'Teachers Lounge' is a web series I co-created with Hollis James. We intentionally left the apostrophe out to turn 'Lounge' into a verb. The show is about teachers lounging around, wasting time.
I think of myself as the queen of lounging. No lounge queen is complete without lounge clothes and house wigs.
The term 'web-series' has a stigma attached to it because it was created at a time when the only web-series that were being created were being created by people who would have loved to have a television show, but they couldn't. So they created a web-series instead, on their own dime. And those series look cheap because of it.
With a project like 'Teachers Lounge,' you're wearing a lot of hats, so it demands hard work and focus if you want to do it right.
Barack Obama's class has always been an illusion clouded in faculty lounge, lizard lounge talk, and Michelle Obama's class has actually been told us by the media that it exists, but there isn't any. There isn't anything that's real. Everything on the left is a fraud. Everything on the left is a lie.
I walked across the polished marble floor and sat on a red velvet lounging couch. I idly wondered how exactly one was supposed to lounge. I couldn't remember ever doing it myself. After a moment's consideration, I decided lounging was probably similar to relaxing, but with more money in your pocket.
I think comedy is no different now than it was at other points. It takes a long time to get good and know how to distill what makes you funny beyond the realm of standup, which is what I'm trying to do with 'Teachers Lounge.'
Comedians act every night on stage, so they have great performing chops. They especially know how to play themselves, which is how we set 'Teachers Lounge' up.
Teachers are expendable, overworked, underpaid, and many times disrespected by students, parents and higher-ups. Nonetheless, these teachers still show up because there are some who are teachers indeed.
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
Singapore gives 10% "white space" time to all of its teachers to come up with their own innovations outside of the official curriculum. This encourages teachers to turn to their colleagues for inspiration and ideas.
My first show was at Here Lounge in West Hollywood.
There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors.
All teachers are good for someone. There are some teachers out there who I cannot stand, for whatever reason. I cannot even bear the sound of one teacher's voice. Yet they are wonderful teachers for other people. They just are not for me.
There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors. And yet there's this political conversation - this reform conversation - that paints a very negative picture of the effectiveness of the teaching population. So there's definitely a tension between the way teaching is talked about and understood at the political level and how everyday average Americans think about teachers.
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
I was known around the college for jamming in the lounge.