Bad Education

Bad Education with Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney started streaming on HBO Max in 2020, and I think I’ve seen it five times start to finish. I’m not sure, exactly, why it resonates with me. Of course, Jackman and Janney kill. They’re amazing. But, it’s not their performances, per se, that draws me in. Here’s the synopsis: A Long Island school superintendent (Jackman) and his assistant (Janney) are credited with bringing the district unprecedented prestige. Frank (Jackman) is a master of positive messaging.

And what does any of this have to do with pillows? It doesn’t. Really. But, it made me think about my own Bad Education and about the status of my current re-education. No one knows I exist. In the world wide web of garage sales (this is how my hilarious mind’s eye sees small business), how in the whole-wide-world would anyone stumble across Belle Pêche? A friend of mine said, “You can’t expect to get organic eyeballs. That’s crazy.” I nodded my head in agreement, but I had zero idea what that meant. During phase one of my re-education, I kind of learned that organic views (eyeballs) generally mean someone ‘naturally’ stumbling across my content. But, how in the whole-wide-world would someone ‘naturally’ stumble across my content when Google hasn’t even ‘naturally’ stumbled across me yet?

My SEO score is 64%. Like, that’s bad. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. So, an SEO score is some mysterious metric that indicates how well your site performs when it comes to search engine optimization. Wait. What? In my re-education I’ve learned that in order for my little garage sale to be seen in the world-wide-web of garage sales, Google has to ‘crawl my site.’ In order for my site to be crawled I have to submit a sitemap or…like… request indexing? I’m just an English major who likes to write and make pillows and I think my site is pretty. And color coordinated. And all the links work, so isn’t that enough for a B? B+? But, in addition to good old fashioned ‘links,’ which I can understand, I also need ‘backlinks’ and according to my bad re-education backlinks are basically votes from other websites. Each of these votes tells search engines: “This content is valuable, credible and useful.” So, it follows, that the more of these “votes” you have, the higher your site will rank in Google and other search engines. Despite hours and hours dedicated to re-educating myself, I still don’t know what any of that means. It’s too abstract and contrary to the 20x20 bright fluffy squares that fly from my sewing machine and coordinate with my couch, my bed, my green velvet chairs with a resounding score of 92%.

At one point, In Bad Education, Frank (Jackman) says, “It’s not perfect. But, it works. What we have here works. I hope we can keep it that way.” Now, that is something I can understand. My site works. It’s not perfect, but it works. Google viewers gave Bad Education a 77%, but Rotten Tomatoes has it holding steady at 94%. I think we all know what this means. Rotten Tomatoes needs to crawl my site.

Cheers from the bright side.

Tracey