On 'English Teacher' and the horror of being perceived
Pari Dukovic/FX (via)
I started watching the FX series ENGLISH TEACHER with my spouse yesterday. It's really good—at least as good as all the blurbs say—and I found that, speaking as someone who spent a number of formative years growing up in South Texas, the show really resonated with me.
The main character, Evan, played by series creator Brian Jordan Alvarez, lives in Austin while working at a high school in a nearby suburb (presumably Round Rock?). As the series opens, Evan is on teaching probation because of a complaint from a parent, subsequently going viral online and unwillingly becoming a polarizing figure as a result. As Evan, B.J.A. radiates a familiar, recognizable discomfort. His students razz him, which only adds to his discomfort—these young people tend to document everything on their smartphones, adding to Evan's all-consuming anxiety that he is under constant scrutiny, constantly being assessed—and he offers a genuine but maybe pinched smile when one student stays behind after class to reassure him that they're “on his side.”
One of his best work-friend peers, Coach Hillridge, is the kind of bro ally you'd have as a kid in high school: He affectionately nicknames Evan “Froot Loop,” which Evan lets him know is not okay, but later Hillridge jovially admits to threatening and bullying the parent who had complained at the top of the first episode—which is also not okay but, for Evan, is definitely a different kind of not-okay. (After taking Hillridge to task for his behavior, Evan sighs and thanks him.)
As Evan explains to Hillridge, he is gay but “not that proud!” (Wow, I typed to my spouse, that is really the Texas experience in a nutshell). Nevertheless, Evan's work-peers nominate him to explain what “nonbinary” means to a group of students gathered in the gym. Evan protests—he's cisgender!! and, also, he just wants to keep his head down and live!!!!—but his peers insist that, of the handful of them, he's the most “qualified.” A lot of the show hinges on this frisson: Evan is constantly tokenized, and constantly squirming as a result, but he also exists in this world where everyone is surveilling one another, not just to hold one another accountable, but, much less nefariously, because they're intending to absorb and model the good behavior they see. High schoolers are still designing their own worldviews, after all.
Early on in the first episode, our three main teachers are sitting together at lunch, grousing about “kids today,” marveling at how the latest crop of students has regressed on once-sacred progressive stances. One teacher exclaims that they've gone back to using the “r-word”—underscoring that these teachers are all millennials who've seemingly worked hard to change their own problematic Y2K norms, and for what? If the kids don't appreciate how hard they've worked to apparently change their own values, then what even was the point? (Overseeing the millennial teachers is an utterly exhausted Gen-X principal played by Enrico Colantoni, whom most people my age will recognize as Veronica Mars's dad, but whom I recognize as the beating heart of “Just Shoot Me.”)
Texas is a purple state, and it is a mess. In a lot of ways it is authoritarian, and in other ways it is libertarian, and—as the show illustrates—people are pretty unpredictable in how they act out those values. Growing up, I tended to divide people along a false binary, into either pot-smoking hippies or moral scolds. Early on, one of Evan's Austin friends—a maybe-genderqueer person who “works in tech”—tells Evan that they themselves self-identify as “pretty conservative” (“No you're not!” Evan sputters). A drag queen out of costume, caught committing a heist of like 12 laser printers, laments that Evan used to be way more punk. Coach Hillridge's “live and let live” libertarianism makes for, on paper, an HR nightmare, but in practice, a nice person to work with.
A friend of mine, formerly a teacher, shared that, in Texas, if you're out with friends and you see a student or parent, you are supposed to push your alcoholic beverage away from yourself—physically distancing yourself, in effect, from normal human behavior. (I always thought about this in Chicago, where the absolute wildest drinkers seemed to be public-school teachers who were on strike.)
I tend to think a lot about people's preoccupation with the appearance of righteousness, rather than the actual state of moral rectitude, and ENGLISH TEACHER seems to dwell on this, too. It's caught between the idea of looking right—looking good enough to keep your job, to survive—on balance with actually doing right.
“If everyone is watching you anyway,” the show seems to sigh, “then, for good or ill, everything you do matters.” By that logic, public-school teachers—and maybe also TV writers?—are simultaneously super disempowered and also the most powerful people on Earth. I bet that curls a lot of hair out in Round Rock.