Tag: quinta-brunson

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.)