summary of the browning version
Andrew Crocker-Harris, a classic teacher in a British school, is a man hounded by a heart ailment, and by his wife's disloyalty, who is pursuing a science teacher. He has lost his feeling for the emotions of others and his understanding of the boys he is there to teach.
Andrew Crocker-Harris is a classics teacher at an English boys school. After eighteen years of teaching there, today is his last day before moving on to a position at another school. The students speculate on why he is leaving, but don't much care since despite being academically brilliant, he is universally despised as being strict, stern and humorless. They have nicknamed him "The Crock". Even the school administrators treat him poorly regardless of his long tenure. Millie Crocker-Harris, his wife, is quite a bit different than her husband: she's younger and vivacious. She no longer loves her husband but rather loves Frank Hunter, another teacher, who despite having an affair with him, knows that he is not in love with her. On this last day, one student named Taplow, who doesn't hate Mr. Crocker-Harris but feels sorry for him, provides him with a small going away gift. The gift brings about a series of actions which make Mr. Crocker-Harris reflect on his past, contemplate his future, and evaluate how he is going to finish his tenure at the school.
In a British school, the conservative and emotionless Latin teacher Andrew Crocker-Harris has a heart problem and is forced to retire. His unfaithful wife Millie is having a love affair with his colleague, the science teacher Frank Hunter, and he is hated and despised by the students, fellows and the direction of the school. His pupil Taplow is studying with him the tragic Greek poem The Agamemnon, expecting to be promoted at school. On his last days at school, Crocker-Harris is informed by the headmaster that the board refused to pay his pension plan for earlier retirement and he realizes that he is a failure as a teacher and a man.
On the last day of term at a boys private school, a new master arrives to familiarise himself. His predecessor, Crocker-Harris is much hated in the school but his younger wife seems more popular and not only with the pupils. Tensions erupt making this a day nobody in the school will ever forget.
Andrew Crocker-Harris, a stuffy professor of Classical Greek at an English public school is disliked by his students, being cuckolded by a colleague and denied a deserved pension by the penurious headmaster. Although he began his career eighteen years earlier as a brilliant young scholar, he has withdrawn into the stiff rigidity of school rules and regimentation and has distanced himself from all human emotion. While facing a bleak financial future and a disintegrating marriage, the kindness of one of his students rekindles his humanity.