John Crichton, Farscape

I'll have to give a bit of credit to Uncle Booby for the idea on this entry.

Reading his story about the young high school teacher who him and others made her life a living hell. It reminded me of the worst class of my high school days.

It was my Junior year, I had already taken two years of drafting classes and knew I wanted more. So I signed up for advanced mechanical drafting and Architectual drawing.

The year before was this fresh faced, straight out of college teacher for all these drafting classes. He wasn't to bad, not nearly as good as the teacher before him. I actually was punished in his class by writting the word fuck over and over again on a piece of paper and hand it into him the next day. It seems he didn't apreciate me yelling out, "WHY DON'T YOU FUCK OFF!!" at one of the other kids in the class. Best god damn punishment I ever had in school. Spent every class for the rest of that day writing the word fuck over and over again.

Well, two weeks before my Junior year, this teacher quit my high school to go to another one. So they where forced to pull a teacher out retirement to teach the drafting classes. Now I don't even know if he had ever taught drafting at all before, but judging by that year I'm saying hell no he hasn't.

He was the worst god damn teacher I have ever had. First off, he never used the chalk board. Normally you come back to school the board is that dark shade of green *before plastic boards and markers* but a few weeks later its a paler chalky shade from all the erasing. This chalk board never got used except for the ocasional teenage hijinks.

Another thing, he really never taught a damn thing the entire year. The only things he would talk about is a job he had once as a drafter, and he only really had three stories from there which he told over and over to us. That or how "things where when he was our age". Only other thing he could do was mark out an exact inch without the use of scale *ruler for you unintiated* any time he wanted to. Other then that, he sat at the desk the entire time with his head down writing something. If you had any questions he would tell you its in the book. After giving your drawings a look over and writting in what changes you had to make when you redrew it, he'd tell yeah that all the right answers are in the book. So it came down to it, you preaty much taught yourself everything. I was at an advantage since I was in advanced mechanical so I knew what was already expected of me and what to do, and my drafting skills transfered *adviously* over to architectual drawing quite easily. And what was most frustrating was when it came time for him to look at your work. He would mark up your page with all this red pen and tell you a few things you need to change and how it should be. Then you would go redraw the part like how he said to do, then when you got it to him, he would mark it up and tell you all he showed you was wrong and that he didn't tell thats how it suppose to be. For quite awhile I just thought it was me missing something, or once again I really wasn't paying attention, but it stopped being me wrong when everyday at least three people said this about his correction. Or bring him there old drawing with his corrections and have him deny it or tell you thats not what I said, even if I wrote it like that. On top of this, the yearly state wide contest, a lot of us wanted to submit drawings to it. Well, the teacher some how screwed it up and no one in my school could submit any drawings cause he had the date line wrong by like a month.

So lets do the math on this shall we......

1. A year of teenagers of varying social status and level of education.

+

2. A teacher who didn't teach, and did not pay attention to anything that happened in class.

=

Anarchy and chaos.

The drafting classes that year became infamous through out the entire school, everyone wanted to be part of it. If people where not in the class they wanted to be, so little parental control, do anything and everything you wanted to do. I was in that class two hours a day, and I saw a lot of the shit that went down.

The theft was the biggest problem with the school. You see, there was this huge closet in the classroom just full of spare equipment in case you needed it, free of charge. Anything permanent like scales and portable boards to take home had to be returned. Pencils and erasers and that shit was yours, but people started taking them by the hand fulls. Equipment came up missing in large quantities, they tried locking the doors, but as soon as they where opened again, shit would come up missing again.

In architecture class, you work on one house the entire time, your dream home. My orginal drawings where even stolen, about a quarter of the way through the year. No matter how hard they tried, your shit was only safe if you didn't leave it in your drawer. There where locks but it was to easy and to many people knew how to pick the locks, even I knew how to do it but didn't unless I was stealing my shit back.

