In a society where civilians are monitored by personality tests that surveil whether they are being perfect citizens, a 1970s high school teacher meets an over-achieving student who forces him to confront the forced boredom dominating his own life.

A professor finds himself attracted to one of his students, allowing her to skip the final exams - but her resultant grade causes her to lash out at him and reveal harsh truths about his own life that he finds difficult to accept.

Having poured 53 years of her life into the creation of a refined girl’s school, principal Miss Bird despairs in the changing of the times and gradual sapping of her powers into the hands of a new board, finally slapping the daughter of the chairman in the face in her all-consuming anger.

Keisha's son attends a bankrupt public school system where the all-white teaching staff are abusive and physically violent towards the majority-black student body. She'll do anything to give her child a better life, even if it means forging papers that say she lives in a different neighborhood.

A young, optimist white teacher in New York takes a job at an all-Black school, determined to break through to his students and properly teach them, despite being stuck in a school system that has continually failed them.

After one of her young low-income students shows up to class disheveled, a female teacher from Chicago makes it her mission to create a strong bond with the girl in hopes it will prevent her from dropping out of school.

When a young father is hired for an English instructorship position, he struggles to balance playing the role of a teacher and meeting the university’s demands for a published scholar.

A college counselor watches anxiously as her teenage son applies to college without her help. As her son plans for his future, the counselor and her husband reflect on how quickly their lives have changed, seeking ways to steady themselves in the midst of middle age.

A teacher reminisces about all his wonderful students of the Narrative Studies courses he has taught around the world before his career comes to an end.

In hopes of finding a new school for his son, man tours the Academy, a military campus in its own little world, and decides to accept the school's seeming perfection.