“There aren’t many people who would sell cigarettes to children. However, there are a lot of people who will sell them sugar.”
I chewed on my tongue to stop from speaking.
“Tireless work it took to stop Big Tobacco from marketing to our kids, but it was worth every sleepless night pouring over studies to find the truth, the same truth we need to face about sugar.”
No speech has ever inspired me to a greater lust for candy. I could feel myself developing a veritable erection for a bar of solid chocolate – innuendos be damned.
About three months ago I took a position as a substitute teacher at a local school. For the most part I took the gig because I needed money. Day labor house painting had yet to secure me financial security. Fearing eviction I revisited my economic options. In my bag of resume fireworks I rediscovered a certificate declaring me legally able to be a substitute teacher.
I’d forgotten about this particular gem, set aside during the summer of 2006 when I decided I had grown out of touch with weed. Wanting to renew our kinship for nostalgic reasons I ditched a variety of career options which wouldn’t care for such an acquaintanceship. However, relations with the green Buddha soon broke down when it became clear weed enjoyed movies I didn’t care for unless bent. We parted amicably, vowing never to speak of the night we found it necessary to burn down a diner full of ghouls.
Knowing well enough that substitute teaching was not much unlike bartending – keep the occupants distracted/placated until they can be compelled to leave becoming someone else’s problem – I decided to revisit this professional angle. The only downside seemed to be that bartending at least allowed for tips. Still, the part time nature of the job appealed to me.
Now, let’s be honest. Substitutes work hard. It isn’t easy getting up that early. However, a lot of my duties involved treating the day like prolonged study hall. Instead of teaching the kids about Lord of the Flies, my responsibilities involved preventing a similar scenario. After all, children below a certain age respond to authority by proximity. Simply standing in a room with them will deter a great degree of outright assholery. One of the reasons I preferred elementary over high school. And whenever it got clear that any kid, born with rebel in the bones, wanted to test the limits, well, frankly, taking them out of class to offer them a cigarette shuts ‘em up way better than a trip to the principal.
So two months go by, teaching by day, drinking the day off by night, when I got the kind of call I’d been dreading.
“Hi, this is Gracy Mercer over at {school name withheld for legal reasons}.”
“Hey, Gracy. What can I do for you?”
Gracy: “According to our records you’ve subbed for Mrs. Helman.”
Me: “If you say so.”
Gracy: “Well, Mrs. Helman is – how do I put this? She’s not feeling well.”
Me: “When do you need me?”
Gracy: “Tomorrow, but what I’m getting at is she’s going to be sick for a while.”
Me: “So you need me for two or three days.”
Gracy: “More like the rest of the school year.”
Me: “Shit.”
Gracy: “Excuse me?”
Me: “I’m sure there are more qualified candidates.”
Gracy: “Mrs. Helman recommended you specifically.”
At which point I understood everything. Mrs. Helman had an eighth grade class as well as taught English. She could have been sent from central casting to play the archetypical burnt out educator. Crooked glasses no matter how she adjusted them, hair like an abstract bird’s nest, the lingering odor of booze beneath a nauseating amount of fruity perfume that wasn’t fooling anyone. She used yellow chalk to hide the nicotine stains on her fingers, and her eyes possessed the haunted quality of a person who knows their soul is a dying ember that once burned brighter than the sun.
Long story short: Low paying jobs require supplemental income. So I may have sold Mrs. Helman some recreational delights. Recalling the news from the other day, about a naked woman running through the streets of downtown Chicago screaming – “We have to kill the children! They eat souls!” – I started wondering if perhaps the LSD I procured for her might have been more potent than either of us expected.
In any case, I couldn’t begrudge the lady for trying to fuck me over in the aftermath. So I accepted the six month sentence as a kind of penance.
The first week breezed by thanks in no small part to creamy whiskey and coffee. I told the kids the truth. Mrs. Helman had temporarily lost her mind. Children go nuts for the truth, especially when it comes from adults. And the darker the better, particularly when it’s about adults. My honesty bought me a week wherein the kids stayed relatively quiet debating the ways Mrs. Helman was barking mad.
However, sometime in the second week I started getting bored, so I pulled out Mrs. Helman’s lesson plan, a grim tome full of doodles that would make a serial killer uncomfortable. Most of it seemed straight forward enough. Math, History, English, the basics as it were. I figured why not take a crack at the job I was being paid to do.
