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Dear (Weird) Teacher
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dear mr landis,
i may have stayed in 8th grade choir had you refrained from creepily twirling your waxy, dali-esque mustache while teaching us how to play handbells. i mean, even though we wore those white gloves during practice, it weirded me out that you had probably already touched them with your waxy fingers. also, the exasperated and quite often terrifying lessons were far from motivational; my only respite was hanging out behind the bungalows, learning how to smoke weed.
thanks for scaring me away from bell choir and into the sweet, loving arms of underage drug use,
kid
Dear Mr. George,
Thank you for making fun of my depressed attitude in history class. I hope you realized what an a$$ you were when I told you that my father had died a couple days ago. But, no, you had to say, “Then why are you at school!?”
How do you expect a 17 year old to deal with the sudden death of a 37 year old parent? Since going to school is what is normally done, they just follow their routine. Furthermore, sometimes being at home is too much or maybe the remaining parent doesn’t understand.
I hope you understand how wrong you were!
Dear Mr. Bice –
Thanks for pretending not to notice when the band members at the football games snuck off to smoke pot. We did the same for you – the breath mints worked, but you should have carried some eye drops, too.
Dear Geography Teacher in Baltimore City,
You asked me how we got to the U.S. “Did you swim?” And I stood before the class, walked over to the map and pointed to the Atlantic Ocean. You must have thought Bulgaria was some nearby Caribbean-sounding island. And YOU were teaching poor kids in Baltimore geography! Your colleague, who took a semester of French in college years before she settled into her inner city high school class, was teaching some sort of funny sounding French. And your other friend taught Child Development to a room full of teenage mothers. When the girls misbehaved or talked about beating their kids, she screamed “Time Out AT ONCE!” And we all laughed because she sounded so damn ridiculous.
To all the teachers who aren’t reaching, you inspired me to be the opposite.
Dear Mr. Dunbar,
I get it. You were a surfer. You wore Hawaiian shirts every day. But why did you let one of my classmates in fifth grade bite your ear in front of the whole class? I kinda got creeped out then. Now, as an adult and almost 30 years later, it’s even more creepy. I’m wondering if there was more naughty stuff going on? You know, sometimes I scour the sex offenders’ list, looking for you name. You might be in your sixties now. Hopefully with no grandchildren.
To Mrs. Sutch:
You once interrupted your own teaching to tell an already bullied kid if you EVER saw him doing what he was doing again, you’d make him wash his hands and go to the office. Really? A fifth grader picking his nose and you gotta call him out like that?
And your husband didn’t DJ our graduation ceremony like you promised!
Mr. Peters.
Who could ever forget when you, knowing you weren’t feeling well and wouldn’t be coming in to school to review our “The Glass Menagerie” the next day, left a stage production version taped off of PBS that you had rewound to the spot it started. It took the substitute who rewound it to the very beginning of the tape five minutes to realize that we were in fact watching something from your porno collection. Perhaps “The Ass Menagerie?”
Good times.
Dear Mr. H,
You were always kind of spacey – but remember when I had to make up an exam and you put me in the same room where you were going over the correct answers? Actually, you probably don’t remember because I doubt you ever realized it.
Still miss your goofy laugh,
Lisette
Dear Ms. Stevens: Thank you for taking me to see Swan Lake in the sixth grade. I can still remember sitting in the orchestra. I’ve loved ballet ever since. In my next life I want to be a dancer – or a swan. Lydia
Dear Mrs. Reep,
I have often remembered how you joined the class in laughing when I answered your question, “Who knows what olives grow on?”
with “Trees”.
What the hell do you think they grow on, Martinis?
Dear Emilia,
There was no need to suggest that I was dressing as a whore in front of the whole class. It was very humiliating. And why did you do it? I liked you…
PS You were wrong, it was just a short t-shirt.
Dear Drs. Smith & Meltzer:
Thank you for taking a precocious 16-year-old student under your wings and letting me watch the Watergate Hearings with you guys during my lunch period in high school and discussing them with you as an adult. However, that discussion about whether or not I thought Nixon was ‘giving it’ to Rosemary Woods was kinda weird. Esp. after I demurred in my response and Dr. Smith asked Meltzer what he thought, and Meltzer, while munching on his eggsalad sandwich tossed out ‘Oh yeah, he’s boning her.’ ‘See that?’ Dr. Smith said, ‘He thinks so. And that f$g reads the Daily News!’ That was kind of cringe-inducing for a 16-year-old in the early 70s. But thanks for the good polisci and US history classes.