Tag: Abbott Elementary

TV Show Review: Abbott Elementary, season 3, episode 9 (“Alex”)

I had been missing out on watching Abbott Elementary for the past couple of weeks. Every Wednesday at 8 pm I tune into ABC to watch the show, which is currently on its third season. If you haven’t seen Abbott Elementary, it’s a show created by the actress Quinta Brunson, who I used to know from watching Buzzfeed videos (she was with Buzzfeed around the time I was in college, and I loved watching her videos.) It takes place at Willard R. Abbott Public School in Philadelphia, and it’s about a team of teachers who do their best to educate the students and encourage them with the limited resources that the district provides them. Janine Teagues is an optimistic idealistic teacher who works at Abbott, and she makes many mistakes along the way but learns that these mistakes are learning opportunities. Her fellow teachers, Melissa, Barbara, Jacob and Gregory, are all in the same boat as her, and everyone is doing their best. Ava Coleman is the school principal who loves to goof off and be very relaxed about school rules. In season 3, she briefly becomes a serious micromanager who does away with her permissive principal-ing and decides to take away all the fun at Abbott to accord with the district’s policies. However, all it took to change serious Ava back into silly fun Ava was turning on “Back That Azz Up” in the gymnasium. Gregory has a crush on Janine, and Janine has a crush on Gregory, but at the time of season 1, Janine is still with her boyfriend, Tariq, who depends on Janine like a child and doesn’t treat her with respect. Gregory decides to start dating Amber, the mother of one of Abbott’s students, and at first, they are enjoying their relationship, but Amber realizes that she’s not interested in Gregory anymore, so they break up. Gregory and Janine are taking time away to figure themselves out, but there is still palpable sexual tension between them, and in season 3, this sexual tension gets hotter when Manny, one of the superintendents in the district, takes a liking to Janine. (The actor who plays Manny is pretty darn cute, by the way. Just sayin’)

In season 3, things change a lot. Manny tells Janine to apply for a fellowship, where she would follow her dream of working as a representative of the school district, and Janine wants it, but she’s not sure if she’s qualified enough and she also doesn’t want to leave her students at Abbott behind. Even though Jacob wanted the fellowship, as it is a very competitive fellowship that not everyone wins, Janine ends up getting it, but Jacob is proud of her anyway. The hardest part for Janine when Superintendent Reynolds offers her a full-time position at the school district is saying goodbye to her classroom. Which brings me to episode 9 of season 3, in which Janine tries to convince one of her students, Alex, to come back to school. Gregory lets Janine know that Alex is missing school to watch The Price is Right with his grandmother, and after calling Alex’s grandmother to ask her why Alex isn’t coming to school, he finds out that Alex is missing school because he misses Janine and doesn’t want to go to school if his favorite teacher, Janine, isn’t there anymore. Janine realizes that she has made a profound impact and significantly transformed her relationship with the people at Abbott. In season 1, Janine can barely control the class, and especially because there was one student, named Courtney, who made Janine’s life a living nightmare. Courtney got the class to sing the Pledge of Allegiance wrong (instead they sang “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of Courtney, and they replace every “America” with “Courtney” as if Courtney runs not just Janine’s classroom but an entire nation.) However, Janine is also able to patch things up with Courtney, and she ends up building wonderful rapport with her students. Gregory and Janine decide to go to Alex’s grandmother’s house, and they end up sitting with Alex and trying to convince him to go back to school. At first Alex refuses because he wants Janine back, but Janine is honest with Alex and explains to him that people are going to leave your life at different points in life, and after a lot of convincing, they finally get him to come back to school. I’m really curious about what is going to happen to Gregory and Janine, because I’m getting the sense that Manny, the district representative who Janine works with, isn’t totally out of the picture.

