One time, I was writing some dissertation on The Crucible and one of the words in the vocab book that week was �incendiary�. Because I�m a spiteful smart-ass, I used that word five times and didn�t bother using any others. That day, she called me into her �office� (she called it an �office� even though it was just a desk at the back of the classroom with Garfield pictures all over the place) and told me this type of thing doesn�t fly in her class. Those were her words, not mine. �It might fly in Mr. Johnstone�s class or Miss Coleman�s class, but right now, you�re in Mrs. Recker�s class and that just doesn�t fly.� She made me redo the entire paper. I had to pick a different topic and everything. It was bullshit if you ask me. I couldn�t just go back and throw in some extra vocab words. She was trying to teach me some sort of lesson that was lost on me. A lot of her lessons were lost on me. Like the day she dressed up like a cowgirl, brought her guitar into the class, and started singing the lesson plan for the day. In a way it was sort of brilliant. I can still remember some of the rhyming couplets.
She also threw pens at me. I sat in the front of the class, by anything but choice, and was, therefore, obligated to make sarcastic comments. I was the entertainment for that class. Every time I said something that made someone else laugh, the teacher would remove a red pen from God-knows-where in that podium of hers and just throw it at me. Not really hard. Just enough to annoy and embarrass me. She knew she could get away with doing things like that to me. Other kids didn�t know how to handle it. I had thick skin. I could deal with her crap. One time this guy, Tim, was forced to read a really personal essay about his father in front of the class. The teacher insisted. Tim said, �I really don�t want to.� Mrs. Recker said, �You�ll read it or fail.� Tim read it. He was so shy. You could tell he was reading it as fast as he could, just do get it over with and sit down. Then he got to this part where he saw his father hit his mother when he was nine and he just started crying. He ran out of the room. The whole class was silent. Just then, I thought it would be hilarious if I made a farting sound. I didn�t make the sound, but I started laughing at the thought of it. Then I started laughing really hard because of how taboo this whole situation was. I couldn�t help it. Then, the whole thing came into focus and I started calming down. Until I thought about how Tim called his father �pusillanimous� in the third paragraph. That�s when I lost it and the teacher kicked me out of the classroom. I figured I�d see Tim out in the hallway, and I�d tell him sorry or something, even though he didn�t hear me laughing. I figured he was already feeling bad and I felt bad for him. I knew there was going to be this �bad feeling� vibe out in the hallway, but when I went out there, Tim was gone. The outside door was just closing. Tim had bolted. The next day he got transferred out of that class. That same day, the day I noticed Tim was gone, Mrs. Recker called me into her �office.� She told me that I had acted inappropriately and it was part of the reason Tim had left. I told her that Tim didn�t even know I was being inappropriate and that I wouldn�t have even laughed very hard if she hadn�t made Tim use words like �pusillanimous� in his personal accounts of his father. And, to be completely blunt, Tim said he didn�t want to read the thing in front of the class, and she shouldn�t have made him do that. She should have respected his wishes for privacy. That�s when I got transferred out of that class. You can�t argue with teachers, even if you�re right. The next day, I showed up to my new English class. Tim was there. I was sort of glad to see him. He just smiled and sort of jerked his head upward to acknowledge me. For some reason, out of spite, I decided that in this class, even though it wasn�t mandatory, I�d use five vocab words per paper. I put them in bold and everything. My new teacher, Mr. Kesey, would always circle them in red pen and write, �I don�t know why you chose to bold this.� I�m just a spiteful smart-ass, I guess. |