ENGLISH TEACHER
Created by Brian Jordan Alvarez
FX on Hulu
WHO was your favorite English teacher, the one who instilled in you a love of literature? Mine was Mrs. Maroney who, in front of 25 high school boys, extolled the Wife of Bath (from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) as a feminist icon and spoke of Tom Buchanan (The Great Gatsby) with such disdain that I thought he must be a bad neighbor or her ex-husband. When I wrote fervently about the novelist E. M. Forster, she read between the lines, understood why I dwelled on his gay themes, and graded the research paper with a nonjudgmental openness that was brave in a Catholic school in the 1990s. Mrs. Maroney was the catalyst for me to go on to major in English, earn a doctorate, and become an English professor myself.
A new TV series titled English Teacher, created by and starring Brian Jordan Alvarez, centers on the tumultuous teaching career of the loud and proud Evan Marquez, who vainly tries to inspire his students while standing beneath a sign that reads “English is Infinite.”
Colin Carman, an assistant professor of English at Colorado Mesa University, is the author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys.