Overall, I tried to teach the kids that what they learned in school could be considered the backdoor to a wild and weird world. Learning to read gave them access to books such as Naked Lunch and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a few choice quotes helped emphasize the point – “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity,” alongside, “Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.” Science taught them ways to blow up things with soda. History is a map of human failure throughout time, offset by infrequent wondrous triumphs. Math helped them keep from getting scammed by street dealers trying to play kingpin. Along the way, I also dropped a few nuggets of personal wisdom which made three kids cry, and one attempt suicide with a belt in the bathroom stall.
But it wasn’t all good times.
It turned out teachers have duties besides babysitting other people’s spawn. Not having enough seniority, I wasn’t able to get out of PTA meetings. At first I thought it might be good for a laugh. I soon learned otherwise.
PTA meetings are the leading cause of alcoholism among teachers. Whatever will to remain sober the students haven’t beaten out of an educator, their parents will cut out with a few flicks of switchblade tongue. Imagine a brick wall that refuses to believe it’s blocking the road, and every logical, pragmatic rebuttal of this opinion results in the wall hitting you with bricks.
Transcript selection:
Principal Martin: “We don’t have the money.”
Parent (Let’s call him Shitforbrains): “Then find some.”
Principal Martin: “We’ve squeezed every penny we can out of the budget.”
Shitforbrains: “I find that hard to believe.”
(Keep in mind that Shitforbrains has no idea what the school has been doing to find more money. He simply presumes no honest search has occurred, and that hidden within the moldy couch cushions in the teachers’ lounge are several gold bricks; that we don’t drink bulk rate coffee produced by a machine that looks ready to explode, we drink cappuccinos served to us by tuxedoed Italian waiters.)
Me: “We could have a bigger budget if everyone voted yes on the upcoming tax increase.”
Mrs. Shitforbrains: “You shut your mouth. Do you really expect us to pay more taxes? I saw the car you drove in here with. You should be paying for my kids’ education.”
Me: “First off, I stole that car…”
Shitforbrains: “You mean the money from our pockets!”
Me: “No, metaphors. I literally stole that car…”
In any event, the evening broke down into a lot of angry grumbling that achieved nothing. No problems were resolved. No issues were made clear. Parents got to yell at the faculty, and like professional whipping boys, we sat there and took it. Although, I’m half certain Mr. Grant, the science teacher, appeared to be getting some sexual satisfaction out of being belittled. A disquieting stain appeared on his pants as he squirmed in delight while a shrill birdlike woman chirped at him for teaching math the wrong way.
Most of the meetings went like this, and I soon found myself following Principal Martin home to see if I could get some dirt on her, thereby blackmailing my way out of future meetings. The most mind shattering exchanges involved oscillations of opinions suggesting the parents in attendance had no idea what they’d demanded at the previous meeting.
For instance, at one assembly the teachers were told the kids were getting too much homework. Then, at the subsequent PTA meeting, parents felt we weren’t giving their kids enough. Hammers do less damage to grey matter.
But the angry parents were, by far, the least irritating. The worst were the Activists. These assholes respected educators and the other parents. As such, they believed we’d all gotten together to make the world a better place. So they saw PTA meetings as a chance to preach their cause of the month, believing their passionate rhetoric might insight the assembled mass to a fever pitch. From this gym we will pour out into the streets, march to the nearest television studio, and lynch the executives for putting too much violence on TV.
Everything came to a pinpoint pushing deeper into my eye when during one meeting a particular parent – Let’s call him Fucktard – called for my attention.
Fucktard: “Yeah, I wanted to address some of the things you’ve been teaching my kid.”
Me: “Which one is your kid?”
Fucktard: “Stevie.”
Me: “Good kid. Smart. He knows shit I don’t even know.”
Fucktard: “Yeah, well, that said and all, as I understand it you’ve been teaching about the Holocaust.”
(Fucktard, by the by, looks like the kind of person most likely to say the Holocaust never happened.)
Me: “And what?”
Fucktard: “My wife and I were just hoping that when you teach it – see the thing is we feel you’re teaching it too dark.”
Me: “Sorry. In the future I’ll make sure to mention the balloons and ice cream cake served in concentration camps.”
Fucktard: “Buddy, they’re too young to learn about this the way it happened.”
Me: “All right. I’ll teach the Holocaust sunny. Anybody else got a problem with me?”
