My husband stopped on Teach: Tony Danza while channel surfing. I was immediately intrigued. In fact, I swear it was just the day before I was thinking about how difficult it would be to do a reality TV show of a classroom or high school. I couldn't sit down and watch since we were getting ready to go out. Luckily, A&E has the full episode on their web site, so we watched it that evening instead. The DVR is now set to record the whole series.
Overall, I felt bad for Mr. Danza. The first few days of teaching are so difficult and embarrassing and to be scrutinized by so many venues made it almost painful to watch. Watching a show like this, viewers are waiting to see him make a huge mistake that a real teacher wouldn't do. Viewers expect the big celebrity to come in and say how difficult teaching is. But, Tony Danza isn't just waltzing in there. Unlike Paris Hilton's silly little TV show from a few years ago, he has a degree in eduction and has taken every step of the process seriously. There is footage of him scrubbing his classroom (which is something that I didn't always know that some teachers have to do themselves), putting up his bulletin boards, and attending teacher orientation.
Watching him over the first week, he makes mistakes that are common for all new teachers. But, he is lucky that he is being told about them. I went maybe two months or more teaching at my first position before I was observed and received feedback for improvement. He is getting valuable feedback so early that he can make adjustments the second week of school!
The major piece of feedback Danza receives is that he talks too much. Even though I'm sure that he isn't the first teacher to get this criticism, it hits him hard personally. But often criticism of teaching is hard not to take personally. That just seems to be something in the nature of teaching. Especially when the teacher is as enthusiastic as Danza, the teaching is personal because so much hope and passion have been put into it. But, the viewer can really see that by the end of the week, he's gotten the message. Now the challenge will be how to relinquish control over to the students, because right now he is doing all the work. Like he said himself, he feels he is preforming for them. While teaching is preforming at times, it is also a lot of guiding and weaving student input together.
Meanwhile, he appears to have no business being involved with the football team. I personally think the producers of the show had something to do with that move. Otherwise, both he and the head coach were real idiots thinking he could coach without any knowledge on the subject. That's precisely why I never volunteered to do anything with sports. I never played sports or even really watched them. How could I possibly help coach? I think that Danza's interest in the band will be better placed because he at least has some music background. But, from the previews, it looks like he is helping a new extracurricular each week. This feeds my idea that this is to make the show more interesting. However, Danza's work with extracurricular activities does show the habit new teachers have of taking on too much, too soon.
My only other criticism of this show is that it appears that Dana only has one class. A&E's web site says that he was a full time teacher, but only one class is seen on the show. Is it because he had only one class? That's not full time then. Is it because they could only get one class worth of students to participate? That is very possible. Either way, I dislike that only one class is discussed. Even if the producers can not legally show those students, Danza should at least make reference to the fact that he has other classes. He isn't taking on the full role of a teacher with only one class. While everything so far has been very real, the fact that he only has this one class, makes the intensity of it so much less for me, because in real life, that experience is multiplied 5, 6, 7 times. Parring down a teacher's class load to one group of students is very popular in media, though. In fact, I can't think of a single movie or show that really shows a teacher dealing with more than one class at a time. I understand that this makes it easier for the audience to follow, but it doesn't depict reality. I don't expect viewers to keep track of 100+ students, but there should be a happy medium.
I am very interested in the topics raising in the previews and I'm excited to watch the rest of the series.
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