Janine Teagues is the absolute worst.

Janine Teagues is the absolute worst. “Abbott Elementary” protagonist is anything but. As a former teacher, let me just say if I worked with Janine, I would be disgusted by her lack of respect for her co-workers, accountability as a professional to her peers and students, and her damn near nonexistent empathy. Janine’s reckless abandon and irresponsibleness are under the guise of optimism, newness, and a desire to do “what it’s best for her students.” In all actuality, Janine, at every turn, is doing what feels good to her, affirming her own ego and a not-so-noble attempt to parent her inner child. It almost feels like the writers don’t understand basic professionalism, and viewers do not based on the overwhelming support for what is a problematic ass character.

Let’s dissect each one:

1. Respect

In the episode “Juice,” Janine goes to the cafeteria meeting and is excited about a new juice option with “more juice.” First of all, juice is not healthy; I feel like, at this point, that is common knowledge, and yet Janine is happy her students will be getting more of it. Smh. Janine’s entry into the cafeteria meeting is disrespectful; instead of entering the room as they are her peers, she walks in like a tornado, and her idea to embrace the juice is not open to conversation. In addition, her peers try and warn her, albeit in not too many words, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And again, instead of a conversation, she steams and rolls through her seasoned co-workers with her excitement. The extra few ounces cause the students to go to the bathroom more frequently.

A student then systematically takes down the bathrooms. When the hallway bathrooms are out of order, and Janine has to take her second-grade class upstairs, she asks to use her co-worker Babara’s Kindergarten bathroom during class which distracts Barbara’s students. Kindergarten has a bathroom for a reason; they can’t be expected to hold it. When Barbara tries to put her Kindergartener at the front of the line, Janine says it’s unfair. They aren’t old enough to ignore distractions. When Barbara tells Janine she can no longer use the restroom when Barbara is not in her classroom, she decides to take her students to the Kindergarten restroom anyway. You do not enter another teacher’s classroom without consent. Period. When I was teaching, I had a fridge and microwave in my supply closet, and even when I was not in my room, teachers would find and ask me to enter. There is an understanding that your purse, student materials, etc., are in the room, and it is always your space. Janine’s class then breaks that bathroom as well, and now everyone has to go upstairs. This leans more towards accountability, but when Janine apologizes to Barbara, she brings up how it’s also Barbara’s fault for not explaining her reasoning behind not embracing the new juice idea, especially since she has more experience. Janine did not at any point ask Barbara why? Respect in schools, simply put, means to be considerate. Janine is not. Respect creates an environment that eliminates me versus you, and us versus them and allows everyone to coexist under the assumption that we are all doing our best. Respect furthers teacher outcomes and positive interaction. I am more likely to work with someone, whether teacher-teacher, teacher-student, or student-student, if I feel like they aren’t out to get me. Respect determines how I treat you, and you treat me. By default, I assume positive intent, but after so many times of you overtalking me, barging into my classroom, breaking facilities, ignoring my advice, bullying your way into my lessons, and stealing equipment to get my attention, I am going to assume you don’t respect me. And if you don’t respect me, fudge you, Janine.

2. Accountability

Janine makes some pretty big mistakes. Being in a school like Abbott requires you to be patient, resourceful, and resilient. Janine is not those things. She never learns her lesson. She never truly apologies, and instead of teaching her students to aspire and overcome, she teaches them to act without regard and if you don’t like your odds, change the game. It’s irresponsible. Children don’t try when they fear failure and it’s an awful quality in adults. Barbara is resourceful and resilent. Barbara gets a grant for the school after several years of trying and decides to get a handicap ramp and, with the remainder of the funds, cleaning supplies and wipes. Accessibility is essential, and a clean and safe environment is a good allocation of funds. Cleaning supplies and wipes are not covered by the school and can quickly exhaust a teacher’s pockets. Shout out to the maintenance workers, but one or two are not enough to truly clean a school with so many students, whether 100 or 1000 students. Desks and other surfaces are not within their custodial duties. Classroom crumbs from your kids wanting to eat pop tarts and Takis can’t wait till the end of the day. The roaches don’t care. Janine sees that the Charter School down the road has computers in the classrooms and becomes hyper fixated on the money being open to all in the school to satisfy wants and not more immediate needs. She fights tooth and nail for one measly computer. That is going to be maintained by what IT department when a kid inevitably goes to a questionable gaming site or is drinking their fruit punch and spills into the keyboard. It’s unfortunate, but there are a lot of infrastructure needed. But back to Janine and accountability, she does it time and time again, power outages, broken toilets, flooding, snakes, and so much of it boils down to her ignoring advice, ignoring procedures, making uninformed decisions, making impractical pride-based decisions. But when she fails, it’s because of the system, her being a novice, or “understandable” insecurity. She needs to learn to see the bigger picture, anticipate consequences, and use those moments as teaching moments. The most recent episode, “Egg Drop,” gave us really good insight; she is afraid of failure, but how is she supposed to teach her kids the importance and value of failure, the joy of failure, to have resilience from failure, to learn from failure, and take responsibility for our failure, if this woman decided instead of learning to tie her shoes she’d like just wear velcro sneakers.

3. Empathy

The saddest part is Janine fails to realize damn near everyone at the school cares. I have yet to see a single character that doesn’t love and do their best. Yes, this is a show, but everyone is a background character to her. Even her friends and inner circle. It’s the Janine show. You’ve got to be a team player in education; it takes a village. Janine inserts herself like a dictator. Gregory as stoic as he is, offers to help Janine through her spiraling and gives her doses of fact and truth, asks for help when needed, and alters his teaching to the students’ needs and he is new new. Jacob gives up his planning to teach the gifted program at her request. Melissa offers to teach Janine to cook and invites her to her home. I have yet to see what Janine does for her kids beyond cultivating blind belief in oneself without effort or professional peers beyond criticizing and admonishing them as not caring as much as her.

Janine has a lot of growing to do to earn my professional respect. Respect, accountability, and empathy are the foundations of a quality educator. Hell they are qualities that will lead you to great things in any profession.