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    Jorma Panula: The Teacher Behind the Greatest Conductors

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    “He doesn’t like talking about himself,” Marja Kantola-Panula said, gesturing to her husband, Jorma Panula, across their dining table while he sat silently. He had been asked a question about his sprawling presence in classical music as arguably the world’s most influential conducting teacher. But instead of answering, he took a bite from a pastry.When Panula, 93, does speak, it’s brief and authoritative, at times abrasive and absolutely clear. At his home, a modest yet paradisiacal retreat tucked among trees in the countryside northwest of Helsinki, he explained, “I was in the orchestra, and most musicians, they hate talking.”He is not so different in the classroom, where he is famous for quietly listening, happy to offer advice if students ask for it but otherwise saying little, gruffly, and certainly never lecturing. His approach hasn’t really changed in the half-century he has spent shaping young conductors — at the storied Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and now through master classes and his own school.Think of major Finnish conductors working around the world today — there are a disproportionate number of them — and chances are they studied with Panula. If this country is the world’s top exporter of conducting talents, then he is something like a farmer, cultivating generations of artists: those leading the field, like Susanna Mälkki and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and those emerging in a blaze, like Klaus Mäkelä.“None of us would exist without him,” said Tarmo Peltokoski, the 23-year-old Finn who leads the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. “All the foundation of my conducting comes from him.”Susanna Mälkki, who studied with Panula, conducting the New York Philharmonic.Chris Lee/New York Philharmonic, via Associated PressPeltokoski in particular has a close relationship with Panula because of their shared background: Both grew up in Vaasa, in western Finland, and speak its dialect. It’s there that Panula hosts a conducting competition every three years. But it’s not where he first picked up a baton; he had prepared for a different life, one that led to his graduating, in 1950, from the Sibelius Academy as a student of organ and church music.That school is the namesake of Jean Sibelius, Finland’s most treasured composer, who was still alive, and in his 80s, when Panula moved to Helsinki. One day, a friend told him where the national hero liked to take a walk after lunch. “The next morning, it was rainy, but I took my bicycle to the little bay and waited,” Panula recalled. “It was freezing, and I waited, and waited. He didn’t come, so I went back home.”Later, that afternoon, he ran into a neighbor, who said that Sibelius had arrived right after he left. “Mamma mia!” Panula exclaimed, throwing up his hands in exasperation from a rocking chair in his living room seven decades later. “I was so close.” The two never met.Panula remained at the Sibelius Academy to study conducting, which he decided to focus on as a career, with success: By 1965, he was the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic. His tenure was thoroughly Finnish, with repertoire heavy on homegrown composers, but also pioneering in his commitment to works by, for example, Shostakovich. He composed music as well, for both the concert hall and the opera house.His career as a conductor, however, pales compared with his teaching.Most of Panula’s students begin at a young age, though not always. Dalia Stasevska, 38, the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, didn’t start until her early 20s. She played violin in a Sibelius Academy ensemble that he used in his classes. After seeing Eva Ollikainen (now of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra) at the podium one session, Stasevska told Panula that she was interested in conducting, so he took a receipt out of his pocket, wrote a phone number on it and said, “Call here.” She was so inspired by her first experiences with him, she said, “I couldn’t let go of the baton from my hands.”Express everything with your hands: Klaus Mäkelä, 27, said Panula first taught him to conduct with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.”Miguel Angel Molina/EPA, via ShutterstockMäkelä, 27, and Peltokoski were both adolescents with no conducting experience when they enrolled in Panula’s classes, and they studied with him until adulthood. They got a crash course in his quintessentially Finnish school of thought, which Sakari Oramo, 57, a former student of Panula’s who now teaches at the Sibelius Academy, summarized by saying: “You have to be able to express everything with just your hands. We are a nation of few words.”And so, at least at first, Panula’s students are not allowed to speak while they conduct. They do communicate physically, though. Mäkelä recalled that he was never taught the basic patterns of gesturing time — something easy enough, an actor can pick it up for a role — but that he was immediately made to lead musicians with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.” Once that was accomplished, he added, “we could do whatever we wanted.”