YMMV / Teaching Mrs. Tingle

• Designated Hero: Our heroes are three teens who decide to cheat on a test, and are caught by the "villain." They then go over to her house, break in, kidnap her, knock her unconscious (albeit unintentionally), tie her to her bed, attempt to blackmail her by taking staged incriminating photos of her committing adultery ^note To be fair, she was having the affair, even if the pictures were staged, and finally changing one of their grades from a C to an A+, and another girl's well-deserved A to a B.
• Designated Villain
  • Mrs. Tingle is the villain because she insults some people, admits she resents all her students, and is cold and distant. This apparently warrants all the abuse she suffers in the movie.
  • Trudy Tucker is demonized because...she gets better grades than the protagonist?
• Jerkass Woobie: Mrs. Tingle. Again, it's the kids who barge into her house and threaten her then tie her up.
• Rooting for the Empire: It is very easy to find yourself rooting for the supposed villain of the film, Mrs. Tingle, who is a) probably the most sympathetic character in the entire film and b) played by Helen Mirren, who easily out-acts everyone else in the film combined with her hands quite literally tied behind her back.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • The title character is a high school Sadist Teacher who has it in for the lead character, who is just trying to become valedictorian. At the start of the film, Mrs. Tingle gives a C grade to a project she worked six months on, a historical recreation of the diary of a girl accused of being a witch during the time of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. Except that the diary describes witch-burnings, whereas the accused witches at Salem were all hanged, except for the one man who was crushed, meaning the teacher was well within her rights to mark the assignment down (and all things considered, a C-grade was generous).
  • On an even bigger note, one of the kids brings a medieval crossbow as a school project (his reasoning being he wants to be a cop when he grows up.). The crossbow goes off and almost hits somebody. Mrs. Tingle calls him an idiot, which we are supposed to think is horrible even though she is completely right!
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Ms. Tingle, who was only doing her job, and Trudy Tucker, who despite her snotty attitude, actually did the research for her project.

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