(no subject)
Jun. 27th, 2018 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAP Bio NBC TV sitcom
I raced through the 13 half hour episodes this week. I'm... unsure what to say. I was fascinated and riveted, but I suspect for a lot of my flist, it would just read as straightforward patriarchy horror.
The premise of AP Bio is that Jack Griffin, the main character, was a successful philosophy professor at Harvard until he had a depressive episode associated with the death of his mother and the success of a rival and was fired by Harvard. He moves into his mother's house in Toledo, OH and wangles a job as an AP biology teacher on the basis of his Harvard credentials rather than any demonstrated ability to teach high school students advanced biology. On his first day he marches into class, informs his maladjusted, intensely nerdy students that he has no intention of teaching them any biology and that if anyone reports him to administration, he will fail them. Locked in a game of chicken between teacher and class, the students pass the semester serving Jack's aimless agenda of pointless and petty failed revenge attempts against his academic rival from Harvard days, while working behind his back to find a way to learn biology in spite of him.
It's a story about privilege, particularly white and male privilege, in a small scale, low stakes setting. Jack should not have his job and the reason he does is because he is white and male and has a white male's ability to skate without facing the consequences others would for similar actions. At the same time, in meaningful ways Jack has lost everything. It seems strange to talk about this rejected, depressed loser as someone who has avoided consequences. AP Bio is intensely interested in this contradiction, in the differences between aggregate privilege as a member of a class and individual privilege, or lack thereof.
AP Bio is also interested in the American education system, which it conceptualizes as a workplace full of uninspired and poorly trained teachers which is being asked to fulfill important intellectual and emotional needs for hundreds of impressionable and vulnerable young people.
In a striking and funny sequence in the 12th episode, when the school principal is up for an award, he asks his teachers to do a model lesson while they are observed by the superintendent and other judges. Nearly all of them, regardless of subject, construct a papier mache volcano as part of their lesson: Building a volcano was taught to them in a schoolwide continuing ed seminar last summer, they explain, and when asked to put together their flashiest, most exciting lesson plan, it independently occurred to all of them.
Set against this kind of inanity, the show asks, is there something to be said for elitism? Is there something to be said for Jack Griffin's Harvard polished genius, his rude gift for complicated philosophical nuance? After all, midway through the season, all of his students independently elect to read his dense, sophisticated treatise on the philosophy of death, and to have conversations about its meaning on their own, following in the wake of their indifferent leader. Maybe individual genius, inarguable and incontestable inborn talent, has value on its own that we are crowding out of the conversation in education as we focus every more narrowly on standardization and results?
No, concludes AP Bio, that is stupid. Morality and mutual obligation and community matter even if they court inanity and the suppression of individuality. And that is a fascinating and prickly conclusion.
I raced through the 13 half hour episodes this week. I'm... unsure what to say. I was fascinated and riveted, but I suspect for a lot of my flist, it would just read as straightforward patriarchy horror.
The premise of AP Bio is that Jack Griffin, the main character, was a successful philosophy professor at Harvard until he had a depressive episode associated with the death of his mother and the success of a rival and was fired by Harvard. He moves into his mother's house in Toledo, OH and wangles a job as an AP biology teacher on the basis of his Harvard credentials rather than any demonstrated ability to teach high school students advanced biology. On his first day he marches into class, informs his maladjusted, intensely nerdy students that he has no intention of teaching them any biology and that if anyone reports him to administration, he will fail them. Locked in a game of chicken between teacher and class, the students pass the semester serving Jack's aimless agenda of pointless and petty failed revenge attempts against his academic rival from Harvard days, while working behind his back to find a way to learn biology in spite of him.
It's a story about privilege, particularly white and male privilege, in a small scale, low stakes setting. Jack should not have his job and the reason he does is because he is white and male and has a white male's ability to skate without facing the consequences others would for similar actions. At the same time, in meaningful ways Jack has lost everything. It seems strange to talk about this rejected, depressed loser as someone who has avoided consequences. AP Bio is intensely interested in this contradiction, in the differences between aggregate privilege as a member of a class and individual privilege, or lack thereof.