“Clarity,” Panula said, “is No. 1, fundamental.”Very quickly, the reasoning behind his lessons becomes clear. To Peltokoski, Panula’s approach to communication set up how to interact with players efficiently, and honestly, to “not suck up to anyone.” And Mäkelä has since noticed how easily conductors develop mannerisms that his education resisted.Panula values close readings of scores, which to him entail more than simply following the notes on the page. “I can see in their faces if they know the music or not,” he said, which means also knowing a composer’s particular style, as well as background. “What kind of literature were they reading?” he added as an example. “What opera did they see? What ballet?”Dalia Stasevska, another Panula student, said, “He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher.”Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesHe often proposes questions without offering answers, Mäkelä said, which makes it “so much more powerful when you find the answer yourself.” If students want more detailed explanations from him, however, he won’t deny them. “They can always ask,” Kantola-Panula said. “The best students will do that.”This method also avoids a pitfall in conducting pedagogy: creating clones. Rather, Oramo said, he “let me make music the way I wanted to do it.” Panula’s students have described him as a close listener, and never a pontificator. (Still, he does get vocal about one bête noire: a conductor who serves audiences instead of orchestra. “Remember who all these gestures are for,” he said. “That is a cardinal fault.”)“He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher,” Stasevska said. “What is so brilliant about his teaching is that it leads to giving space to grow and find your personal style in conducting.”No two Panula alumni look the same onstage. Their similarities emerge during rehearsals: To this day, many of them speak to orchestra players succinctly and purposefully. Like, well, Finns.They do not, however, tend to pick up his personality traits, which are singular and notorious. There is his Finnish directness, and then there is his language — “this old man,” Mäkelä said of the first time he saw him, “swearing like crazy.”Part of his barbed persona was honed in his home region, Ostrobothnia. Oramo’s mother came from there, too, and was, he said, “very much of the same culture as Jorma.” Hearing Panula, he said, “was for me very familiar, almost homelike.”His sense of humor is quite dark, in a way that can be misread; Peltokoski once saw Panula walk out of a master class, then come back after rounding the block, a move that he described as “purely for theatrical effect.”“It’s not the sort of humor all people might like, but it’s very specific to him,” Peltokoski added. “And it’s also essential in understanding him — the sarcasm, the deliberate misleading of people, the wordplay, these sort of ridiculous overexaggerations.”Occasionally, though, Panula’s way of expressing himself has slid into the territory of offensive generalizations. In 2014, he gave an interview in which he glibly said that women were more suited to “feminine” music and were poor interpreters of repertoire like Bruckner symphonies. He was quickly criticized, including by former students.Panula, whose personality quirks are famous, is also known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation.Vesa Laitinen for The New York Times“People, of course, when they get old, become a little bit like characters,” Stasevska said. “There’s some kind of grumpiness. It’s in his personality. But I was surprised by that comment, because I don’t recognize my teacher in that. It was a sad thing for him to say, and I have no idea why he said it.”The Panula that endures in her memory, she said, is the one who nurtured her through artistic and personal struggles. Who took her and others out, almost daily, to lunches that he paid for. Who led “marvelous” discussions about culture and was devoted to his students “beyond anything I ever experienced.”He is known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation, checking in with terse but warmhearted phone calls. Peltokoski’s parents receive a visit when Panula is back in Vaasa. And alumni of his classes make up a far-reaching, still-growing family tree.“I’ve met people in various parts of the world who have been Jorma’s students: architects and pedagogues, people from different walks of life,” Oramo said. “The work he’s done has just been a huge piece of Finnish orchestral life and culture. And the fact that the profession of the conductor is so highly appreciated in Finland is largely the result of his work. He’s irreplaceable.”And Panula doesn’t plan to be replaced any time soon. The morning after the interview at his home, he and his wife were off to Hungary for a master class. In his latest call with Stasevska, she said, she could still hear the “sparkle” with which he discusses new students — who will keep coming as long as he’s alive.Because, asked whether he would ever truly retire, he responded with his trademark concision: “No. Why?” More

