Thank you for posting my review. I think the bottom of the DVD box says it all..."no corner left behind".
This season did more to show the problems with NCLB than any newspaper article. It's all about the stats and not the students. That's what gets politicians noticed.
I have been telling everyone I know to watch 'The Wire'. It is my life as a teacher.
The DOE should require every parent with a child who is failing to watch it.
Then, they should make the administrators watch it, too.
I haven't seen it, but I think I will. Thanks for the information. Its nice to see reality portrayed for onece.
I"d been waiting for this on dvd -- a teacher friend with cable highly recommended it.
Great review Schoolgal. I've got the dvd's coming one after another on Netflix for season 1. I spent a lot of time doing the socializing thing and sometimes I feel guilty - like did I shortchange kids academically when I did that? Looking forward to marathon sessions of watching it.
another great show that really supports teachers in Boston Legal. Last night they had a case putting down the NCLB laws. Schmidt--the head lawyer really let the law have it. A few months ago they defended a teacher who had a young child die from a peanut reaction on her watch. Again, they did a great job sticking up for teachers.
David Kelly, the creator and writer, has always been pro-teacher. He also created Boston Public--a show about a Boston high school. The first season was great. Marla, a special ed teacher, gives a speech to the parents and basically reads them the riot act. Now that is something I wish was on YouTube.
The problem with turning the urban classroom into an objet d'art of a new blackboard jungle--even one ostensibly pro-teacher---is the burden it places on the actual world it caricatures.
As a teacher in Baltimore I can attest the myriad fantasies that are spawned by The Wire's "realism"
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/
te...imore_teach.php
Here is a blog my students are running this year:
http://acce123.org/wordpress/
as well as a class webpage
http://www.acce123.org/
The last scene takes place in a closed school. Next year our mayor is closing 13 schools. So that is a reality.
Of course there are schools that work even here in NYC. But I think The Wire was looking at how NCLB is working against students. And, maybe not your school, but the rest of us are putting a hold on learning so that we can test prep. That point was made loud and clear in The Wire. It was also made clear how stats are more important to politicians.
If you are reading this blog, you saw the story of a HS principal telling teachers to find a way to pass students. Over at Pissed Off Teacher's blog, the teachers were given a similar mandate.
Any show that depicts the outside forces that effect teaching should be hailed in my opinion. Keep in mind the creator was a former teacher. That is why seeing the DVD bonus materials puts it all in perspective.
btw, I liked your blogs and I read what one student wrote about The Wire.
The show also dealth with those students who took their education seriously. When the disruptive students were taken out, the class became more cohesive.
I am glad you do not work in such an enviornment and your school has found a way for teachers to teach and students to learn. Can you please share what your school is doing to achieve this?
I agree with the general senitment that the critique of "outside forces" is good and that anything that sees NCLB and the testing regime as a perverse form of humiliation and mechanism of social control for my students is to be congratulated.
My students live in hyper-segregated neighborhoods and go to apartheid schools. I make no claims that we are "successful." We have all the pathologies that the minimum security incarceration called public education in Baltimore provides.
The Wire neatly packages my students' humanity not just their academic performance in nice production values for premium channel subscribers to consume.
This was my response in the Baltimore Sun at the end of season 4:
To be a Baltimore schoolteacher and watch Season 4 of HBO's The Wire, which ended last week, is to experience cognitive dissonance. The show, widely praised for its authenticity, verisimilitude and simple honesty about life in Baltimore, attempted this season to represent some truth about what passes for education in the city. And no doubt there is some truth in the show's Hobbesian world of Baltimore youth, whose TV lives are nasty, brutish and short.
I often struggle to adequately convey to others the intensity of teaching in city schools. You find yourself torn by a contradiction: needing to promote the American promise contained within education in an institution and world where promoting that promise seems cruel. Ed Burns, a writer and producer of The Wire who taught in city schools, describes what one must do to go into a city classroom: "Psychologically, there's no way to prepare for it. The closest preparation I think I had was when I went to Vietnam in the infantry."