AP Bio is also interested in the American education system, which it conceptualizes as a workplace full of uninspired and poorly trained teachers which is being asked to fulfill important intellectual and emotional needs for hundreds of impressionable and vulnerable young people.
In a striking and funny sequence in the 12th episode, when the school principal is up for an award, he asks his teachers to do a model lesson while they are observed by the superintendent and other judges. Nearly all of them, regardless of subject, construct a papier mache volcano as part of their lesson: Building a volcano was taught to them in a schoolwide continuing ed seminar last summer, they explain, and when asked to put together their flashiest, most exciting lesson plan, it independently occurred to all of them.
Set against this kind of inanity, the show asks, is there something to be said for elitism? Is there something to be said for Jack Griffin's Harvard polished genius, his rude gift for complicated philosophical nuance? After all, midway through the season, all of his students independently elect to read his dense, sophisticated treatise on the philosophy of death, and to have conversations about its meaning on their own, following in the wake of their indifferent leader. Maybe individual genius, inarguable and incontestable inborn talent, has value on its own that we are crowding out of the conversation in education as we focus every more narrowly on standardization and results?
No, concludes AP Bio, that is stupid. Morality and mutual obligation and community matter even if they court inanity and the suppression of individuality. And that is a fascinating and prickly conclusion.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-06-27 07:37 pm (UTC)Which I might like; it might distract me from thinking about the education horror that is real life, sigh.
AP Bio is also interested in the American education system, which it conceptualizes as a workplace full of uninspired and poorly trained teachers which is being asked to fulfill important intellectual and emotional needs for hundreds of impressionable and vulnerable young people.
I would also add -- I have no idea if the show goes here -- teachers who are faced with external obstacles ranging from other teachers to students' parents to admin to the state @^$%&# standards. (Am still bitter that CA forces physics into 9th grade.) We have sidestepped the system for now, but I hear secondhand reports about all of these problems. (And these things were relevant in why I decided emphatically not to go into teaching.)
Also: At my otherwise wonderful (magnet, state-flagship, almost all my other teachers were incredibly terrific, and the ones that weren't incredibly terrific -- with this one exception -- were totally fine) junior-senior high school, I had a US History teacher who as far as I can tell just completely gave up on teaching us. (It is also not clear she ever knew any history; for example, she once tried telling us that the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis were the same thing.) About once or twice a week she wouldn't show up for class at all, and there'd be a note saying we should adjourn to the library and read and make outlines of our reading. (We never read. We would just talk for the entire period instead. This was before laptops, and there wasn't much point in writing out an outline we'd just have to type up later. Not that she paid much attention to that either -- another famous story in my class was how my roommate wrote an essay where, starting on the second page, it got more and more fanciful in its references to bubble gum until it was only talking about gum, and got an A.)
My roommate and I buckled down in the spring and studied strenuously for the AP exam and did just fine.
I don't know what this says about life. Probably that the AP exam is fairly easy (especially if you already know how to write), for starters, but...
(no subject)
Date: 2018-06-27 08:06 pm (UTC)I dunno, probably not? A lot of the show's humor is about the ridiculous leeway the deluded principal gives him because he loves to be able to talk about the Harvard professor he has teaching for him, but I don't think a woman would get the same leeway even with Harvard.
I have no idea if the show goes here -- teachers who are faced with external obstacles ranging from other teachers to students' parents to admin to the state @^$%&# standards.
Tangentially it deals with some of these issues. There's an episode about Back to School night where the show confronts the fact that parents may have other objectives than making sure their children live fulfilling lives. The humorless grind who desperately wants to actually learn AP bio from class has parents who are incredibly frustrated by their daughter's lack of a sense of humor. (and Jack spends the episode trying to have sex with one of his students' parents.) There's an episode where the students have to carry baby dolls that cry all the time to class as a Health class assignment, because state mandated abstinence only rules making it the only sex education they can do.
I don't know what this says about life. Probably that the AP exam is fairly easy
Yeah, I think at a certain level this is the show's truth on education: That kids are going to become grownups whether they go to school or not and whether school is a happy experience or not, and students will either learn or they won't, and there are limits to how much teaching can affect that.