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      in Television

      ‘Abbott Elementary’ and the Joys of Living Outside the Main Edit

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      The sitcom has tweaked the mockumentary formula to teach an invaluable lesson about the value of life off-camera.There is a scene, early in the second season of ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” that neatly captures some most contemporary questions about the power and ubiquity of video. Teachers at Abbott, a public elementary school, are in their lounge, watching something alarming. A charter-school company has been running what’s essentially an attack ad against them, featuring unflattering video clips of them on the job. As they process seeing themselves eviscerated onscreen, a question hovers over the proceedings like chalkboard dust: How did the charter school obtain this footage in the first place? The answer comes from the school’s principal, Ava Coleman, who explains that she welcomed in the interloping camera crew — because she had a hard time telling them apart from the regular camera crew, the one supposedly filming the show we’re watching.“Abbott Elementary,” now reaching the close of its second season, is a mockumentary sitcom; its narrative frame involves the production of a documentary about “underfunded, poorly managed public schools in America.” The teachers are used to being filmed, if not always happy about it. (Ms. Schemmenti, the resident South Philly toughie, turns on the regular crew: “See, this is why I never trusted any of youse! Now get the cameras out of my face before I give you a colonoscopy with it.”) They have been subject to a classic sitcom trope, the misunderstanding that leads to humiliation. But the root of that humiliation is unlike most every sitcom character before them: They’ve been captured by the wrong cameras.The show isn’t exactly subtle in its suspicions about what recording culture has done to education.The way “Abbott” deploys comic mix-ups is a technique the show shares with traditional sitcoms, the 20th-century kind with their multicamera setups, stagelike sets and audience laughter (real or simulated). But “Abbott” exists in a world that has been slowly shedding that style. Many examples still exist, but by the end of the aughts, multicamera shows were already seen as quaint compared with their critically acclaimed new counterparts — single-camera comedies like “Arrested Development,” “The Bernie Mac Show” or “Modern Family.” These shows could borrow techniques from film, documentary and reality TV — cutaways, confessional interviews, voice-over — to access jokes unavailable in the old studio-audience setup. The most obvious predecessors of “Abbott” were among them: the American adaptation of “The Office” and, later, “Parks and Recreation,” both long-running NBC mockumentary sitcoms about close-knit workplace colleagues.“The Office” framed itself as a documentary about work at an ordinary company, then let that premise recede into the background; it wasn’t until its final season that it began to reckon with the camera crew’s yearslong presence. “Abbott” has introduced this quagmire much earlier. Across its sophomore year, it has repeatedly turned its attention to the inescapable surveillance we face today — not just from professional camera crews but from one another. Coleman’s gaffe is, in reality, just another expected incursion. The staff’s flabbergasted reaction is an instance of the characters’ not so much breaking the fourth wall as routinely banging their heads against it.The attack-ad scene parallels one from the show’s pilot, in which the premise is introduced. Principal Coleman barges into the teachers’ lounge boasting about the staff’s chance to become famous. After an older teacher, Mrs. Howard, reminds her why the crew is filming — the school is being cast as both underresourced and badly managed — Coleman replies that “no press is bad press.” It’s often unclear whether the biggest challenge facing the teachers is a lack of resources or the fact that Coleman is such an ineffective, uninterested leader. But the charter-school episode marks the first time that the main threat to their work is their own comfort with being observed. The principal may be hilariously awful, but in this case the teachers have ceded their privacy — and that of the small children they teach — to random strangers with cameras.The whole misunderstanding mirrors what the critic Ian Penman once