Iwannapunchyouinthefacesohard: “You told my daughter she couldn’t be a scientist. That is sexist.”
Me: “No, I told her it would difficult for someone failing science to become a scientist then told her if she brought up her grades it would become more likely.”
Iwannapunchyouinthefacesohard: “That’s not how you encourage children.”
Me: “You’re right. I should’ve told her she can be anything she wants, even when she’s failing at it. Anything else?”
Principal Martin: “I think that’s enough for now.”
Me: “No, no. This is cathartic. They came here to yell at someone because they can’t yell at their own lives. Who’s next?”
HeIsRisen: “We asked for our son to be excused from sex ed., but you taught him about private parts anyway.”
Me: “Your kid is a goddamn snitch.”
HeIsRisen: “It wasn’t your place to teach those… things.”
Me: “One day he’ll thank me.”
HeIsRisen: “What?”
Me: “I seriously doubt you’re ever going to teach him anything he needs to know about sex.”
Things got a bit nasty after that.
I truly believe there are some people afraid that if their kids learn certain things those children will become aware their parents have been keeping aspects of reality from them, and once that realization is crossed, those enlightened kids never trust their parents again. Not entirely anyway. Hiding behind the lie of protecting innocence, parents raise their children to be blindsided by awful truths instead of safely introduced to them. Although maybe, just maybe, it’s possible some people are so willfully ignorant they truly believe their limited perspective encompasses all of reality, or at the very least should. Still, it wasn’t tactful to suggest Mrs. Shitforbrains needed a good punt to the cunt to turn her brain back on, a reboot if you’ll forgive the pun, and saying that Iwannapunchyouinthefacesohard should be sterilized may have touched a nerve. But I stand by those statements.
Yet, there was no coming back from those declarations, not without having to apologize. So I rose from chair, quietly told Principal Martin I quit, and walked out the door, though this wasn't the last time I was ever a teacher.
… over the next few weeks a string of incidents occurred the police have deemed malicious mischief. At least one pair of PTA members keeps finding the term PIG RAPIST painted on their garage door, while another set will always fear whoever broke into their house and super glued their shoes to the ceiling in the middle of the night. And whoever mailed that crate of porn is a genius in my book.
I chewed on my tongue to stop from speaking.
“Tireless work it took to stop Big Tobacco from marketing to our kids, but it was worth every sleepless night pouring over studies to find the truth, the same truth we need to face about sugar.”
No speech has ever inspired me to a greater lust for candy. I could feel myself developing a veritable erection for a bar of solid chocolate – innuendos be damned.
About three months ago I took a position as a substitute teacher at a local school. For the most part I took the gig because I needed money. Day labor house painting had yet to secure me financial security. Fearing eviction I revisited my economic options. In my bag of resume fireworks I rediscovered a certificate declaring me legally able to be a substitute teacher.
I’d forgotten about this particular gem, set aside during the summer of 2006 when I decided I had grown out of touch with weed. Wanting to renew our kinship for nostalgic reasons I ditched a variety of career options which wouldn’t care for such an acquaintanceship. However, relations with the green Buddha soon broke down when it became clear weed enjoyed movies I didn’t care for unless bent. We parted amicably, vowing never to speak of the night we found it necessary to burn down a diner full of ghouls.
Knowing well enough that substitute teaching was not much unlike bartending – keep the occupants distracted/placated until they can be compelled to leave becoming someone else’s problem – I decided to revisit this professional angle. The only downside seemed to be that bartending at least allowed for tips. Still, the part time nature of the job appealed to me.
Now, let’s be honest. Substitutes work hard. It isn’t easy getting up that early. However, a lot of my duties involved treating the day like prolonged study hall. Instead of teaching the kids about Lord of the Flies, my responsibilities involved preventing a similar scenario. After all, children below a certain age respond to authority by proximity. Simply standing in a room with them will deter a great degree of outright assholery. One of the reasons I preferred elementary over high school. And whenever it got clear that any kid, born with rebel in the bones, wanted to test the limits, well, frankly, taking them out of class to offer them a cigarette shuts ‘em up way better than a trip to the principal.
So two months go by, teaching by day, drinking the day off by night, when I got the kind of call I’d been dreading.
“Hi, this is Gracy Mercer over at {school name withheld for legal reasons}.”
“Hey, Gracy. What can I do for you?”