And thus, the truth represented in The Wire - where nail-gun assassins, corrupt cops and drug kingpins cohabit the small screen with middle-schoolers and ill-prepared, good-hearted teachers - can have a salutary effect in conveying what this teaching and these classrooms can be like to those who've never experienced it.
Yet this "truth" about Baltimore schools has in its own way become a kind of idee fixe, a cliche. You can't have a conversation with anyone about city schools, be they conservative or liberal, and not have it eventually become some taxonomy of horrors. "North Avenue," for instance - as in the show - becomes a shorthand epithet for the dysfunction of Baltimore schools, an environment where students are forced to endure the predations of failed institutions, where school is only practice for criminality, incompetence and bureaucratic sadism. Not to mention those low test scores.
From governor to mayor to teacher, Baltimore schools are literally "worth less" in our discourse.
One thing that kids never fail to do, though, is to learn what we teach them. No doubt Baltimore students are taught by the existential deficits in their schools and their lives.
However, they also are taught by this other cultural orientation, this fixed idea about the schools they attend.
There was great social cachet to be had this fall by my students in getting a bootleg copy of Season 4 of The Wire. It was popular to own, particularly in its illegal format. But it wasn't a collector's item for its authenticity, its realism or its storytelling technique.
None of my students perceived a critical message in the show. Some described The Wire as simply another Stop Snitchin', but with better production values. And as with that infamous bootleg DVD of Baltimore street life, there was great respect for the power of being represented at all. Here were the images of "Bodymore, Murderland," in all its street-cred glory. Here is the adult world representing what goes on in our messed-up school. It's on TV. We're on TV.
So, on the one hand, we have the cruelty of separate and unequal schools in the America of Baltimore City. On the other hand, we have the cruelty of a kind of aestheticized abjection represented by Season 4 of The Wire and our own disassociation from institutions we claim are unfixable, dysfunctional and probably best saved by being destroyed.
This season of The Wire ended with the heavy-handed metaphor of bodies of young men from the streets of Baltimore being stacked in the gym of a city middle school. Without question there is a kind of truth here, but more, there is a variety of cruelty.
Tomorrow, I will go teach to kids who aren't on TV and who aren't part of some taxonomy of failure, but who are real human beings who often learn how little society values them. They hear us talk about it. Maybe they read about it. And now, along with the rest of the world, they can see it on TV
Did you see the bonus material? Did you see how it all was a metaphor of how little education is respected in this country. The producers tried to convey how important it is to start investing on the elementary level and give students more than the 3Rs.
Keep in mind that it is still a show and as such takes dramatic license. In Boston Public a teacher shot off a gun and was never fired.
That wouldn't happen in real life.
But the show was still popular with teachers because it showed how difficult a profession it is.
I also like the dramas that inspire teachers. But not Freedom Fighters because too much of the reality was taken out of that movie.
I grew up on movies like Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Corn is Green. But the Blackboard Jungle, Up the Down Staircase and To Sir With Love showed another side of teaching that still inspired. I found the teacher in The Wire a good role model. He truly cared for his students and would rather teach than test prep. He was able to conduct wonderful lessons and the students felt safe in the new atmosphere once the problem students were removed.
I think any teacher will tell you that their best days are the days when "certain" students are absent. The Wire tried to prove that disruptive students have a great impact on learning. And when they were removed, teaching rather than disciplining takes place. This is true regardless of the socio-economic factors.
I'm sorry you didn't see what I saw, but The Wire is not a show about education. I wouldn't expect people to think that NYC is like NYPD Blue or Law and Order. Nor are Italian Americans like the Sapranos and all people from Brooklyn speak like that.
I really believe The Wire tried to send the right message to it's viewers that testing should not be the only factor that measures a school's success. If you remember the ending, the teacher says that he is back working for a system were the "stats" rather than the job are what matters.
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