called “the relentless publicity of modern life,” a quality that leads many of us to constantly re-evaluate our relationships with recording technology. On “Abbott,” the main characters have various levels of attachment to cameras and microphones, which wind through plots in countless ways. In one episode, Ms. Teagues — the idealistic protagonist played by the show’s creator, Quinta Brunson — introduces her co-workers to a TikTok challenge that helps them fund-raise for school supplies. Mr. Hill, the dorky young history teacher, tries to help his students start a podcast. Mr. Johnson, the school’s custodian, helps quash a TikTok-style fad and later mugs for the camera at a Sixers game.They’ve been captured by the wrong cameras.But the show sieves most of its video-​age anxiety through Principal Coleman. She pulls out her phone to record videos of teachers arguing. She spends her time watching survivalist reality-TV shows in her office. She live-streams online auctions. The show isn’t exactly subtle in its suspicions about what recording culture has done to education, for either the children or the staff, but Coleman’s online hustles and schemes are a joke that can point in either direction: Sometimes they’re selfish manipulations that waste everyone’s time, and sometimes they pop up in the final act to rescue the school.Crucially, though, it’s the least-pertinent footage that carries an important lesson “Abbott” has for viewers: the value of life lived outside the main edit. In real documentaries, the richest parts often capture something secret or ancillary, something “caught” from outside formal interviews. But these mockumentaries are scripted, meaning showrunners can simply write those moments in. Their use of such footage suggests that the real meaning of our lives is often found outside the stuff we’re presenting on camera for others to see. Even the attack ad speaks to this: Viewers know that the moments captured in that commercial represent only a sliver of what the characters have to offer.“Abbott” uses such incidental footage to interesting effect. In a first-season episode, we watch Mrs. Howard and Mr. Hill try to plant a garden, though neither really knows how. A stoic former substitute, Mr. Eddie, whose father owns a landscaping company, grumbles about the project. Over the course of the episode, the garden mysteriously improves — until, in the closing minutes, we see that Mr. Eddie has been tending to it in secret. In another episode, Ms. Teagues and her visiting sister get into an argument about deep-seated family trauma — one we see play out incidentally, caught by rolling cameras even though it has nothing to do with the supposed theme of the documentary.The question of why the fictional cameras of “Abbott” take this approach has, thus far, gone unanswered. But the show’s sustained critique of our video-saturated era — conditions that models like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” never had to contend with — suggests that the narrative function of this “minor” footage is crucial. TikTok and Instagram, two of Principal Coleman’s favorite platforms, might feature much comedy and the language of storytelling, but neither is all that good at doing what great sitcoms have always done: revealing the ways that people are messy and contradictory and fail to align their private and public selves. In this era of curated video, the way “Abbott” treats seemingly throwaway moments is a reminder that our biographical B-roll, in memories and private impressions, is the most valuable viewing material.Source photographs: Gilles Mingasson/ABC; Tim Robberts/Stone/Getty Images; Manu Vega/Moment/Getty Images.Niela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More

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      in Music

      Ron Miles, Understated Master of Jazz Cornet, Is Dead at 58

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      He enjoyed the admiration of his fellow musicians for decades, but he had just been starting to find his place in the spotlight.Ron Miles, whose gleaming, generously understated cornet playing made him one of the most rewarding bandleaders in contemporary jazz, if also one of its most easily overlooked, died on Tuesday at his home in Denver. He was 58.His label, Blue Note Records, said in an announcement that the cause was complications of a rare blood disorder. Mr. Miles had only recently gained the wider attention that he had long deserved, and his death proved as wrenching as it was unexpected for a jazz world already reeling from a cavalcade of untimely deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.The pianist Jason Moran paid tribute to Mr. Miles in a Facebook post, praising the spirit that he poured into both his compositions and his contributions to other people’s bands. “He’d make a chart with so much soul and simplicity,” Mr. Moran wrote. “And he would imbue any other song with that soulfulness as well. Every turn