A Job Interview at WJM-TV

The chief of my teaching assignments, my school has given me to understand, are likely to be teaching business people. Right at the moment, this is true; of the three teaching assignments I have, two are in corporate settings (the third is a girl of 11 who is a true joy to teach).

Teaching business people, I find, poses some unique challenges. I sometimes feel I have to fake a knowledge of the corporate world I do not have and, frankly, no longer desire. Another challenge is the sheer volume of business-related terminology and idioms I have to teach. In the course of one lesson, I found myself having to teach ASAP, get the ball rolling, hedge your bets, and when the chips are down. None of these are easy to explain.

But there are some definite advantages to teaching business students as well. They are, for the most part, polite and well-behaved. There is the change of scenery I get by traveling to and from different assignments. And then today, there was the opportunity to use my favorite television episode of all time in the classroom: the very first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I attempted to use Mary in the classroom once before, when I took CELTA training in New York. That time, the lesson I gave was an absolute disaster, because I tried to accomplish far too much and tried to use the program with a group of students who were not able to handle it. But today, I managed to handle the episode almost perfectly. Instead of trying to do the whole half-hour episode, I focused on the scene for which the episode is justly famous--Mary's interview with Mr. Grant. I set my students the clear task of evaluating Mary's performance as a job candidate and Mr. Grant's performance as a job interviewer. And above all, I had chosen my audience carefully: a classroom of managers who frequently have to make hiring decisions.

If I have seen Mary's interview with Mr. Grant once, I must have seen it a thousand times. But my students had interesting reactions to it. I was delighted that they were able to find the humor in the scene, and that they understood the comprehension questions I gave them afterward about what had happened. Humor is often the hardest thing to translate from one culture to another, and I get the feeling this is doubly true when English speakers and Russian speakers interact. But I was happy that I was able to share a part of my culture I truly love.

My students grasped at once that Mr. Grant is an alcoholic. They were as put off by his questions about Mary's marital status and religion as any American would be. One of my students informed me that, although it is not actually illegal in Russia to ask questions about a job candidate's religion, it is considered very rude. (Marital status may be another matter; I gather that outside of the United States, it is actually quite common for candidates to list their marital status on a resume, and I have no reason to expect that this is less true in Russia).

Overall, my students thought both Mary and Mr. Grant had done poorly in the interview. They saw at once that Mary probably knew nothing about the company or the job she was applying for and had failed to put her best foot forward. And one thing one student said really stuck with me: she called Mary "stupid."

Many words spring to mind when one thinks of Mary Richards: bad hostess, luckless dater, confident career woman, feminist icon. "Stupid" is not generally one of them. But thinking it over, I have come to realize that in a certain sense, my student was right. Mary did an enormous number of truly stupid things during her seven years at WJM. Much of the humor of the show resulted from Mary's seemingly total inability to exert authority when the situation clearly required it. Although she was called an associate producer, the actual work she was shown doing on the program seemed to differ little from the kind of secretarial work she was originally seeking the day she met Mr. Grant. When Mary won our hearts, it was usually for her attempts to keep peace in impossible circumstances, not for the sharpness of her mind.

Don't get me wrong; I've always loved Mary Richards, ever since I first saw her on Nick at Nite back in the day, and I always will. But seeing people watch her with none of out American preconceptions about what Mary is supposed to be or represent has definitely given me a new perspective on her. If, in the '70s, her presence on television seemed like an important breakthrough, that may say more about the '70s than about Mary herself. I may loathe Carrie Bradshaw, but I have to admit that, in six seasons of seeing her brazenly pursue love and labels, the woman I think of as Little Miss Charge Card stuck up for herself in ways Mary Richards never did.