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.”)
The Arts Are Life 