was original.”For decades, Mr. Miles enjoyed the admiration of insiders and fellow musicians and was known as a munificent educator and standard-bearer on the Denver scene. But his retiring personality and his relative absence from New York conspired with the resolute unflashiness of his playing to keep him out of the brightest spotlight. In his bands, the accompanists were often more famous than the leader.Only with the 2017 release of “I Am a Man,” a collection of seven inspired originals played by an all-star quintet, did the scope of his creativity gain wider recognition. Three years later, Blue Note released the quintet’s second album, “Rainbow Sign,” a set of languorous, poignant tunes that he had written while caring for his ailing father, who died in 2018.The title had a few levels of meaning for Mr. Miles, all of them intertwined. Referring to a passage in the Book of Revelation, when Christ perceives that his skin is multihued, Mr. Miles said the rainbow was a symbol of humanity’s oneness. “The idea of a rainbow is that it’s this thing that takes us outside of our expectations and our limitations of what we can see,” he told the Denver-based publication Westword.While grieving, Mr. Miles had also been drawn to mythology that sees rainbows as a gateway connecting the living to their ancestors. “Those who have left us can come back when we see a rainbow and visit us,” he said, “and we can interact with them through this rainbow.”Ronald Glen Miles was born in Indianapolis on May 9, 1963, to Jane and Fay Dooney Miles. When he was 11, his parents moved the family to Denver, hoping that the mile-high climate would help Ron cope with his asthma, and took jobs as civil servants there.He started playing trumpet in middle school, at a summer music program, and grew devoted to the instrument as a student at East High School. Mr. Miles played in the jazz band alongside the future actor Don Cheadle, who played saxophone, and soon began an apprenticeship with the respected Denver saxophonist Fred Hess.Mr. Miles and Mr. Hess would become collaborators, making a number of recordings together and both serving on the faculty of Metropolitan State University of Denver, where Mr. Miles eventually became director of jazz studies.After graduating from high school, he enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Denver, but soon transferred to the University of Colorado Boulder to study music. He went on to graduate school at the Manhattan School of Music; this was the only period he spent living outside Denver, where he would spend the rest of his career mentoring a generation of musicians — both on the live scene and in classrooms at Metropolitan State.On his first album, “Distance for Safety,” released in 1987, he led a hard-driving trumpet-bass-drums trio infused with equal doses of rock and free jazz. He went on to release a string of consistently unorthodox albums on various small labels, conforming to no favored format or style, including “Witness,” a 1989 quintet date, and “Heaven,” a 2002 duo record with the guitarist Bill Frisell.As Mr. Miles’s career went on, an expansive Rocky Mountain sound seeped ever more indelibly into his compositions and his playing, which was rough around the edges but balanced and controlled at its core. In the 2000s he switched fully from the trumpet to the cornet, a slightly less glamorous instrument that seemed to suit him.Unlike a typical East Coast trumpeter, he rarely flitted or zipped around on the instrument. He approached notes as if to disarm them, sometimes allowing tones to fill themselves out gradually, becoming wide and full and bright. The melodies he traced felt designed to be followed, even when they went fiendishly askew.By his mid-50s, Mr. Miles had become the leading brass player in what can now be considered a legitimate subgenre in jazz: the blending of American folk, blues and country with cool jazz and spiritual influences. One of its originators was Mr. Frisell, a Denver native 12 years older than Mr. Miles. In the 1990s and 2000s, the drummer Brian Blade and his Fellowship Band were its biggest exponents. Mr. Miles worked closely with both musicians.Mr. Miles performing at the Stone in New York in 2006.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesHe began collaborating with Mr. Frisell in the 1990s, playing first in the guitarist’s unusual quartet (joined by trombone and violin); they went on to appear in a variety of each other’s ensembles. Mr. Blade joined them in a trio under Mr. Miles’s direction that recorded a pair of arresting albums, “Quiver” (2012) and “Circuit Rider” (2014), before expanding into a quintet.With Mr. Moran added on piano and Thomas Morgan on bass, Mr. Miles composed for the band with each individual musician in mind. And he gave his side musicians full scores, rather than just individual parts, so they would see how all their voices would move together.The band became a darling of the jazz world, and “I Am