Gracy: “According to our records you’ve subbed for Mrs. Helman.”
Me: “If you say so.”
Gracy: “Well, Mrs. Helman is – how do I put this? She’s not feeling well.”
Me: “When do you need me?”
Gracy: “Tomorrow, but what I’m getting at is she’s going to be sick for a while.”
Me: “So you need me for two or three days.”
Gracy: “More like the rest of the school year.”
Me: “Shit.”
Gracy: “Excuse me?”
Me: “I’m sure there are more qualified candidates.”
Gracy: “Mrs. Helman recommended you specifically.”
At which point I understood everything. Mrs. Helman had an eighth grade class as well as taught English. She could have been sent from central casting to play the archetypical burnt out educator. Crooked glasses no matter how she adjusted them, hair like an abstract bird’s nest, the lingering odor of booze beneath a nauseating amount of fruity perfume that wasn’t fooling anyone. She used yellow chalk to hide the nicotine stains on her fingers, and her eyes possessed the haunted quality of a person who knows their soul is a dying ember that once burned brighter than the sun.
Long story short: Low paying jobs require supplemental income. So I may have sold Mrs. Helman some recreational delights. Recalling the news from the other day, about a naked woman running through the streets of downtown Chicago screaming – “We have to kill the children! They eat souls!” – I started wondering if perhaps the LSD I procured for her might have been more potent than either of us expected.
In any case, I couldn’t begrudge the lady for trying to fuck me over in the aftermath. So I accepted the six month sentence as a kind of penance.
The first week breezed by thanks in no small part to creamy whiskey and coffee. I told the kids the truth. Mrs. Helman had temporarily lost her mind. Children go nuts for the truth, especially when it comes from adults. And the darker the better, particularly when it’s about adults. My honesty bought me a week wherein the kids stayed relatively quiet debating the ways Mrs. Helman was barking mad.
However, sometime in the second week I started getting bored, so I pulled out Mrs. Helman’s lesson plan, a grim tome full of doodles that would make a serial killer uncomfortable. Most of it seemed straight forward enough. Math, History, English, the basics as it were. I figured why not take a crack at the job I was being paid to do.
Overall, I tried to teach the kids that what they learned in school could be considered the backdoor to a wild and weird world. Learning to read gave them access to books such as Naked Lunch and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a few choice quotes helped emphasize the point – “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity,” alongside, “Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.” Science taught them ways to blow up things with soda. History is a map of human failure throughout time, offset by infrequent wondrous triumphs. Math helped them keep from getting scammed by street dealers trying to play kingpin. Along the way, I also dropped a few nuggets of personal wisdom which made three kids cry, and one attempt suicide with a belt in the bathroom stall.
But it wasn’t all good times.
It turned out teachers have duties besides babysitting other people’s spawn. Not having enough seniority, I wasn’t able to get out of PTA meetings. At first I thought it might be good for a laugh. I soon learned otherwise.
PTA meetings are the leading cause of alcoholism among teachers. Whatever will to remain sober the students haven’t beaten out of an educator, their parents will cut out with a few flicks of switchblade tongue. Imagine a brick wall that refuses to believe it’s blocking the road, and every logical, pragmatic rebuttal of this opinion results in the wall hitting you with bricks.
Transcript selection:
Principal Martin: “We don’t have the money.”
Parent (Let’s call him Shitforbrains): “Then find some.”
Principal Martin: “We’ve squeezed every penny we can out of the budget.”
Shitforbrains: “I find that hard to believe.”
(Keep in mind that Shitforbrains has no idea what the school has been doing to find more money. He simply presumes no honest search has occurred, and that hidden within the moldy couch cushions in the teachers’ lounge are several gold bricks; that we don’t drink bulk rate coffee produced by a machine that looks ready to explode, we drink cappuccinos served to us by tuxedoed Italian waiters.)
Me: “We could have a bigger budget if everyone voted yes on the upcoming tax increase.”
Mrs. Shitforbrains: “You shut your mouth. Do you really expect us to pay more taxes? I saw the car you drove in here with. You should be paying for my kids’ education.”
Me: “First off, I stole that car…”
Shitforbrains: “You mean the money from our pockets!”
