Go see the film Bully. All of the controversy about its MPAA rating was warranted, because it presents a powerful glimpse into the painful realities young people face in schools across the country. It’s a documentary that everybody needs to see, because we are long overdue for a serious conversation about bullying.

“‘Kids will be kids,’ ‘boys will be boys,’ ‘bullying is a rite of passage’ — these are myths.” Both AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel emphasized this point repeatedly in the panel discussion after Tuesday night’s screening. And it’s true: young people are demeaning, harassing, sexually harassing, and assaulting their peers on a daily basis and there is no excuse for it. Bully‘s most important take-away is surely the brutal wake-up call for just how bad things have gotten: it’s impossible to watch 12-year-old Alex get cursed, beaten, and strangled — and take it — without your heart absolutely breaking for him. Add to that the complete lack of accountability for school administrators to intervene (and the negligence they demonstrate as a result) and you leave the film with a sense of anger and alarm that bullying was ever treated like it wasn’t a big deal.

One concern that has been raised is the film’s portrayal of suicide through the lens of two families who recently lost their sons. Emily Bazelon suggests that the lack of context about Tyler Long’s mental health is conspicuous and misleadingly implies that bullying was the only factor that led to his suicide. This apparent misrepresentation is disconcerting, and Bazelon is right that mental health concerns should always be included in conversations about suicide. Still, she neglected to mention that when Tyler’s parents hosted a town hall about bullying after his death, no school administrators could be bothered to show up. This isn’t a film about suicide — it’s a film about how little we are doing to protect kids from peer abuse. Clearly this was a school that did not see bullying as a problem but that had a lot of parents and students who did. The Long family felt that bullying had significantly impacted Tyler’s life and sought to rectify that lack of accountability to protect other children, and none of the additional context of his story takes away from that reality.

So ultimately, I don’t feel like this discrepancy takes away from the film in the same way Bazelon does. Yes, suicide contagion is a real concern, particularly if suicide is portrayed as a direct or inevitable result of bullying, a point I’m not going to debate. But conservatives who wish to maintain anti-gay climates in schools also emphasize this point to downplay the impact of bullying, so it shouldn’t be treated as an either/or question. Two years ago, a 14-year-old boy named Brandon Bitner committed suicide two towns away from where I grew up in rural central Pennsylvania. He had been bullied for his perceived sexual orientation, but at his funeral, the eulogizing religious leader absolved the community of any accountability for how Brandon was treated, choosing to blame only his depression. The way I felt on that day is the same way I felt leaving Bully — not that bullying causes suicide, but that given bullying can be a trigger for a young person to take his own life, it shouldn’t take such a death for a community to address the problem.

In this way, Bully is a call to action, busting down a closet door of apathy about an issue that intersects all of our lives. There is much we still need to learn about the impact and extent of bullying, but we now have an incredible launching point for the revolution our schools deserve.

In the days after it became clear that a winning MegaMillions ticket had been sold in Maryland, speculation ran rampant over who would come forward to claim it, especially after a woman named Mirlande Wilson first claimed to be the winner, then said she’d lost the ticket. Now, more details have emerged about the real winners, and as Maryland Lottery Director Stephen Martino said “It couldn’t have happened to nicer people.”

While the winner’s names are being kept private, it turns out the three of them work in Maryland’s public education system as an elementary school teacher, a special education teacher, and an administrative assistant—and all of them work second jobs as well. They do not work in the same school, but know each other from work, and each contributed $20 to go in on tickets as a pool. They will take home $35 million after taxes, and according to Martino, plan to purchase homes, travel in Europe, and pay for their children’s college educations. And, in a nice little rebuke to ugly sentiments that paint public school teachers and public servants as lazy, Martino said they plan to keep teaching.

There is something quite nice about the idea that the MegaMillions will, at least in one state, enrich people of previously modest means. But that story’s only heartwarming in the first place because we don’t pay teachers enough so that they don’t need to take second jobs. It’s bittersweet that chance is making up for our failures of policy.

Pop culture has a real tendency to oversell the idea that one dynamic teacher can change a child’s entire life. But if it’s supposed to be correcting for that tendency, Glee‘s gone from being a realistic show about low teacher pay and school budget cuts to a fairly naked expression of contempt for educators.

Take last night’s episode. First, we learn that far from being the dedicated Spanish teacher we were lead to believe Will Schuester was, he’s actually an incompetent racist. He’s so bad at the language he’s supposed to be teaching that it’s embarrassing, and he only signs up for remedial classes when he has a shot at getting tenure that would make him feel more secure about marrying Emma. Will’s understanding of the culture he’s supposed to be contextualizing limited to mariachi hats, ponchos, and bullfighters—Santana’s ethering of his lack of interest and commitment unless he has a chance for self-aggrandizement was eminently deserved, even if Will had to stick around long past when he should have been fired, if these skills are any indication. It’s been clear for a long time that Will isn’t particularly interested in teaching, whether he’s spending all his time auditioning for a musical or enlisting the glee club to spend a huge amount of time to choreograph his proposal rather than working on anything relevant to their education or after-school activities. But there’s something really gross about how terrible he is at his job and how little he’s cared about that for three years. Blowing off your primary responsibilities to your students in favor of after school activities isn’t cute or evidence of passion.

And Will’s not alone. Emma spends most of the episode passing out flyers with taglines that should get her fired: even in the cause of getting kids to pay important issues, there is never a situation where it’s okay to call kids as two-timing hos or use words like “taint” with them. And yet, she’s rewarded with tenure by the end of the episode. Not that I believe Glee is governed by logic or anything, but the only way to interpret that in any coherent way is that McKinley High rewards incompetence and the tenure system is hopelessly rigged to protect teachers who would otherwise be fired. It’s like Michelle Rhee wrote this episode or something.

There are a few bright spots. Crazy Sue Sylvester, bless her, actually takes feedback seriously (and the show would be smart to pair her with NeNe Leakes, giving Sue some space to be less of a cartoon villain) when she knows it comes from a place of genuine investment in the Cheerios’ excellence. Ricky Martin single-handedly made the case for immigration reform, bilingual education, and passion in teaching, which I’d be stirred by if I didn’t think those excellent points and the hunk of handsome delivering them were going to sink below a tidal wave of dreadful. But Glee’s reached a truly impressive point: it hates its characters, it appears to hate us, and it’s coasting along believing it can convince us not its contempt for everything from coherence to public educators.