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Miss Jean Brodie’s Personality Teachers are usually the second parents of children when they are in school which is wherethey spent most of their childhood. For this reason teachers are supposed to ensure that the physical, psychological, spiritual and intellectual well being is enhanced. Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher for young Scottish with a divided personality in that she believes that every action she partakes and every manner in which she behaves is of importance but did not interpret the potential harmful influence her behavior would have on her students.
Although Miss Brodie an exemplary as a teacher in some aspects she is also very untrustworthy. This explains her divided personality (Spark 6).Miss Brodie had a group of 10 year old girls who she considered her group. They would learn things that were not necessarily in the curriculum but were worthy knowing. She chose her group members on the ground that she could put her trust in them, those whose parents could not raise complaints on what their daughters were being taught which was more irrelevant or those whose parents constituted the elite group who had too much knowledge and exposure to complain about Miss Brodie’s teaching methods and policies (Alberto and Ann 6).
she also chose girls whose parents were unenlightened to be able to question her teaching policies and who believed in the high rated reputation of this school.Miss Brodie’s untrustworthiness comes out here when she gains trust from the parents and the students and later exposes them to her a lot of details of her intimate life. Miss Brodie is also negligent in that she goes out of her way to teach something like the interior decoration of the author of Winnie The Pooh, skin cleansing substances or about the love life of Charlotte Bronte which is out of the out of the curriculum she was entrusted with.
Miss Brodie in one of her grammar lesson decides to tell her students about the accident of her lover. She narrates the story critically and the emotional ten year olds break into tears. When the headmistress Miss Mackay, pays the class n impromptu visit Miss Brodie manages to selfishly lure the students to say that they are crying about a moving history story from the WW1.This was a selfish lie (Spark 8).Miss Jean Brodie was narcissistic and that barred her form genuinely caring about her students and that explains her behavioral contradictory.
She burns with a desire to be admired and adored by everyone; more so by the Brodie set (Spark 11) she fails in caring about her students in a healthy way but instead use them to extend her psychological needs through her students. She wishes to be the only figure to be looked upon by the students which disrespects the students by not treating them as unique individuals but a bunch that should bow down to her egoistic needs (Vaknin and Lidija 12). It is because of the same attribute that she ill advised Emily Joyce who experienced an untimely death.
Miss Jean Brodie as much as she is an untrustworthy narcissist she has the best interests of her students at heart .in as much as it is seen out of the curriculum, teaching the Scottish girls about contemporary issues like art and religion was one way of ensuring that students have a wider perspective of education that a narrow one that sticks to the system. She also encourages the students to grow up and become dedicated women like Pavlova the ballet dancer (Spark 12) Works citedAlberto, Paul and Anne Troutman.
Applied Behavior Analysis for Teachers. Boston: Pearson, 2013. Print.Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. Print.Vaknin, Samuel, and Lidija Rangelovska. Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited. Prague: Narcissus Publications, 2003. Print..
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