True Tales of Stupid Fucking Teachers (Part 1)

These days I’m more partial to “The Walrus and the Carpenter“, but for a long long time, from the first time my maternal grandmother read it to me when I was a child, my favorite poem was Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky“. I grew up in one of those houses that always had, like all good houses should, at least one copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass kicking around. So by the time I was 10 or 11, I had pretty much memorized Jabberwocky.

Now, for those who may not be familiar with this brilliant little bit of poetry, it’s beauty comes from the fact that it is filled with nonsensical words, yet meaning can be derived for most of them via context. Others are combinations of other words, whereby “triumphantly galloping” can be succinctly expressed as “galumphing”. Just read the fucking thing if you’re unfortunate enough to have never read it previously.

Jabberwocky first turned up in school in about 7th grade. It was in one of our English textbooks. My teacher, Josie Martinez (who was not a stupid fucking teacher and is, in fact, the single best teacher I ever had) chose a student seemingly at random to stand before the class and read the poem. He made it past the first word, “‘Twas”, then choked hard trying to sound out the alien “brillig”. He gave up, sat down, at which point Mrs. Martinez asked for volunteers. My hand shot up, which was very unusual indeed. It should be noted though that this class was pretty tight, and intelligence was actually respected in this school, so these other kids would actually think it was cool that I could nail this. So she called on me, I carried the book up and pretended to read from it (hey, I didn’t want to seem like too much of a geek). I delivered Jabberwocky flawlessly. She said, “You’ve read this before then, huh?” Had it happened today I’d probably have said “no, never heard of it before today” just to fuck with her.

So flash forward a couple years, and I’m a freshman at Herbert Hoover High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

Wait a minute. Brief digression while I slag Hoover High School.

This was a school of fucking retards. It was filled with mindless, soulless preppy fuckwads, and I despised nearly every fucking last one of the Wham-listening-Guess-wearing-Daddy-bought-me-a-Camaro pukes. Now Hoover always looks good on paper because their students get good grades, but trust me, the bar there is set astoundingly low, or at least it was in 1984. Despite my lifelong underachievement (in all my years of education, grade school though college, I can count the times I did homework on one hand) the year I spent at Hoover was the first time I ever got mostly A’s (algebra being the exception, I’ve always sucked hard at math).

So my English teacher in this lovely institutional learning facility was not the shaprest stick in the bunch. I wanna say her name was Mrs. Morgenstern, or Morgenton, or something like that. Maybe it was just Morgan. Anyway, whatever her name was, she taught 9th grade English at Hoover High School in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1984/1985 school year if you want to track her down and tell her I think she was a stupid fucking teacher.

So one of our early assignments was to memorize a poem. We had a week to do this and then we had to stand before the class and recite our poem. I thought this was pretty fucking easy for high school, I remembered doing that in 4th grade, but whatever. Always one to take the path of least resistance, I chose Jabberwocky, which of course I already knew by heart.

So the day comes where we have to recite our poems. I don’t remember what the other kids chose to learn, but suffice it to say that nobody did “Casey at the Bat“. So, my turn comes, and I already know it was a mistake to have picked a poem that was three times as long and infinitely more complex than the ones my classmates chose. So I go up there and recite the poem to a bunch of clueless preppy fucks with their mouths gaping open.

And when I’m done, Mrs. Morganheimer says, “Wow, that was a really difficult poem, especially with all those old words we don’t use anymore.”

I gave her a very quizzical “are you fucking kidding me?” look and sat down. Bitch thought that “frumious” and “uffish” were Old English. And she was supposed to be teaching me?

Thankfully, that was the only year I spent at Hoover. After that I got a car and used Dr. Bill’s address (behind his mother’s back) on all my official forms so I could go out of my district to Lincoln High, which despite being violent and full of metalheads actually made an effort to teach its students something. My grades immediately fell back to their usual pattern of straight C’s.