TV Show Review: Abbott Elementary season 3, episode 10 (2 Ava 2 Fest)

I missed the last episode of Abbott Elementary last week, so I am playing catchup, but I was able to catch this recent episode tonight. In this season, Janine is working as a member of the school district and is away from her classroom at Abbott Elementary most of the time. In this episode, she has to make a huge decision about whether to continue working for the school district or go back to being a teacher at Abbott. There are several signs throughout the episode that indicate she is going to go back to being a teacher at Abbott. She often revisits the photos of her students and coworkers, and they make her miss Abbott. However, her coworkers at the school district–Manny, Simon and Emily–are super pumped and want her to stay with them at the school district. Also, the new superintendent (played brilliantly by comedian Keegan-Michael Key of the comedy duo Key and Peele) informs Janine that she has been reassigned to work for a high school. Janine tries to get the message across to her coworkers that she doesn’t want to work permanently for the school district, and wants to go back to Abbott, but it takes her a while to get that message across because she knows there will be some consequences against Abbott if she quits her job at the school district. However, what really gets her to come back to Abbott is the really sweet card that Barbara and Janine’s students made for her. They all signed it themselves and Barbara wrote a sweet message to Janine about how she is looking forward to all of the things that Janine will accomplish. I only worked as a pre-K teacher for about two years, and frankly I missed a lot of days of work and called in sick, so I couldn’t really understand how hard teachers work for their students every day and show up to do that hard work. (I just realized Teacher Appreciation week is in a month) But it must have been hard for Janine to be away from her students since she has built such a strong bond with them for the past two seasons of the show.

The Ava Fest part was pretty hilarious. At the beginning, Shanae and the other members of the cafeteria staff are stressing out and running around the kitchen preparing all this food to prepare for Ava Fest, which is really an open house, but Ava wanted to glam it up in her authentic Ava style, so she made it all about Ava and invited Questlove from The Roots as the guest musician. When the kitchen staff have Mr. Johnson taste-test the food, I thought Mr. Johnson was going to like it, but he said it tasted like trash, prompting Shanae to throw his food across the room and get even more stressed about how people were going to like the food. Barbara, Melissa, Jacob and Gregory think Ava is lying about getting Questlove to come to Ava Fest. They also think she is lying about her connection to Questlove and how they started The Roots together. When Questlove doesn’t show up at first, Melissa tries to kill time with the audience by doing a lot of impressions of actors, but many people find these impressions unfunny and cringey. I thought Ava was lying about her connection to Questlove and that Questlove was coming, but it turns out he shows up for the open house after all, and he throws down a lot of sick beats as always (if you’ve seen him or heard his music, the man can jam. He DJ’d at the Academy Awards one year and it was so dope!) To be honest, I was glad when Janine decided to go back to Abbott. Gregory was also quite happy because while they were dancing, he had this huge smile on his face. Gregory mentions at some point during the episode that Janine is the main reason he stayed at Abbott. It was also stressful for Janine to not be in her classroom and to have to deal with the various substitutes who came to her class while she was away. In one episode, there is a substitute teacher named Jessca (no “I”) who rejects the traditional grammar rules and has a very permissive style of teaching, to the point where she lets the students call her by her first name. They end up repeating these behaviors when Janine visits, calling her by her first name instead of “Miss Teagues.” Janine thinks Jessca is going to stay at the school permanently, but she only ends up staying for a week, especially because her week subbing for Janine has been rather “mid” (I just looked it up in Urban Dictionary because I didn’t know what it meant, and apparently it means “below average.”)

Abbott Elementary, season 3: episode 4 (“Smoking”)

Yesterday I couldn’t get enough of Abbott Elementary, so after catching up on episode 1 (“Career Day”) I watched the latest episode, “Smoking.” In this episode, a student at Abbott is caught smoking, which caused the fire alarms at the school to go off. Apparently, there is not a no-smoking rule at Abbott. The teachers end up having a discussion about drugs in the lounge. Jacob says that smoking is bad, but Janine says he can’t say that because he vapes. Jacob argues that vaping is not as bad as smoking, and then he tells everyone that Janine does weed. Janine admits that she smokes it every night and that she needs it to function. Ava admits that she does hookah, Gregory admits he has an occasional protein-bar edible, and when Barbara tells them they need to give up the sin of taking these drugs, Melissa laughs and says that Barbara drinks alcohol. Mr. Johnson tries to chime in, but Janine sees a student has been taping the whole discussion with his phone, and the teachers confront the student about how he needs to not let the discussion become public. However, it is too late. The student ended up posting the conversation on social media, and now students everywhere in the school now know that their teachers do substances even though they told the students that substances were bad. During a lesson Jacob is teaching on the Dust Bowl, one of his students asks, when looking at a photo of the Dust Bowl, if that is what the inside of Jacob’s car looks like when he is vaping, and they laugh at him. Janine greets a student in the halls with a simple “hi,” and the student whispers, “Bet you are.” (At first, I didn’t catch this, but then I watched it again and realized the student was making fun of Janine being “high” on weed.) Barbara is teaching her students and takes a sip from her traveler mug, and a student asks her if she is drinking Pinot Grigio. The teachers are fed up, and so they find a way to clear things up with the students.

