Every year in the staff room at our school, there is one professional development session teachers secretly hope gets cancelled. The notice goes up, and by the time the coffee urn has been drained, eleven of us have already exchanged “urgent” hallway texts about lesson planning and parent meetings. So when the principal announced a mandatory afternoon screening last term, the mood was not exactly optimistic.
The film was Taare Zameen Par—Like Stars on Earth—the 2007 Bollywood movie about Ishaan, an eight-year-old boy who is playful, imaginative, and inexplicably failing everything in his third-grade year. “We are watching the whole thing,” our principal said, which earned a few snorts. “And I want at least one specific observation from each of you afterward. One. That’s all.”
I had seen the film years ago, back when I was twenty-two and convinced I would be the kind of teacher who changed every single life that entered my classroom. I remembered the watercolor scenes, the singing, the emotional climax. I did not remember feeling uncomfortable. This time, alone in the dark with teachers from third grade and middle-school math and everything in between, I could not sit still.
The first half hour of the film is what got to me, long before the dyslexic diagnosis is ever mentioned. It is the part where Ishaan’s teacher comes to class with a green board, a black board, a stack of worksheets, and a child who simply cannot keep up. He is not defiant at first. He just—misses things. The words wobble. The letters look like strangers. He grins during math because the numbers seem to dance, and the class laughs at him, and the teacher assumes he is doing it for attention.
I have taught a hundred Ishaans. Probably more.
In real life, they do not usually look like a Bollywood movie child. They look like the kid in the back of my sixth-grade History class who always asks if the chapter is going to be “on the test millimetre or centimetre, Miss?” They look like the quiet girl who copies the word from the board letter by letter but still gets it sideways. And instead of a dramatic song about dreams, there are smaller, sadder moments. A ruler tapping on a desk. The sound of a sheet of paper being flipped to its blank side when they realize they wrote it all wrong. A request for extra time that gets met with a sigh from me, and I am not proud of that.
Sitting in that darkened room, I realized why the film should be mandatory in every class, in every school, for every adult who stands in front of a kid—and possibly for every parent who sits across the table from one at homework time.
It is because we still misread fidgeting.
The narrative of the movie is straightforward. Ishaan is sent to boarding school, even though he is not naughty enough for expulsion. The parents are exhausted. The father is disappointed. The older brother is effortlessly top of his class. At the boarding school, something in Ishaan breaks just a little more. The art teacher, Ram Shankar Nikumbh—played by the director, Aamir Khan—eventually shows up, notices the boy in the corner who has stopped trying, and asks a very ordinary question: What is he good at?
That is the part that made me think about a student I had last year, a boy named J. (I will not use his real name, but his story is stuck to me like a sticker under a desk.) J. could not sit still if you promised him a year’s worth of gold stars. He would bump his knee, drop his pencil case, forget his homework, misread the instructions, and then announce loudly that the work was “dumb.” For months, I thought he was just lazy. Honestly, I thought he was rude.
One afternoon, I had kept him inside at break to finish a worksheet he had refused to do. He sat there, knees bouncing, and read the first question out loud to himself: “The Great Wall of China was built by the—Miss, this says built, but you said builded, no.”
I almost said the word built again, louder. Instead, I watched his finger move across the page. He was pointing at each word with his whole thumb, covering almost the entire line. I got my phone out and wrote a quick email to the learning-support coordinator. That was the beginning of something that more teachers should start earlier: a suspicion that the problem was not character but processing.
The practical insight from the film is not a revelation that solves everything. It is quieter than that. The film does a beautiful job showing how much damage we cause by saying nothing—how a child internalizes “I am stupid” within about eleven weeks of poor grades with no intervention. Ishaan’s art teacher does not test him, does not label him, and does not even talk much about the diagnosis. He simply meets the boy where he is, which is a boy who loves colors and a boy who cannot write a straight line, and he adapts.
What can a teacher actually do after watching the film, in a classroom of twenty-five kids and one real curriculum?
First, the observation gotcha: before you discipline a kid who’s drifting, look at their handwriting. Take a photo of their notebook. Compare it to the kid next to them. If the spacing is bizarre, if letters are flipped, if copying from the board produces half-legible nonsense, that is not laziness. That is an invitation to have a conversation with the special education teacher.
Second, it changes the phrase you use at parent meetings. Instead of saying “He is disruptive,” you say, “He seems to be experiencing a lot of frustration around written work. Can I show you what I am seeing?” Parents—including the father in the film, who is furious and heartbroken—need specifics. A parent can fight back when you say their kid is not trying. They cannot fight back when you show them a page where a nine-year-old wrote b and d the same way. And they are relieved.
Third, the film makes you stop and count the minutes. How much time do I spend standing at the front of the room while children are expected to absorb? I was not fully aware of how much I leaned on verbal-only instruction until I watched Ishaan nod along during class—nodding because he was pretending, because he had learned that adults stop asking questions if you smile and nod. Now I try to make sure my instructions are also written on the board, and I ask two children to repeat the task back to me before we start. Before the film, that was for the benefit of kids who were “not paying attention.” After the film, I understood it was also for the kids who were paying very, very hard attention but could not make sense of the words.
What I did not expect was how the film would land on parents. The following week, at a PTA meeting, the mother of a third-grader mentioned she had watched it after her sister-in-law recommended it. “I cried the whole drive home,” she said. “Because my son reminds me of Ishaan, and I feel like I have been the angry father this whole time.” We did not stand up and hug. We just sat in the plastic chairs, looking at the same scuffed floor, and then she asked me, “What should I actually do at home when he refuses to read?”
Here is the honest answer I gave her, which is the same answer I kept repeating to myself: do not make reading a nightly battle. Find one thing he loves—for her son, it was dinosaurs. Print three interesting facts about a dinosaur, one sentence each, large font. Read the first one out loud to him. Then read it again, slowly, with your finger under each word. Then let him say the last word of the sentence. Just the last word. The next night, he says two. It is not the entire book. It is a wedge.
The movie’s climax allows the audience to believe that one kind adult solves the whole child. Real life is messier. The film is more honest than we give it credit for, though, because in the end, the father still has to change too. The mother still has to change. The older brother has to change. The father finally reads the art teacher’s report left on the desk, and that scene is the one I think about at night. He reads about a child who is not a numbers mismatch but a creative soul who thinks in images. It is the diagnosis the family does not know how to say out loud.
We are eleven months out from that staff screening. I cannot say our school is transformed. Half of the room was genuinely moved and half was just tolerating the afternoon. But the other day, a colleague from the science department came into my room and said, “I made my Year Seven class watch the first twenty minutes of that film when they wouldn’t stop laughing at a kid who read out loud slowly.” She told them, “You are free to find this funny. Just know that everywhere in this room, there is someone who reads like that inside their own head.” The class went quiet. She did not need to lecture them.
That is why the film should be mandatory. Not as a cure. Not as an after-school special. But because it catches us doing the thing we do every day—dismissing a struggling child as “not trying”—and holds it in front of us for two hours, with color and songs and a child who looks like a pest but turns out to be an artist. Watching it does not make you a perfect teacher or a perfect parent. It just makes it harder to see a page full of wobbly letters and assume it means you know who the child is. Sometimes, it just means you do not know yet. And the only appropriate response to that is to start looking closer.
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