Miss Guided is Aptly Named TV

At the beginning of January, I wrote a column about Room 222, an Emmy and Golden Globe winning docudrama on high school life that first aired on ABC almost 40 years ago. At the time, I commented that the issues faced by students and teachers in Room 222 were little different from the issues they face today.

Instead of a new Room 222, the very same network has given us Miss Guided, a high school sitcom about a once-dorky girl who returns to her alma mater as a guidance counselor. She’s gone through college, probably grad school, as well as a makeover, and now feels that she “knows it all.” She feels well-equipped to help teens with their in-school and after-school problems because she’s been there herself. But she goes about it all wrong by trying to be cool, instead of trying to act more distant and professional. But it’s not like her principal or vice principal actually care if she succeeds. In fact, they have little memory of her being a former student, or wonder why she bothered coming back.

Personally, I’d wonder the same, and that’s why Miss Guided loses it for me. Having been given similar labels as Becky Freeley, Judy Greer’s guidance counselor character, in my K-12 life, I had no desire to relive high school. I couldn’t wait to graduate and get on with my life. I could care less about proving myself to people who didn’t like me. Ten years after I graduated from high school, I went to my class reunion with my wife. Classmates who remembered me reminded me of my incompetence on the track team, something I had long put behind me. I laughed it off that night, but later wondered why I had spent the money to listen to people I’d forgotten for ten years talk about something I didn’t want to remember.

So, to me, Becky is a glutton for punishment. I can’t feel sorry for her character because she hasn’t grown up. If I had a daughter like young Becky, I’d tell her to have a dream, focus on it like a laser beam and ignore anything in her path. I’d want her to be brilliant and happy with herself and feel that her detractors are unworthy. But in Miss Guided, we have a show where her detractors, including a former beauty queen classmate, are the focus of her life.

I realize that I might be too sensitive, and Miss Guided is only a sitcom. The show has enough comedy for non-dorks to like. Those who didn’t take school too seriously, or don’t take it seriously now, will laugh their touckis off at Becky’s misadventures. They might remember a teacher from their past or present that is remarkably like Becky and laugh at her, not with her, as Judy Greer would want.

As for me, I’ll take my high school laughs old-school and watch Welcome Back Kotter in reruns. I prefer a strong teacher with a heart who can match wits with his sweathogs. Gabe Kotter kept them from leaving school behind for four seasons. I don’t believe Miss Guided has similar prospects, but as Mark Twain once said: education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. He would have had more hope for Becky Freeley than I do.

Juno and The Restless Virgins

Since I wrote a novel based around sex education, I’ve tried to pay attention to other books and movies that do the same. I reviewed Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This time, I’m reviewing Juno, a movie I enjoyed so much I saw it twice, the first time with my wife, the second time alone, so I could take a more insightful look at the story.

 Juno is the story of a pregnant teenager who is trying to make sense of her difficult circumstances. Ellen Page, who plays Juno, makes the movie. She’s not only funny, but she appears wise without taking things too seriously. Juno is the geeky guy’s best friend, someone you can talk to, jam with, but you’d forget she was a girl unless she reminded you —and that’s how she gets pregnant. She reminded the “cheese on her macaroni”, before he ever knew he was.

I enjoyed Juno because it was different; it was not a formulaic high school drama of fill-in-the-blank (studs, geeks, misfits, beauty queens, etc) against the cliques or the teachers. Nor was the movie a preachy lecture where everyone in one person’s life imposes values and passes sentence. Juno was not held up as a poster child for teen sex gone wrong. That would have lost the teen/college audience for sure.

Instead, Juno is a movie that a father and teenage daughter can watch together, and share laughs at each other’s expense after it ends. Election (1999), which starred Matthew Broderick, and was based on another Perrotta best-seller, is the only other high school based movie that comes close to the same achievement. No surprise; I saw both movies and they played well to all ages.

I could open my old high school yearbook, or anyone else’s, and find one girl like Juno, maybe two, but certainly no more. She’s noted as an oddball, but doesn’t stand out in any special way—except for her wit—and her untimely pregnancy. During a rare scene in school, pregnant Juno attracts silence and stares as the crowds allow her to pass undisturbed, although it is clear that she has been branded a marked woman.

