Abbott Elementary finale: the sitcom's first season reviewed by a teacher.

When it comes to screen portrayals, few professionals get as a raw deal as teachers. History teacher Jacob Hill’s cable-knit whiteness—“he looks like he dreams in podcasts!” a student says—is clueless about how to get along in a majority-Black school. When she hears how exactly the principal scams her way into local nightclubs, Brunson’s Janine exclaims, “You don’t even look like Jill Scott!” The principal’s deadpan reply: “To white people in South Philly I do!” As with many others’, my unreserved love for Abbott Elementary comes from a personal place too. And as in the series’ fourth episode, when a new progress-tracking app makes the younger teachers suddenly useful to the tech-averse veterans, I also remembered when a 30-year teacher who spent the bulk of her career at an all-girls Catholic school in the South Bronx enlisted me to help her find out which boy was downloading a container ship’s worth of porn from the school Wi-Fi. After a few tense conversations about how much he loved a middle school teacher of his, and how he felt U.S. teachers were worse now, he snapped: “You know these people could never work at a place like Goldman or Alphabet!” You’re right, I thought.