success. When I was a teacher, one of my favorite tricks, after inadvertently making an error during a lecture, was to say to the class, with as straight a face as I could muster, "That was one of my sophisticated teaching techniques whereby I purposely make a mistake to see which of you will be perceptive enough to catch it. (2) Unless their search for a throw or for success in judo helps them to know themselves and to be prepared for all of life's situations, we will have missed our role as teachers. If as teachers we give all we can to our students and teach them to be able to beat us, then we have done our jobs. But we fail to realize that our young students may not actually be seeking a throw but in reality seeking an identity. And it is one aspect of the film that can be applied to the teaching of martial arts and teaching in general. Explaining to our youngsters that they need to demonstrate more patience might cause us to reflect on those moments in our own adult lives when we have not exercised the same discipline that we have expected of our youngsters. " While the import of her comments were difficult to discern at that moment, I was soon to discover that my mother's death would lead me to new insights about myself and my martial arts. When his academic ability is discovered and he is offered a scholarship to an exclusive high school, he becomes alienated from the boys in the hood. He was prepared to view death as just another part of life. The young hero keeps his writing skill and intelligence hidden from his peers. Hopefully we will then find that elusive Forrester that dwells within all of us and go on to live life more completely and adequately. It should not wound our pride to acknowledge that sometimes our students know more that we do in certain areas.
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,
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Acceptance Essays