a Man,” released on Enja/Yellowbird Records, garnered widespread acclaim. Mr. Miles made his first appearance as a leader at the Village Vanguard last year, playing the storied club’s reopening week after it had been shut down for a year and a half because of the coronavirus.Mr. Miles is survived by his wife, Kari Miles; his daughter, Justice Miles; his son, Honor Miles; his mother; his brother, Johnathan Miles; his sisters, Shari Miles-Cohen and Kelly West; and his half sister, Vicki M. Brown.Mr. Miles was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2017; that same year, he joined the saxophonist Joshua Redman in recording “Still Dreaming,” a tribute to the band Old and New Dreams, with Mr. Miles filling the trumpeter Don Cherry’s chair. The album earned him his lone Grammy nomination.Mr. Miles had also been a member of the pianist Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret, an acclaimed avant-garde quintet; the violinist Jenny Scheinman’s groups; and the blues musician Otis Taylor’s backing band.A decade before Mr. Miles put together his quintet, the New York Times critic Nate Chinen, reviewing a performance with a sextet, made note of how selflessly he led his band. “Mr. Miles, who wrote most of the material for the group, appeared flatly uninterested in solo heroics; he was more intent on submerging himself in a sound,” Mr. Chinen wrote. “The songs felt like internal monologues in open spaces: careful and contemplative but free.” More

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      in Television

      Broken Lights, No Glue: ‘Abbott Elementary’ Has Teachers Talking

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      A new sitcom by Quinta Brunson about a Philadelphia public school is a relatable balm during a period of intense stress for educators.In the second episode of “Abbott Elementary,” a new ABC mockumentary about a group of (mostly) dedicated educators in an underfunded public school in Philadelphia, a second-grade teacher named Janine resolves to fix a flickering hallway ceiling light that the school had ignored.“The more senior teachers are just used to giving in,” says Janine, the bright-eyed protagonist (played by the show’s creator, Quinta Brunson), “but I, however, am young, sprightly and know where they keep the ladder.”For Maurice Watkins, a 28-year-old music teacher in Maryland, Janine’s take-charge approach was laughably familiar. Just recently, he had taken a trip to a discount store to buy mops and brooms to clean the classroom floors of the three public schools where he teaches. While the traditional classrooms undergo a regular cleaning, the spaces where he teaches band and orchestra do not.“As a teacher, you’re left to fix it yourself,” said Watkins, who works with fourth through sixth graders. “Almost every day I go through one of those situations.”(Luckily, Watkins’s attempts at janitorial duties did not go sideways like Janine’s did: After she adjusted a loose wire, much of the school’s power went out.)Six episodes in, Brunson’s “Abbott Elementary” has quickly become a talker among teachers who see themselves and their colleagues reflected in the show’s main characters, who are repeatedly pushed to their wits’ end by administrative chaos, paltry resources and the antics of their students. On social media, some viewers gushed about how relatable the show is to them.The ratings have been strong thus far, with more than 7 million total viewers across all platforms over roughly the first month after the premiere, according to ABC. (There’s Hollywood buzz, too: On Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, the host brought on Joyce Abbott, Brunson’s sixth-grade teacher whom she named the show after, bringing the actress to tears.)Teachers say they recognize the fictional school’s staff in their own halls: the young teacher who is too new to be cynical, the self-serving principal, the ace veteran teacher who is stubbornly set in her ways and the white teacher who falls all over himself trying to seem progressive around his Black students and colleagues.Watkins said that the day after the first episode of “Abbott Elementary” aired in December, “every teacher at school was talking about it.” For some, though, it hit too close to home.“Some teachers I know can’t even watch it,” Watkins said.Teachers say they identify strongly with the challenges Janine and her colleagues face on a daily basis: a persistent lack of funding, behavioral problems of students and struggles with introducing new educational technologies.“D — all of the above,” said Alisha Gripp, a principal at a charter middle school in Kansas City, Mo. One aspect of the show that she adamantly does not identify with, however, is the school’s incompetent principal, Ava Coleman (played by Janelle James), who spends her time trimming her Chia Pet and organizing student files by who has the hottest dad.