But Juno is remarkably poised for her age; she’s thought through what she wants to do—put the baby up for adoption—and she’s handling the pain with surprising humor. Juno is the bravest girl in school, and she’s considered the freak. It’s unclear why that happens; Juno’s boyfriend/best friend’s mother was the only person who had given Juno a reputation. Maybe Juno’s classmates are afraid, not for her, but themselves.    

Maybe the writers have left that for us to figure out for ourselves.

It’s good meat for a father-daughter talk after the movie’s over. 

After seeing Juno for the second time, I picked up a book, Restless Virgins, a non-fiction story about teenage hook-ups at a nationally respected New England prep school. This was a rare opportunity to take a back-to-back look at a movie and book along similar themes.

The authors of Restless Virgins, Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley, both graduates of the school, told a true story that appeared to be more like the formulaic high school movies: take the social cliques of the school, peer pressures, and mix them in with a scandal reminiscent of the Duke Lacrosse case. Only this time, the boys are expelled while the girl’s reputation is embarrassingly showcased in court. The school is spared no embarrassment as well; a headmaster is forced to concede that hooking up has been par for the course for some time.

I understand why a publisher took on Restless Virgins; the school is one of the nation’s elite and its’ students considered among the best of the best at gaining admission to the most selective colleges. We expect to be surprised when they behave just like “public school kids” who lack the same advantages. We expect them to abide by a code of conduct, inside and outside school, for the good of the institution, and for the sake of tradition.

But Restless Virgins showed me that the elite are just like anyone else, except that they can afford better lawyers. All high schools, public or private have their cliques and they change, while the traditions that should probably die take a long time to go away. This came out quite strongly in Virgins.  The students were ready to ignore, or let go of the school’s past, while the administrators were asleep at the switch, incapable of cleaning up the mess.

Unlike Juno, there were no pregnant young women in Restless Virgins. But Juno MacGuff didn’t see sex as a game, or something she had to do, but something she wanted to do, with a guy she really cared about. The fictional Juno was far more mature, and also far more interesting, than the real-life cast in Restless Virgins.

Should TV Bring Back Room 222?

Every profession could use a good TV show to help it flourish in tough times. With No Child Left Behind, maybe teachers need one more than ever.

I’ve heard most of the arguments on why this happens: pay, working conditions, job satisfaction, bureaucracy, lost tenure, ad infinitum. If you’re reading this story, I’m sure you have too.

I know that students decided to become teachers for reasons other than money, and they didn’t begin their working life expecting the other negatives. They must have inspired by something, maybe a teacher who took a personal interest, or turned them on to learning. Or, maybe it was attraction of having summers off.

I can say one thing, for sure. Teachers were rarely “made” because of Hollywood; film and television producers have done little in recent years to portray teaching in an honest and positive light. They’ve certainly done a lot for the images of law enforcement, crime scene investigation and medicine, but not K-12 education.

If you are in your thirties or forties, what movies and TV shows about teachers come to mind?

Welcome Back Kotter (1975-79) was hilarious. Having grown up in New Jersey, I admit that I’m a huge fan, because the show made fun of Brooklyn. But my Hebrew school friends imitated the “Sweathogs,” the remedial rowdies in Kotter’s class. Even the nerdy girls dreamed of being with Vinnie Barbarino, Freddie “Boom-Boom” Washington and Juan Epstein, the Puerto Rican Jew, while the guys shot their hands up, shouting “Ooh! Ooh!” like Arnold Horshack. Like the Sweathogs, my classmates annoyed and buried the teachers; they didn’t praise them.

Boston Public (2000-2004) was created by David E. Kelley, who produced LA Law, Boston Legal, The Practice, Doogie Howser M.D. and Picket Fences. The latter featured Fyvush Finkle as a doddering attorney. Thanks to Kelley, he later plays Harvey Lipshultz, a doddering widowed social studies teacher. Harvey was not exactly a role model for someone starting a teaching career. Chi McBride played Steven Harper, the fair-minded principal to near perfection, though I could not same the same for his vice principals: Scott Guber (played by Anthony Heald), the authoritarian dork and Ronni Cooke (played by Jeri Ryan, of Borg collective fame in Star Trek Voyager), a lawyer-turned-teacher who directs the school to teach to standardized tests. They were not exactly role models for teachers who aspired to become principals.

