Merli

In college, I learned two things in Philosophy 101:

(1) That all philosophers were men.  (According to the textbook title, Socrates to Sartre, and all the chapters between Socrates and Sartre)

(2) It's not a good idea to pick up a kitty on campus and take it to class in your book bag--or the professor will ask you to leave and take your cat home.

The content of the course was way over my sophomore head at the time and I wondered, "Who thinks about this stuff?"

I wish I'd had a teacher like Merli--in the Spanish series I'm watching on Netflix!

Unlike my rather dry professor, whose name I've long ago forgotten, Merli of Barcelona teaches philosophy as he does everything else--flouting the rules of the school and teaching each philosopher in the most engaging ways.

His students, including his son in the class, are seventeen-year-olds driven by hormones and unhappy home lives, smart and curious and funny and crazy about their teacher most of the time, except when they're furious at him.

It's a brilliant series about classroom dynamics and learning, judgments of other people, compassion, and students learning to question authority and think for themselves.

When one of Merli's more mature female students is humiliated (by a nude video sent by her ex-boyfriend to one of her classmates who sends it all around the school), Merli manages to downplay the drama and teach the kids to imagine how hard it is for her to get past a former mistake.  Spontaneously, several of the kids take off their shirts and blouses in a moment of solidarity with her.

As you might imagine, Merli gets in trouble with the principal more often than his students.  He flouts the rules at every turn.  He's a tender, caring, eccentric, teacher whose personal life is as bumpy as his students' lives are, but he uses it--as he does theirs--to illustrate the universal questions discussed by Socrates, Plato, the Sophists, and the rest.