Member-only story
Classroom Parable
Guns in school? Perhaps we should think this through.
In junior school, back in the early 90s, I had a maths teacher who, unusually for that day and age, possessed a most fulsome moustache.
At some stage, someone pointed out that he looked a bit like one of the gloriously camp dancers from The Village People. And so, to torment him, the naughtier kids in the class (of whom, I am ashamed to say, I was one) would occasionally interrupt his algebra lessons to stand up in unison and sing Y.M.C.A. — complete with the arm-waving semaphore.
On one such occasion, the poor maths teacher, quite understandably, responded to this provocation by flying into a rage. We were a disgrace, etc, we’d never amount to anything with this attitude, etc. And when his rant was over the whole class went quiet, as if chastened by the rare adolescent realisation that adults bleed too.
Asshole that I was, I chose this moment to burst out laughing.
The teacher turned his wrath on me alone, grabbed a whiteboard marker and hurled it in my direction. I ducked, and the flying pen hit Luke Poloniecki, a non-YMCA-participant and incorrigible brown-noser, square in the face. Angrier still at the failure of his first act of violence, the teacher then marched down between the desks and, shouting epithets I can no longer recall, proceeded to hit me multiple times around the head and shoulder with an open palm.
At the end of the lesson, he kept me behind, beseeched me not to say anything, as it could cost him his job.
All of which would be nothing more than a colorful anecdote, devoid of topicality, were it not for the fact that the President of the United States wants to give teachers guns.
