FACULTY NEWS
Penn Charter Gets
SCHOOLED by Rebecca Luzi
It’s not wholly unexpected for former teachers of Adam F. Goldberg OPC ’94 to get the call: Can you come to the set of Schooled in Culver City, Calif., to film an interview with the actor who plays you? Unexpected, maybe not. Thrilling, yes. Schooled is the ABC series—a spinoff of The Goldbergs— based on Penn Charter teachers that debuted in January. The latest teachers to jet out to Sony Studios to be filmed with the actors who play them, for a cameo interview in the series created by Goldberg, are math teacher Liz Flemming and visual arts teacher Randy Granger. Liz Flemming got the invitation in January and began her whirlwind journey back to the ’90s as Adam F. Goldberg’s math teacher. “I taught him eighth grade Algebra I,” she said. “He was a terrible math student, but he did fine in my class. He was in the C section. He told me he was supposed to be in the D section, but his mother begged and screamed and cried that he needed to be in C section or he wouldn’t get into college.” Thanks to his “smother,” Beverly Goldberg (immortalized in the ABC series The Goldbergs), who saved everything, Goldberg knows he earned a B- in Flemming’s class. Not bad for a kid who spent all his time with a camera on his shoulder.
Liz Flemming with Lennon Parnham, the actress who plays her on Schooled.
“Math was not his natural thing, and it wasn’t his interest either,” Flemming recalled. “But he did what he had to do.” Goldberg was funny in class, she said, and he carried his camera with him “anytime a teacher didn’t yell at him to put it away.” As part of her interview prep, Flemming shared her memories with Goldberg and Schooled writer Kerri Doherty. And she learned about her character, a rather intense teacher, and former track and mathletes coach. Sound familiar? The real Ms. Flemming has coached track, cross country, basketball and Math Counts. As for intense, Flemming passed along to Goldberg a recommendation from a current student athlete that her character “needs to be obsessively keeping track of stats.” Once Flemming got a tour of the sprawling studio, finished with hair and makeup, and left her very own trailer—reserved for “Real Liz Flemming,”—she sat high in a director’s chair next to actress and comedian Lennon Parnham, who plays her on Schooled.
Liz Flemming’s trailer at base camp at Sony Studio, labeled “Real” Liz Flemming.
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“Mostly what I was focusing on was trying to take it all in and be there in the moment,” Flemming said. “It was so surreal. I was nervous, but I was trying so hard to just be there that it wasn’t a bad thing. I was enjoying it.”
