I was beginning to wonder when, in a series that's given us self-serving cops, corrupt union officials, and crooked politicians, we would start seeing the rotten teachers. Tilghman Middle School has been far from idyllic but most of its problems have stemmed from limited resources or troubled, undisciplined kids. The people who run the school have come off pretty well.
Prez hasn't been a model teacher, but he's just incompetent; he still means to teach the kids. And this week we saw some particularly noble and dedicated educators: the teacher who knows her students well enough to bust Randy in the wrong lunch, the principal who's found a way to fund truant officers, the preternaturally calm teacher who guides Colvin through the school. Had The Wire finally found an institution and a subculture it wouldn't criticize?
At the very moment I began to doubt the show's cynicism, Colvin's guide left and we saw another side of the school. First Colvin overhears the teacher berating his students. (Not that you can't chew out your classes--sometimes you have no choice--but you don't have to take such bitter delight in it.) Then we see how the school's truancy program really works; it's our first glimpse of a system that exists only to generate statistics in order to perpetuate or placate some larger system. Cutty and his partner are basically doing jump-outs, just as meaningless as the ones Carver and Herc used to run in the Western. (This detached, commentless observation, not the twinned mayor-and-drug-dealer poker games, is how The Wire draws its best comparisons.) Then we meet an administrator who will only allow the university to study the school's problem students if they pretend the school doesn't have a problem. When Colvin gamely says "The system is fine"--well, on this show you know those words will never be true.
You almost had me going, Simon, but I knew you couldn't hold back forever. I'd like to see more of the dysfunctional and self-perpetuating parts of the school system. One teacher mentioned something about "team rules" back in the first or second episode--they can only make rules they can all enforce? What the hell is that about? And how does No Child Left Behind fit into this dynamic?
Education has always been one of the running themes of The Wire, long before the schools were on screen. Avon tried to groom D'Angelo, D'Angelo tried to tell Wallace there was another path, Daniels and Griggs tried to school Carver and Herc, Cutty tried to train the young soldiers, Freamon tried to rein in McNulty, Colvin tried to teach Carver that a real police knows his district. Most of these attempts failed. That doesn't bode well for this season's teachers, a group that once again includes Cutty. He's emerged as one of the most principled characters in the series, but he's got a thankless task. Not only do his students ignore the pointers he gives them and focus instead on the boxers' muscles, then they overcompensate and imagine he's out to molest them. This week's episode ended on a haunting image, Michael slinking off into some private teenage space, but the more he pushes away from Cutty the more it seems he'll end up with Marlo.
The Wire also dramatizes thought processes better than anything else I've seen. The most memorable sequence in the first season featured McNulty and Bunk realizing another homicide detective had botched a murder scene. As they reconstructed the murder literally out of thin air they punctuated their discovery solely with variations on "fuck." This ran for a couple of minutes. My favorite scene in the second season featured Daniels, called into Barrell's office to do him a favor, reading the departmental politics on the fly and asking for command of his own major crimes unit. (This scene essentially salvaged the premise of the series from the wreck of the first season finale.) And now we have an early contender for my favorite scene of the fourth season, as Freamon pieces together Marlo's missing bodies while Bunk degenerates on the stool next to him. Freamon's a brilliant teacher, but nobody seems to be listening.
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