It Was Always About Kindness

There were myriad reasons I wanted to become a middle-school teacher, but I won’t get into those now (it involves my wife, Denzel Washington, and the state of the world). What matters is that about a year ago, I decided it’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. A few months later, I was hired as a long-term substitute, filling in for one of the most remarkable teachers I’ve ever seen. I had zero idea what I was doing. I hadn’t been in a classroom since law school, which I started in a different century, and for some reason, I thought two decades of writing for a pop-culture website would prepare me to teach 8th graders. I was an idiot.

One of the last things that teacher told me before she went on leave was, “It’s going to be messy. And that’s OK.” She was right. It was messy. Eight months later, I’m a full-time Social Studies teacher, and it is still messy.

“We laugh, we fall, we get back up. We’re a mess, and that’s fantastic,” Rebecca Welton told Ted Lasso in this week’s season finale, reflecting on the death of Mae. “Being messy just means … being alive.” Nothing makes a person feel more alive than a middle-school classroom. It is messy and chaotic and stressful and frustrating and joyful and almost never boring. I go to work every morning with a pit of nerves in my stomach, and it disappears the second the first kid walks through the door.

And I inhale Ted Lasso these days, warts and all, because Ted Lasso is no more about soccer than middle-school social studies is about memorizing dates. This is what I didn’t know when I got into teaching. They’re both about kindness. About listening, and encouragement, and finding ways to get a little better every day. But mostly, they’re about kindness.

I’ve been watching a lot of Friday Night Lights lately, too, because while I am closer in spirit to the yokel of Ted Lasso, I aspire to be more like Coach Taylor. Discipline was the hardest part of the job at first, because what if I gave a student a consequence and they didn’t like me? But somewhere along the way, it got a lot easier, because I realized that discipline and boundaries are also a form of kindness. I learned a lot of that from th way Coach Taylor pushed his players, but never lost their affection. But I also learned it from watching Ted suspend Alice for a game a few episodes back. It was probably as hard for Ted as it was for Alice, but he knew it was the right thing for her. He was right. Now she’s the head coach, and Ted has demoted himself to her assistant, and in a way, that’s the best possible outcome for someone like Ted Lasso: teaching someone to be better than you are. She always had the content knowledge. Ted just gave her the kindness.

Anyway, I suspect Kaleena will be along with an actual rundown of the Ted Lasso finale, a review that will likely grapple with what has been an inconsistent season. But I wanted to explain why I don’t post as much as I used to (though I’m still very much an everyday presence, and that’s not going to change), and also why I love Ted Lasso so hard: The writing may be inconsistent, but the kindness never is.