They end up enlisting the help of Tariq’s program, F.A.D.E. I honestly thought Tariq was going to show up again, but instead it’s Slim, another guy who is part of the F.A.D.E. program. Slim was deeply influenced by Tariq, and it is clearly showing in his performance. He ends up giving a really hilarious spoken word about not doing drugs, and it is very cringey for the students to watch. He enlists another F.A.D.E. spokesperson, Caroline (played by a really brilliant comedian named Aparna Nancherla), who ends up engaging the students in a very chaotic discussion about which drugs are better or worse than others. The school ends up employing a strict checking policy where the teachers have to check the students’ bags for any drugs. Obviously, this isn’t fun, and it stresses the teachers and students out. The teachers talk more about it, and they realize the best way to address this is to actually have a conversation with Curtis, the student who was caught smoking. Melissa and Gregory sit down with the student, and the student apologizes and says he won’t do it again, and that he doesn’t even like the taste of smoking. Melissa and Gregory tell him he isn’t in trouble and tell him that they just want to make sure he is being careful. When the student asks if it was his fault for having the F.A.D.E. program brought into the school, Melissa assures him that wasn’t his fault (“it’s the government’s fault) and they send the student back to class. Gregory and Melissa don’t want Curtis to be suspended, and so Gregory finds a way so that Curtis’s suspension will be lifted. When Curtis finds out, he goes into Ava’s office and gives her a hug (this was really touching).

Meanwhile, Janine also has to deal with Jessca (yes, this is actually how she spells her name) who is the substitute for Janine’s classroom. Jessca insists on the students calling her by her first name and doesn’t teach them grammar properly. She lets the students misplace commas and just has a very lax attitude towards teaching, and Janine has a problem with this. One of the students calls her Janine when she comes into the classroom, and Janine corrects him and says, “it’s Ms. Teagues,” but Jessca insists it’s fine and that nothing is wrong with her teaching. Janine confronts Barbara about Jessca, but Barbara tells her that every teacher has their own teaching method and that is fine. Barbara also admits that she wasn’t too thrilled about Janine’s teaching methods when Janine first came to Abbott because Barbara had a certain way of doing things, but after she got to know Janine over time, she came to respect Janine’s ways of teaching.

Poor Jacob had to give up his vaping pen at the end, though. The teachers cheer him on when he drops it in the trash can, but then he fishes back in the trash for his vaping pen because he doesn’t want to let it go. He ends up finding another alternative to vaping, a Bref pen, which is just straight up air (I had to look up if Bref pens were real, but I couldn’t find any.)

Abbott Elementary, season 3, episode 1: Career Day Part 1

A few weeks ago, I tuned into ABC to watch season 3 of Abbott Elementary. However, I didn’t know that I had missed a couple of episodes and wanted to catch up. Honestly, I laughed, I (almost) cried, and just was so glad that they decided to have a third season of the show.

There were some pretty hilarious moments in this episode. At the beginning, everyone notices that Ava, the principal of Abbott Elementary, is not acting like herself. She is following school policies to the point where she doesn’t participate in any shenanigans or act silly, and to the point where she takes away the teachers’ lunch period so that they are working all the time. Jacob, Mr. Johnson, Melissa, Gregory and Barbara all devise ways to get Ava back to her goofy self, so they try to give her stuff she likes. Jacob clumsily throws a pile of money on her desk because Ava likes money, but Ava doesn’t fall for it. Mr. Johnson tries to entice her with tickets to see Usher in concert while wearing an Usher T-shirt and trying to dance like Usher. That doesn’t work either. So, they use Gregory to try and seduce Ava, because in the earlier seasons Ava was always trying to flirt with Gregory even when she knew it was inappropriate and he didn’t like it. They have Gregory stand in the doorway to her office with his muscles flexed and have him talk to her in a sexy seductive voice about how her rules are “so rigid and hard,” and she looks up from her work and tells him to put his arms down (I busted up so hard when she called him “Jeremy Allen Black,” which is a reference to the actor Jeremy Allen White.) I laughed at the scene where they finally get Ava to go to the gym and then Mr. Johnson blasts the song “Back That Azz Up” by Juvenile. I love how Barbara called City Girls “The Town Women.” (Ava loves listening to City Girls and when she became a more serious principal and stopped cutting up, she stopped listening to City Girls for a while.)