“I think she’s hilarious — but I am nothing like her,” Gripp said with a laugh.In one episode, teachers take to TikTok to drum up school supplies for their students; Janelle James, right, plays the principal. Gilles Mingasson/ABCGripp, who has been an educator for 17 years, said she thought “Abbott Elementary” was a more true-to-life depiction of teaching than those in much other Hollywood fare, including “Boston Public,” a Fox drama from David E. Kelley. That show tended to lean into melodrama in the fictional high school where it was set, making Gripp think to herself, “They’d be fired; they’d be fired; that kid would be suspended.”“It really is cool to have a more realistic, but still entertaining, take on education,” she added.Much of the show’s background comes from Brunson’s mother, who was a public-school teacher in Philadelphia for 40 years, according to two of the show’s executive producers, Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker. The producers and writers also interviewed teachers, school staff members and board members about their jobs.Many of the plot points come from real-life educators, including the main arc of an episode in which Janine becomes wildly successful at using TikTok to ask people to donate school supplies. It comes off as both funny and grim because she has to resort to social media for basic materials like scissors and glue.The TikTok episode reminded Kristina A. Holzweiss, a 52-year-old former teacher and librarian who is now an education-technology specialist at a Long Island high school, of a time several years ago when she independently raised more than $100,000 to buy enrichment materials like Chromebooks and a 3-D printer for her library. This was before TikTok took off, but teachers could use a website called DonorsChoose, which helped them with crowdfunding for their classrooms.“Teachers should not have to do this; this is not in our job description,” Holzweiss said, “but teachers always put their students first.”For some, a show that highlights hard-working, committed educators is particularly welcome right now. As schools across the country reopened after extended pandemic closures, teachers were put in the center of battles over mask mandates and in-person versus remote learning.The struggles of teaching during a pandemic — as well as long-term issues around low pay, benefits and erratic hours — contributed to a nationwide labor shortage at schools, which have struggled to find substitutes for sick teachers and teachers who quit.Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter, left) and Janine in an episode about a new gifted program that goes awry.Liliane Lathan/ABC“When the pandemic happened and everything closed, teachers were heroes,” said Jennifer Dinh, a 31-year-old second-grade teacher in Chino Hills, Calif. “But as soon as the next school year rolled around, it all went out the door.”“Abbott Elementary” tackles the issue of teacher burnout from the outset, showing a young teacher walking out of the building carrying a box of her belongings and raising a choice finger on her way out. (“More turnovers than a bakery,” quips Barbara Howard, played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, who has been teaching in the school district for 20 years.)A theme of the show is the clash between young, newer teachers like Janine, who are learning the physical and emotional toll of trying to fix a dysfunctional school, and the more experienced teachers, who have learned to accept certain things — a flickering light, for example — so that they avoid burnout.“If we burn out, who’s here for these kids?” asks Melissa Schemmenti (played by Lisa Ann Walter), a straight-talking, Sicilian American second-grade teacher.After more than three decades of teaching, Jocelyn Hitchcock, a 57-year-old fan of the show, is determined not to burn out. After 20 years as a music teacher, she grew frustrated by dwindling funding for the arts and shifted to the core subjects. This past fall, Hitchcock started teaching at a small elementary school on the Walker River Paiute reservation in Nevada.Her school has recently dealt with a serious shortage of teachers (the principal has had to teach in the classroom), and she now spends time before and after school tutoring children to help them catch up from the learning deficits created by the pandemic.In “Abbott Elementary,” she said, she finds validation in seeing people on TV going through what she experiences day to day.But because the show is set in a nonpandemic world (at least thus far), Holzweiss said she thought the show was missing an exploration of the greatest challenges that teachers face right now: hybrid teaching, staffing shortages and students lagging behind academically and socially.“It’s an entirely different world now,” she said. More

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      in Movies

      Harry Colomby, Teacher Who Aided a Jazz Great’s Career, Dies at 92

