God, I’ve got a lot. They weren’t really stupid in the detrimental sense, though. In fact, they greatly livened up my schooling years.
Back in elementary school, I was too young to immediately appreciate the humour.
Have you ever noticed how they assign dangerously psychotic teachers to elementry school, where students are too young to press charges or sue? The vice-principal, Larry, strangled a friend of mine in class once. I went home with him after school that day, so I was there when he told his father. The reply was, “Yeah. When I was in school his brother, Barry, did the same thing to me.”
We had a math teacher that screamed, “Twit!” a lot (like she was trying to attract birds) and slamming metre sticks on people’s desks. A minor infraction resulted in lots of screaming and slamming, oftentimes using the word, “Scatterbrain!” (she reserved, “Twit!” for cordial states of affairs, when no one needed discipline). The funniest moment was when she caught someone changing his pants in the back of class (think grade four: it rocked our worlds).
Those are the only things worth mentioning before junior high, although a friend of mine once told me about her schooling greats. In fifth grade, her principal got in a physical fight with two of the kids. She described the principal’s weird arm motions and said there was nothing funnier than seeing two fifth graders kick the sh*t out of him. “It was one of those rare moments that make schooling entirely worthwhile.”
In grade eight I had an English teacher who discouraged my fondness for creative writing. I will admit, I usually doubled the length of intended assignments, but I think her job was to nurture. At the end of the year she gave us a week to do a ten to twelve page story which would count for a large portion of our marks. I handed in a one hundred and twelve page story (typed). She made me hand in something shorter, I complained to the principal, who made her READ THE LONG ONE IN HIS OFFICE. I truly pity her, because it was a really lame first attempt at a novel. I think it had dolphins as the stock antagonist.
Our gym teacher commanded no respect whatsoever and often had dangerously unruly classes (picture two jocks spending twenty minutes trying to smother someone with crash mats), but her health classes were a study of human abberance. She often told us what orgasms were like, what ejaculate tasted like (bleach; in reminiscing, we often took it to the next logical, philosophical step… how did she know what bleach tasted like?), how her son almost bled to death through the penis, her husband’s apprehension at his prostate exam, how the superintendant caught her birthing calves while topless… the whole gamut of vital human experiences.
Our computer teacher spent all class looking up porn. He would get grumpy if you tore him away from his porn with something as trivial as your PC crashing and deleting a year’s worth of work. My best friend spent four months working on a multimedia extravanganza/final project. The teacher went to preview it during Christmas holidays and deleted it. He told my friend this, adding, “What I saw over your shoulder look pretty good. I’ll give you eighty-five.”
My friend, “Hmmn. I think I’ll goof off in the next few months before the semester ends.”
“Okay.”
Somehow, this guy’s real teaching job wasn’t computers, but social studies. As a social studies teacher, he greatly believed in seeking enlightenment for one’s self. Often times he’d show up late, and once or twice he’d not show up at all. We’d have to go look for him (wasn’t a difficult search, he was in front of his porn processor in the computer room) and, in the end, we ended up teaching ourselves what we needed to know. Our class had above average social grades at the end of the year, first time hot girls talked to me because I was smart.
Our math teacher was too much of a buffon to be eccentric. A common occurance (occurence? looks incorrect at three in the morning) was him peering into the hallway where a bunch of unsavoury thugs were loitering just outside his door, so he’d summon his wits and run his pink-shirted pudginess over the intercom, where he’d ask one of the secretaries to come down and chase them away. Yeah, because those sixty-year old women are really fierce when they’ve got the correct sized ledger.
We had a kid in our school who was huge, six foot seven inches and about three hundred pounds, maybe more. One day he was standing behind the library door and when the librarian tried to leave he found himself faced with a problem. The short, scrawny, bookish librarian (whom often hung around groups of kids in the hopes that they’d repeat a line from earlier that he had a good joke for) started shrieking and repeatedly slamming Gigantor with the door. Hilarity ensued.
A French teach who couldn’t teach French and who didn’t like sarcasm. She pulled my best friend and I (my best friend being the aforementioned guy with the deleted computer work) out of class and said she was tired of our sarcasm and that we’d never get into NAIT that way (North Alberta Institute of Technology – a trade school).
Is there a limit to post length? This is my first post here, by the way.
But, by far, the greatest troglydite (that REALLY doesn’t look right at three in the morning) we experienced was our English teacher for grades ten to twelve.
Many experiences as you’ve recalled, i.e. we pointing out basic meanings that she somehow missed. My first encounter with her, she tried to have me punished for plagiarizing someone else’s work, etc. (You know, “plagiarizing” doesn’t like correct there. I must confess, ever since I got spell check, my once impressive verbosity and spelling abilities have dwindled.)
One thing she did that really offended me is she wouldn’t let me do a book report on MAUS (the comic book that won a Pulitzer), even though the assignment was for a story in any medium. Someone analyzed Barney, but, NO, COMICS ARE FOR KIDS. Ag. That set the course for our relationship.
My friend wrote a skit for Hamlet as a project in Grade Twelve, and was going to perform it for the class (I, who wasn’t in the class at this point because I hated her, was going to play the psychiatrist). At one point he has one of the actors play Hamlet as a boy, so he has the description that the actor should be on his knees in front of his father, because, logically, he’s not as tall. The teacher tore up the script because of all the innuendo, pointing out that scene as blowjob imagery between son and father.
(In her defense, I had gone crazy on the school newspaper once I realized how little she scrutinized the articles being submitted – clearly she didn’t think me, or anyone, very capable of much depth or multi-layered storytelling. As I understand it, she almost lost her job because of all the bestiality jokes alone that got into the published papers. Since then, she shredded anything by me or my friends, no matter how innocuous.)
The worst was in that same grade twelve class when the kids, even the smart ones, had enough of her half-assed pedogoguery (man, that doesn’t even look close to correct. Forgive me) and ran amok for an hour. Her last ditch attempt to regain control was to go to the front of the room, get the attention of a sufficient amount of people, then break into tears and tell them about the time she had almost been raped (or possibly fully raped, everyone was too stunned that she’d try to establish control like this to really pay attention to the sticky details).
Lots o’ laffs!
Ooh, ooh. One last one. One of my favourite people to hang out with was this guy with an incredible talent for disassociative speech. The best example was when he shouted, “Ungh! Suckb*tch! Start at the low end!” What he meant to say, believe it or not, was, “Keith, my good friend, play a low card.”
Anyways, before we were friends with him we realized the entertainment value of nurturing a feud with him. To make a long story short, he had screamed some hilarious gibberish at us and the teacher, a passive-aggressive who must’ve been going through a divorce while his children had been killed by the corpse of his favourite dog (the dog having been killed by illnesses acquired by eating the man’s elderly mother), ordered him to leave class. My friend, Gigantor II (weighing about forty pounds less), stood up and deadpanned (rather brainlessly, because he wasn’t a thug), “You want trouble?”
Wow. I can’t begin to describe what happened next, but, wow. Wow wow wow. Wow. Still shocks me in my memory.