Melissa also faces a huge decision in her relationship with Garrett, the vending machine guy at Abbott. They hit it off really well and he wants to get married to her, but Melissa doesn’t want to get married again because her last marriage wasn’t great. Garrett keeps hinting at them getting married, such as putting a Ring Pop in the vending machine, but Melissa tells him that she just does not want to get married. During Career Day, they bring in a marketing person from The Philadelphia Eagles team to talk about marketing, and the kids find it boring, so the person has Jalen Hurts call in on a virtual call to visit the class. Everyone is super excited, but then Garrett asks the marketing person if he could sneak in a way for him to propose to Melissa, so he has Jalen Hurts make an announcement about Garrett’s proposal to Melissa, with everyone watching the proposal in all the classrooms, and Garrett gets on his knee and proposes. Melissa is shocked, but she ends up saying “No,” and they have to go outside the school to talk about it. They really love each other, but in the end, Melissa didn’t want to get married, so they broke up. It was really sweet when they hugged even though it was a sad moment for both of them. When Melissa returns to her classroom, she is wiping away tears, and Jalen Hurts (Jason Kelce and Brandon Graham also make cameos. I’m not very knowledgeable about football, so I had to look up the names of the other players making cameos on the show) tells her that he respects her right to not marry and that she did what she thought was right.

Janine also faces a major decision herself. Manny, who works for the school district, offers her a fellowship to work for the school district. It is a great opportunity, but the only thing is that Janine would be away from her classroom for most of the time, and as a dedicated teacher who loves her students, it would be hard for her to be away from them for that long. Janine tells Manny that she appreciates the offer, but she turns it down. Jacob feels sad that he didn’t get the fellowship, and at first when Janine acts like it’s no big deal, Jacob tells her that the fellowship is a huge deal. The teachers also are kind of lukewarm about how Manny and the other people working for the school district are trying to change how things are done at Abbott. In one part of the episode, the district gives Janine’s classroom iPads, and Janine is so pumped that Manny and his team gave them iPads for the students to use as learning tools. However, the students complain about how the iPads aren’t fully charged and how there aren’t enough chargers for each iPad, so Janine brings it up to Manny and he and the team say that they will take care of it. Manny also introduces himself to Mrs. Howard (Barbara) but at first she is lukewarm because it seems like he doesn’t actually care about making Abbott a better place even though he comes off that way, but Manny tells her that his mom was an educator and Barbara starts to have more respect for him. Janine then comes to Barbara, and she wants to seem pessimistic about what Manny and the other school district representatives are trying to do to change Abbott, but Barbara says that she has had a change of heart and that she is actually quite hopeful about the changes the district will implement at Abbott. Janine then asks her advice about whether she should go for the fellowship or not, especially because she would be away from her classroom a lot. Barbara tells her that if that is what will make her happy, then she should do it, and that she can always come back to Abbott after the fellowship is done.

Things get awkward, though, between Janine and Gregory. Ava catches them on camera (clearly, she is back to regular goofy Ava because that is something she would have totally done) and we see Janine and Gregory talking about what happened when they were on the museum field trip. In that episode, Janine felt that it would be best that she focused on herself and not try to start a relationship with Gregory, and she thought Gregory still had feelings for her. But this time, Janine thinks that she and Gregory should make it official and get back together since she isn’t seeing anyone, and he isn’t either. However, he tells her that he wanted to respect her decision to not be with him, and that after that he had moved on. This puts Janine in an awkward position because she assumed Gregory had feelings for her. Since season 1, Gregory has had a huge crush on Janine, but at the time she was dating Tariq, who she had been with since eighth grade. Gregory decided to start dating Amber, a mother of one of the students at the school, and by the time Janine had broken up with Tariq, Gregory was taken, leaving Janine feeling secretly heartbroken. Janine finds another person, Maurice, who is Gregory’s best friend, and they seem to be working out. However, even though they are seeing other people, Gregory and Janine still have feelings for each other, and they end up making out on evening. Gregory and Janine tell this to Maurice over dinner one evening, and Maurice breaks up with Janine. Janine feels bad about cheating on Maurice, so during the field trip that the class takes to a museum, Janine tells Gregory that she feels bad about what she did to Maurice and says that she needs to step back from being in a relationship for a while to spend time with herself. Now that Manny is in the picture, I wonder what is going to happen. I’m not sure if Manny respects Janine as just a coworker, or if he is secretly interested in being with her, and I wonder if Gregory is going to feel a way about it if Manny and Janine ever do get together.

