The Humiliation of Tony Danza

If you think about it, it's actually kind of weird that Tony Danza has waited this long to cash in on his pseudo celebrity. I mean he's the consummate ham-fisted hasbeen we loutish, bulk-buying Americans love to favor with a second act. If you scour our collective unconscious, I'm sure you--or Leonardo DiCaprio--could find recessed memories of Tony Danza doing a stint on the second season of Dancing with the Amazing Idols. But the truth is, as E and I recently discussed, Danza has waited until now to unleash his realness on our TV sets.

Above is a clip from Teach: Tony Danza. Now I don't know when or what channel this show comes on. This is because I am an adult human with a job and familial responsibilities. I cannot spend my evenings with Tony Danza. I am 32. I have a 2001 Toyota Corolla that needs to have its oil changed, and there is laundry to fold. Boardwalk Empire is not going to watch itself. Still, I did want to comment on the above clip. While I assume Teach is a dumb, exploitative show in which Tony Danza attempts each episode to quote his own sitcom character whenever the opportunity arises or doesn't, the above clip is actually sort of dead on -- shockingly so. It's actually "real' in the way reality is real and not just a bizarre simulacrum of reality, packaged by a corporation and sold to us like a bag of Cheetos.

One of the most frustrating things about being a rookie teacher in a pubic school like Tony Danza's and like the one I worked in is how many middling bureaucrats and administrators there are out there who want nothing more in life than to lecture you about picking up your roster or punching in. Oh, Ms. De Naples, you punctilious minx, I knew her when.

They Schools

In an other life, one in which I provided the world with some modicum of benefit, the life I lead before I took up my current occupation (writing orders that turn out to be unnecessary, doing research for cases that settle before anyone looks at my incompetent work product) was a life marked by various hardships: 5:45 AM alarm bells, followed by a commute made up of multiple modes of transportation (bus, subway, foot) to a job that took years off my life and allowed me to use the bathroom only at designated times of the day.

I can't say that I miss the time I spent miseducating the Bronx youth--after all, there is no joy like the joy that comes with sitting in a temperature-controlled office, putting on your headphones and blasting Prince while reviewing some CEO's emails (emails which may or may not contain damning admissions of liability, but which most certainly contain pictures of bare breasts fashioned with Christmas ornaments--attorney client privilege prevents me from providing a link here). Well, there might be an equivalent joy, now that I think of it: the joy of being able to evacuate one's bladder at the moment the urge arises. Thank you, corporate America. Thank you for that.

Anyway, back to my previous life: one day, at some point in the middle of my first year, I was told that for the rest of the term a Mr. Yeats was to provide me with a Tuesday respite from my den of unruly little monsters. He was the Social Studies teacher, I was informed, but I had not yet met him; I had not heard mention of his name even in the course of my first three or four months. It turned out that Mr. Yeats had spent the better part of the school year, imprisoned in teacher's purgatory, a mythical place that I would later fantasize being dispatched to, and which I imagined as a cinder-block-lined room with dozing teachers and strewn-about copies of the New York Post.

Apparently, Mr. Yeats had been involved in some incident the previous year--a student had accused him of some crime or indiscretion, and until the matter was resolved, he had to live out his week-days, 8-3, in teacher's purgatory down near the UFT office in Brooklyn. What Mr. Yeats did was never made clear to me, but upon his return, he seemed hell-bent on not repeating himself: The man was the most oblivious, disengaged teacher I've ever seen in inaction. Literally, he stood at the chalkboard, with his back to the students, droning on about the Boston Tea Party. So many fights broke out during Mr. Yeats' "classes" I gave up yet another bathroom opportunity to sit at my desk, trying to impose some order.

Anyway, two things reminded me of Mr. Yeats today: this insane article about a teacher being cast off to the middling confines of what I imagine is Phoenix's teacher purgatory because she dared use masking tape to designate boundaries for some of her more active students, and this wonderful This American Life piece on "The Rubber Room"--the proper nomenclature for New York's teacher purgatory.