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      A chance encounter with Thelonious Monk led to a 14-year stint as his manager. After seeing a young Michael Keaton at a stand-up club, he became his manager, too.Harry Colomby was a schoolteacher with a love of jazz when he stopped by the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village in 1955 to remind the drummer Art Blakey that he and his band, the Jazz Messengers, were scheduled to perform in a few days at the school where Mr. Colomby taught.While waiting, Mr. Colomby greeted the celebrated composer and pianist Thelonious Monk; they had met once before. “Oh, Harry. Yeah, I remember you,” Mr. Colomby recalled him saying, as detailed in the liner notes to the live 1965 Monk album “Misterioso.” “Say, you got your car here? You can drive me uptown?”In the car, Monk asked if Mr. Colomby was ready to quit teaching. “So I drove Thelonious to his house at 2:30 in the morning and at 3 a.m., a half-hour later, became his personal manager,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure how it happened.”Mr. Colomby’s younger brother, Bobby, the original drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears and later a record producer and an executive at several record companies, said in a phone interview that Monk viewed Harry as someone who was “bright, honest and would work hard,” adding, “Harry told him, ‘I can’t promise you you’ll be rich, but you’ll be appreciated as an artist.’”Thelonious Monk in 1961. “I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician,” Mr. Colomby said. “He was potentially a symbol.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMr. Colomby died on Dec. 25 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 92. His brother confirmed the death.When Mr. Colomby began working with Monk, he was little known beyond the jazz cognoscenti and his unorthodox approach divided critics. He was also rarely heard in New York City because he lacked a cabaret card, which in those days was needed to perform in bars and nightclubs there; he had not had one since 1951, when it was revoked because of a drug arrest. In 1957, Mr. Colomby helped Monk get his card back. His subsequent extended engagement at the Five Spot in the East Village was the beginning of his emergence as a jazz star.For most of the 14 years that he managed Monk from obscurity to renown, Mr. Colomby taught English and social studies at high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Plainview, on Long Island. “I had no illusion about how much money there is in jazz,” Mr. Colomby told the historian Robin D.G. Kelley for his biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” (2009). “But I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician. He was potentially a symbol. He was symbolic of strength, stick-to-it-iveness, purity, you know, beyond music, beyond jazz.”Harry Golombek was born on Aug. 20, 1929, in Berlin, and fled with his parents and his brother Jules to New York City in the spring of 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Family members who had immigrated earlier to the United States changed their surname to Colomby. His father, Saul, who became Fred in the United States, started a watchmaking company in Manhattan. His mother, Elsie (Ries) Colomby, worked there.After graduating from New York University in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Harry began his teaching career.As a manager, Mr. Colomby had only four clients: Monk; the singer and pianist Mose Allison; the comedian and impressionist John Byner; and the actor Michael Keaton.Mr. Byner said that he met Mr. Colomby in the early 1960s at a John F. Kennedy impression contest. “He was fantastic,” he said in a phone interview. “He knew everybody.” But they parted in 1986 because Mr. Colomby became focused on his business with Mr. Keaton.“He left me for another guy,” Mr. Byner said.Mr. Colomby first encountered Mr. Keaton, then a stand-up comic, performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in the late 1970s.“What I saw in Michael was something original,” Mr. Colomby told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I also saw charisma onstage. Something about his look and timing was exquisite.”Mr. Colomby was also the producer or executive producer of starring vehicles for Mr. Keaton including the television series “Working Stiffs” (1979) and “Report to Murphy” (1982) and the films “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Johnny Dangerously” (1984) and “One Good Cop” (1991).In addition to his brother Bobby, Mr. Colomby is survived by his wife, Lee, and his son, the actor Scott Colomby. His brother Jules, who briefly ran a jazz record company, Signal, died in the 1990s.Mr. Keaton was Mr. Colomby’s client for about 25 years, and the two remained friends afterward.“What we shared was, we saw things in an offbeat way and we’d talk for hours and make each other laugh,” Mr. Keaton said in a phone interview. “I was probably the only stand-up whose manager was funnier than he was.” More