Episode Synopsis: Abbott Elementary, season 3, episode 3

I love Abbott Elementary. It is one of my favorite shows, and I was so excited that season 3 is finally here! I missed the first two episodes, so I need to catch up, but I definitely did not want to miss it. In this episode, Janine and Jacob are trying to find an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter for a student who needs an interpreter, but Janine has to go through several hoops in order to get the interpreter. She has to go through several chains of command, and she has high hopes that she will just get it approved immediately, but that isn’t how it works. Instead, her proposal gets rejected and after going through several people for the approval, she almost gives up. But Ava and Janine’s fellow teachers encourage her to keep going. Meanwhile, a group of Gregory’s students start to come into his classroom and hang out there frequently, even though Gregory wants to spend his free time alone. They come in with issues about their personal lives, and try to ask how they can get girls, and one student passes gas. This causes Gregory a lot of stress because he just wants to spend time alone. I was kind of squealing with joy because there is one moment where the students come in, and Gregory is reading the book Quiet by Susan Cain. If you haven’t read Quiet, I recommend it. As an introvert, I really loved it because it reminded me that there are also a lot of people like me who are introverted and that there is nothing wrong with wanting to recharge in solitude sometimes. Susan Cain talks about how introverts can make valuable leaders and shares her own experiences about moving through the world as an introvert. I remember reading it in high school and feeling, Wow, I am not alone. I feel seen and heard. I feel like Quiet was the perfect book for Gregory because I learned from this episode that he is someone who values his alone time. Gregory finally manages to set some boundaries with the students, and he tells them that they can’t come in his room talking with him about girls, and one of the students asks if he can still pass gas, and Gregory lets him. He has to set this boundary because one of the students asks him for advice about this girl he is dating because he wants to buy her a chain, and Gregory tells him to focus on school and then he and the other guys can focus on girls later. However, the student takes his advice too far and he ends up breaking up with his girlfriend, causing her to break down in tears and causing Melissa to ask Gregory what on Earth he did to make the young woman cry. Gregory realizes that the student took it too literally, and so he has to establish boundaries so that the kids aren’t coming in trying to get him to always give advice about their relationship problems. Mr. Johnson, the custodian, comes into Gregory’s classroom when he is trying to have some alone time, and Gregory tells him he is reluctant that his students think he is the “cool teacher.” Mr. Johnson busts up laughing because he thinks Gregory is anything but the “cool teacher,” and Melissa comes in trying to get a break, and Gregory admits that he is being called “the cool teacher,” and like Mr. Johnson, Melissa laughs because she can’t believe Gregory would be called “the cool teacher.”

Tariq, Janine’s ex-boyfriend, comes back into the picture because there is a student at Abbott named Nick, and Nick’s mom is dating Tariq. Earlier in seasons 1 and 2, Tariq was Janine’s boyfriend, and they had a very codependent relationship in which Janine took responsibility for his mistakes and his mess, and he depended on her to always take care of him. (This reminds me of myself, because I tend to be dependent a little too much on others and get comfortable with depending on them, when I can just do the thing myself. But that’s for another blog post.) Janine breaks up with him because he is just a really not-great boyfriend, and she is moving on with her life and moving up in her career. But when he comes back in this episode, it is not a pleasant experience for Janine, especially when he rubs it in her face that he has a new girlfriend. Tariq learns to respect his girlfriend’s son by calling him the name he prefers. Barbara, who is a no-nonsense teacher and has taught at Abbott for many years, advises him to not call Nick “Tariq, Jr.” or “T.J.” because Nick hates it, and because Nick is his real name. Tariq decides to do better (a little bit better, anyway) and call Nick by his preferred name.

