Watching Dexter
When I’m home in the Midwest, I can count on my sister-in-law to introduce me to great TV shows. A while back, we watched almost an entire season of Weeds. Yesterday, she introduced me to Showtime’s Dexter.
If you’ve never watched Dexter, here’s a brief rundown: by day, main character Dexter is a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police department. By night, he’s a serial killer. As an infant, he was found in a crate with his murdered mother and was adopted by a police officer. His adopted father noticed that Dexter was odd–he was antisocial and enjoyed killing animals, among other things. Realizing that Dexter had these tendencies, dad took to teaching Dexter how to be appropriately social, eventually teaching him how to channel his sociopathic, murderous urges into something more positive.
My favorite part of each episode is the use of flashback. In the present time, Dexter’s dad is deceased, so the flashbacks offer us the only glimpse into their relationship. During the flashbacks, we witness dad pointing out and explicitly teaching social skills to Dexter. Some of the lessons included in the first-season episodes I watched:
- Smile for pictures, even if you’re not happy.
- Don’t be a bully. Even if you’re trying to fit in with the other kids, it should never come at the expense of someone else.
It struck me how much raising Dexter was like working with my students. Granted, my students are not sociopaths, and they don’t feel the urge to kill things. But they don’t fit in. They lack important social skills that other kids pick up on by eavesdropping. I notice this even more with my student who has Asperger’s Syndrome–in all probabilty, even if he could eavesdrop on social cues, they wouldn’t be on his radar.
From Dexter’s father, I can see many years of my job laid out in front of me. There is always something more to teach. And if I approach it like the father character–with patience, compassion, and as the situations present themselves–my students will turn out just fine.