Me: “No, metaphors. I literally stole that car…”
In any event, the evening broke down into a lot of angry grumbling that achieved nothing. No problems were resolved. No issues were made clear. Parents got to yell at the faculty, and like professional whipping boys, we sat there and took it. Although, I’m half certain Mr. Grant, the science teacher, appeared to be getting some sexual satisfaction out of being belittled. A disquieting stain appeared on his pants as he squirmed in delight while a shrill birdlike woman chirped at him for teaching math the wrong way.
Most of the meetings went like this, and I soon found myself following Principal Martin home to see if I could get some dirt on her, thereby blackmailing my way out of future meetings. The most mind shattering exchanges involved oscillations of opinions suggesting the parents in attendance had no idea what they’d demanded at the previous meeting.
For instance, at one assembly the teachers were told the kids were getting too much homework. Then, at the subsequent PTA meeting, parents felt we weren’t giving their kids enough. Hammers do less damage to grey matter.
But the angry parents were, by far, the least irritating. The worst were the Activists. These assholes respected educators and the other parents. As such, they believed we’d all gotten together to make the world a better place. So they saw PTA meetings as a chance to preach their cause of the month, believing their passionate rhetoric might insight the assembled mass to a fever pitch. From this gym we will pour out into the streets, march to the nearest television studio, and lynch the executives for putting too much violence on TV.
Everything came to a pinpoint pushing deeper into my eye when during one meeting a particular parent – Let’s call him Fucktard – called for my attention.
Fucktard: “Yeah, I wanted to address some of the things you’ve been teaching my kid.”
Me: “Which one is your kid?”
Fucktard: “Stevie.”
Me: “Good kid. Smart. He knows shit I don’t even know.”
Fucktard: “Yeah, well, that said and all, as I understand it you’ve been teaching about the Holocaust.”
(Fucktard, by the by, looks like the kind of person most likely to say the Holocaust never happened.)
Me: “And what?”
Fucktard: “My wife and I were just hoping that when you teach it – see the thing is we feel you’re teaching it too dark.”
Me: “Sorry. In the future I’ll make sure to mention the balloons and ice cream cake served in concentration camps.”
Fucktard: “Buddy, they’re too young to learn about this the way it happened.”
Me: “All right. I’ll teach the Holocaust sunny. Anybody else got a problem with me?”
Iwannapunchyouinthefacesohard: “You told my daughter she couldn’t be a scientist. That is sexist.”
Me: “No, I told her it would difficult for someone failing science to become a scientist then told her if she brought up her grades it would become more likely.”
Iwannapunchyouinthefacesohard: “That’s not how you encourage children.”
Me: “You’re right. I should’ve told her she can be anything she wants, even when she’s failing at it. Anything else?”
Principal Martin: “I think that’s enough for now.”
Me: “No, no. This is cathartic. They came here to yell at someone because they can’t yell at their own lives. Who’s next?”
HeIsRisen: “We asked for our son to be excused from sex ed., but you taught him about private parts anyway.”
Me: “Your kid is a goddamn snitch.”
HeIsRisen: “It wasn’t your place to teach those… things.”
Me: “One day he’ll thank me.”
HeIsRisen: “What?”
Me: “I seriously doubt you’re ever going to teach him anything he needs to know about sex.”
Things got a bit nasty after that.
I truly believe there are some people afraid that if their kids learn certain things those children will become aware their parents have been keeping aspects of reality from them, and once that realization is crossed, those enlightened kids never trust their parents again. Not entirely anyway. Hiding behind the lie of protecting innocence, parents raise their children to be blindsided by awful truths instead of safely introduced to them. Although maybe, just maybe, it’s possible some people are so willfully ignorant they truly believe their limited perspective encompasses all of reality, or at the very least should. Still, it wasn’t tactful to suggest Mrs. Shitforbrains needed a good punt to the cunt to turn her brain back on, a reboot if you’ll forgive the pun, and saying that Iwannapunchyouinthefacesohard should be sterilized may have touched a nerve. But I stand by those statements.
Yet, there was no coming back from those declarations, not without having to apologize. So I rose from chair, quietly told Principal Martin I quit, and walked out the door, though this wasn't the last time I was ever a teacher.
… over the next few weeks a string of incidents occurred the police have deemed malicious mischief. At least one pair of PTA members keeps finding the term PIG RAPIST painted on their garage door, while another set will always fear whoever broke into their house and super glued their shoes to the ceiling in the middle of the night. And whoever mailed that crate of porn is a genius in my book.
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