Now all the mischeve in the class started out preaty normal, talking in class, throwing of shit, general goofing off. The longer it went on the worse it got. There where these things called eraser guards, thin metal plates with holes and lines punched out so you can erase very specific lines on the drawing without fucking it up. These things turned out to be very aerodynamically amazing little tools. With a quick snap of the rest and you could whip one down the entire length of the class room, which was preaty long to accomodate all the drafting tables. On top of this, the corners where preaty sharp, which made them stick int ceiling tiles well. All year long there was a couple dozen of them stuck in the tiles, or wedged in to metal frames that held the tiles up, at all times.

Now a very spefic three days was all the evidence you needed to see how bad it was. It seems some people learned that the rubber foot pads on the foot rest of the drafting tables where crumbling. You could rip off chunks of them, bend'm, and whip them at people, but they where really useless like this. You shoot one of those rubber bits from a rubber band, thats a different story though. The fuckers flew fast and stung like a bitch when they hit you. This lead to a three day rubber band war in the drafting classes. It got really out of hand, everyone was coming in with hand fulls of rubber bands, paper clips to bend and shoot at people, peeling big chunks of rubber up to prepare ammo for that days war. Drafting students where preaty advious to pick out that period of time. They all had a shit load of rubber bands around there wrists or on cardboard tubes with there drawings in them, cause they couldn't trust there shit in class. The rubber bands after a point was an everyday thing, but these three days specifically was war! No one did any kind of work during those three days, everyone was just seeking out more ammo and a new victim for ther onslaught. And where was the teacher during all this?? Sitting at his desk with his head down, writing something and completely ablivious of what was going on around him. The only reason he even noticed what was going on, why the war wasn't longer then three days. It was cause someone's errant shot blasted him with a paper clip shot from a rubber band right on top of his shinny head. He looked up, saw us all standing facing each other in combat postions, then stormed out of the class. He came back after a point and proceded to give us one of his "when I was your age" lectures. It got us all to stop the war, but the shit still didn't end.

What finally ended it, the straw that broke the camels back. Well, in every class there was this picture framed copy of some teacher's pledge to there student that all the teachers where to live up to. Well, it seems someone re-wrote it very graphically with plenty of foul language.. heh heh sort of like my diary. This person slipped there version of it in the frame and it quickly got around that it was there. So everyone is sitting at our tables, a lot of them not so quietly snickering over it when the teacher spotted it. Sat there and read it for a bit, then stormed out of the class. When he came back, he told us he had quit the job, that he didn't want to talk to or even want a a single one of us to look at him. This was about a month and a half tell school years end. The vice president took over the class for a week, repremending us all for what we did, then we all took our final exam at the end of the week. Since they couldn't find a replacement for the class, all the drafting classes where turned into a study hall. Well it was meant to be a study hall, but enough people convinced the substitute teacher to let us watch movies for the rest of the year.

Looking back on this, I feel a lot of regrets and remorse for it. I regret being part of it in anyway, to humilating him so badly he quit the job. I may not have written it or stole anything, but I still feel guilty for all of it. I feel remorse for treating him so bad, and showing no respect like everyone else was doing.

At the same time I'm angry at how bad of a teaching job he did, how he didn't teach at all, and was more negative in your progress of learning then anything else. Angry I was denied being taught properly so he could have his piece and quite or tell us how "things where when he was our age" or his stories when he fucked up as a drafter. I learned a lot from that class despite all this, but thats only cause I taught myself, not cause of him. I have to wonder how much I could have really learned if I had a decent teacher in that class.

A few years back I saw him in the lobby outside of the comunity college's theater just outside town. My mom had directed and was in one of the key roles so I went out to see her in the play. When I saw him across the room, I rememered it all. I quickly hid from him, cause I just couldn't look in the face and pretend it didn't happen and I couldn't get past the embaressment long enough to apologize for how bad it got, despite how bad he was at being our teacher.

Ah well, just another tale of mis-spent youth.

LATER

It's about time - Wednesday, Jul. 07, 2004
An Honor for Chrome - Friday, Feb. 20, 2004
A great loss - Monday, Oct. 20, 2003
a terrible announcement. - Tuesday, Sept. 09, 2003
Chrome speaks: - Friday, Sept. 05, 2003