Then there are movies such as: The Blackboard Jungle (1955), To Sir, with Love (1967), Class of 1984 (1982), The Principal (1987), Stand and Deliver (1988), Lean on Me and Dead Poets Society (both 1989), Class of 1999 (1990), Dangerous Minds (1995), The Substitute (1996), One Eight Seven (1997), and Freedom Writers (2007). They all revolve around the same theme: an idealistic young teacher struggles to reach their students and unsuccessfully navigates the educational bureaucracy in an urban public school, before stumbling on their own success formula. The ending to any of the movies is the same: the teachers are popular, even loved, and with their students behind them, they teach on.

But that’s not real life, that’s the entertainment ‘biz.

 

Would a serious television drama that better depicts teachers in real life actually succeed? Could it inspire young people to become teachers?

 

In other words, what if we brought back Room 222, in re-runs, or updated for today?

 

Room 222 aired on ABC from September 17, 1969 to January 11, 1974 for 112 episodes. It was centered around an American History class at Walt Whitman High School in Los Angeles, taught by Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes), an African-American teacher. Other characters featured in the show were guidance counselor Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas) as Pete’s girlfriend; the principal, Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine) and Alice Johnson (Karen Valentine) as a student teacher. In addition, recurring students were featured from episode to episode.

 

Pete Dixon, the main character, was not much different from the idealistic teachers in the movies, though Haynes’ acting made him far more believable. While I remember Karen Valentine’s character as being somewhat ditzy, the others appeared genuine and not ridiculously overconfident. They talked amongst each other about how to improve their teaching and best act in loco parentus, without trying too hard to be mom or dad to their students.

 

Like the movies, Room 222 tried to address contemporary political issues of the 1960’s and 70’s such as homosexuality, war, race relations and woman’s rights. The show boiled a lot of content into half an hour. Boston Public needed an hour to deal with three similar themes in a single episode.

 

Unlike the movies, the teachers didn’t always conjure heroics and the students were not always cheering at the end. There were tragedies: the ex-Marine who couldn’t play high school baseball after coming home from Vietnam, for example, or more sadly, a bright and promising senior who dies of leukemia. The teachers and the principal showed their warts. Seymour Kaufman was the type of principal that any teacher would like to have for a boss. He was the Sherman Potter (of M*A*S*H fame) of high school principals, minus the Midwestern witticisms.

 

Did Room 222 succeed?

It almost didn’t: weak early ratings almost led ABC to pull the show after the first season, but Room 222 ended up winning the Emmy for Best New Series at season’s end. Room 222 was nominated for seven Emmy awards and seven Golden Globes between 1970 and 1971.

More amusing, Lloyd Haynes and Karen Valentine won TV Land Awards as Teacher of the Year and Classic TV Teacher of the Year–thirty years after Room 222 went off the air!

ABC launched Room 222 in 1969, the same year as the network launched The Brady Bunch. The final episodes concluded only two months apart. Yet, while we fondly remember the Bradys through numerous spin-offs and regular re-runs, we do not find Room 222 episodes in syndication today. I guess that comedies are more marketable on the re-run stations during prime time.

Would Room 222 succeed today, in a similar format?

I’m not sure.

Room 222’s story lines showed open discussion and problem solving; the teachers rarely complained about the task of teaching. None of them kvetched about the low pay, or the students they taught. Teachers, like the crusty Mr. Dragan (Ivor Francis) who had traditional teaching styles were frequently portrayed as jaded. Today, the most fervent advocates of No Child Left Behind would laud them as teachers and scholars.

A Room 222 for the 2000’s would have its share of hits and misses in political correctness. There may be too much competition for a major network to take the risk. These days, you’re more likely to see a well-developed show covering the themes in Room 222 on HBO and their cable kin. They’re more comfortable with serious, controversial programming, such as Mad Men, Big Love and The Sopranos.

Maybe the reason we don’t have a teacher’s docudrama is that parents don’t want to hear teachers complain about a tough day at work, after they’ve had their own bad days at work. Parents do not usually have sympathy for teachers; otherwise, they’d always support school budget proposals.

It’s also possible that parents do not want their children to know that their teachers work for a living—and that teachers consider teaching a job, as opposed to a calling.

That’s a natural, but over-protective, impulse.

Parents don’t want their babies to grow up to be Sweathogs.