Honestly, I cannot wait to watch the next episode of Abbott Elementary.

Abbott Elementary season 1, episodes 10 (Open House) and 11 (Desking)

These episodes were pretty hilarious but also really touching. In episode 10, Janine and the other teachers get ready for open house at Abbott Elementary. Janine thinks it is going to be this big thing, but the other teachers, from experience, know that it’s not going to be as big a deal as Janine wants it to be. Janine prepares the classroom to meet the student’s mom but then she also gets in this situation where she meets Barbara’s daughter, Taylor. Barbara is disappointed in her daughter because she works at an alcohol company and didn’t go into teaching like she did. Janine tries to intervene and deescalate the situation but that just makes Barbara and Taylor’s interaction more intense. Gregory, meanwhile, finds out how Ava got the principal position, which he always wanted but didn’t get, because Ava found the superintendent cheating on his wife. Ava is gleeful that she gets to rub this in the superintendent’s face, but then later the superintendent, after a lot of letting Ava rub her success in his face, informs her that the woman Ava thought he was sleeping with was his wife after all, and that he had just divorced and remarried her. This puts Ava in hot water and she is at risk of losing her job. Meanwhile, Janine waits and waits for the student’s parent to arrive, and after 8:30 a woman finally walks in and apologizes for being late, and Janine goes off on her for being late. The parent tries to explain but Janine doesn’t want to hear her explain, but then the parent takes her jacket off and Janine sees she is wearing an ER nurse uniform and the parent tells her she was doing a surgery on a man with a bullet wound. Janine reflects and then apologizes for reacting the way she did, and the parent forgives her.

The desking episode was hilarious. First I got to meet Jacob’s boyfriend, Zach, and we get to meet him because the teachers are figuring out who is jumping on the desks and Zach, who is an expert in shoes, does research on the footprints of the shoes to see who the potential culprits could be. The students are jumping from desk to desk as part of a social media trend, but it is annoying the hell out of the teachers and the custodian, Mr. Johnson. It gets to the point where Mr. Johnson goes with Gregory on a stakeout in the custodian’s closet to see who is desking. They end up having a good discussion where Mr. Johnson informs Gregory that he has had many jobs before being a custodian at Abbott Elementary. Gregory is disappointed in not getting the principal job because that’s what he wanted to be for a long time, but Mr. Johnson tells him that as a young man himself he went through many different careers instead of settling with one, and that he may even leave his job as a custodian one day and find new work. But his message to Gregory was to basically not put all his eggs in one basket and get so down on himself for not getting the principal position. I really appreciate Mr. Johnson’s perspective because it’s easy to put your eggs in one basket and stake your life on one career position, but when you don’t get the position, it can feel soul-crushing. Mr. Johnson helped Gregory take a more long-term view of a career since he is older than him and has experienced more in the workforce.

It kind of reminded me of when I went to a symphony orchestra performance, and it felt as if I was meeting all these movie stars because I had wanted to be in a professional orchestra and wanted to know how to get in. Up until then I had auditioned for only a few professional orchestras and was feeling dejected for getting rejected from them. But then I got to meet one of the cellists in the orchestra after the performance, and she told me to not put all my eggs in one basket, meaning to not be so hung up on the results of the audition. I’m really glad she said that though, even though at the time she told me that I kind of deflated inside because all I thought of before that was, How can I get into a professional orchestra? And when I didn’t get the results I wanted, I got really discouraged. But looking back, I’m glad I had those jobs in food service and law because I learned about new industries and gained valuable work experience. After a lot of reflection, I had to really think, Am I going to stake my whole life on this career? What does a career even look like to me? Sometimes my ego gets so caught up in this one-dimensional idea of what a career should look like that I block out other possibilities and opportunities that could actually help me grow. I still find myself in the position of basing so much of my self-worth on being a musician even though deep down I probably understand that my self-worth isn’t based on the career I have. But when I was working jobs unrelated to music, I really based so much of my self-worth on having a successful music career so I didn’t think that the jobs I had to support my career could be fulfilling in their own unique way. Over time though as I gained more experience at these jobs, I felt more confident and I ended up creating value at these jobs.