An Education in Farts

Growing up, I had some pretty bad teachers. One, for instance, would time us to three seconds at the water fountain. If we had to take a bathroom break, she would take it out of our recess time. Once, she threatened to take away recess for the rest of the year if we kept talking. We kept talking and she stayed true to her deal.

Another teacher, in fourth grade, ran the study hall for students who didn't bring permission slips for field trips. There, I sat in her class with her miscreant, apathetic, and ignorant students. I tried reading or drawing, but a girl at my table held up a crude sign that said, "HEATHER FARTED", and laughed and pointed at the girl next to her. "Shut up, shit." replied Heather in response to the sign. "You girls STOP that right NOW", said the teacher, and the girls put the sign down and resumed jiggling in their giddiness. I hung my head and pretended not to notice.

My fifth grade math teacher always challenged the students to figure out simple arithmetic in their heads faster than he could. Since we were in fifth grade, we weren't as good as he was and he would always chuckle in self satisfaction afterwards. One time he mentioned the novel Moby Dick, and two students giggled. He stopped everything and asked them what they were laughing at. They shrugged. We sat there for ten minutes while he stared at them, trying to get them to say that "dick" is a funny word. They never did, so he cancelled our reading/game period that afternoon.

In kindergarten, my teacher (who I later heard was an alcoholic, which makes total sense in some ways) would give us a daily nap time. If we slept, we got a sticker. My best friend could hypnotize himself into falling asleep instantly, while I never could. Kindergarten teachers must love their job because of this nap time, because everything is serene for about an hour. My teacher took advantage of this period and made one of the students give her a neck rub during nap time while she graded our papers. Everyone but the girls hated doing this, so teacher/teacher's pet relationships were quickly determined. We hatched a plan to retaliate, and during the time one day we tied her shoes to her desk. This same teacher later gave us a paddling for drawing a naked woman, a decent one at that, on the back of a worksheet. She got another teacher to witness the sentence, but I thought she was doing it like "Hey, check this out. I'm totally going to wail on this kid's ass." I didn't like her much after that.

In sixth grade, we had a teacher who was "just a bitch", as my dad explained to me. Both of my brothers had had her before and she did the same thing to them. After leaving her class, she immediately forgot my name, out of spite of my creativity and self worth. She taught General Science, and for entirely too many illustrations used her MRI results she brought in from her doctor visits. We could see the details of her brain and head while she pointed out the different parts of the brain, nasal cavity, the mouth and throat and eyes. It never occurred to anyone why she actually had so many x-rays of her coconut's interior. During some student presentations one day, she closed her eyes and sat for a good five minutes silently. Someone whispered that she was asleep, after which she leaped up and said, "I am NOT asleep, unlike the rumors that CASSIE is trying to spread!" Cassie, needless to say, was disproportionately punished.

Different points in time, though, allowed the trickling of some very special people into my education. The substitute teachers of Cumberland County were really something. We loved getting these people into the rooms with us, not only because of their ignorance to our schedule, but because they were so fucking interesting and laughable.

In high school, there were so many to choose from. The same nine or ten people substituted regularly for all teachers, and they were all gems. Mr. Lovingood was gay. We all called him Mr. GoodLoving, and he was frequently made to cry and run out of the room. There was another whose name I never knew, because I was too distracted by her amazingly strange appearance.

We called her Quay Quay, because she was always trying to be an Indian (woo-woo, not red dot). She had a mullet that she called a "wedge" haircut, and wore those shitty black t-shirts with a picture of a sad looking Indian mixed with a coyote howling, a full moon, and an eagle thrown in for kicks. She had dreamcatcher earrings, and brown tinted glasses. She would pace around the room and use that stuff that makes "smoke" come from your finger tips, citing it as Indian magic. If you told her that she wasn't an Indian, which she was not, she would hiss like a cat and scowl at you. Best of all, though, she would draw portraits of Indians that looked like they were done by an eight-year-old, giving them to people around the school and doing her best to get a reputation as the resident Indian. She told everyone about ghosts that lived in her house, and how they didn't do much of anything but walk and poke about the house at random times. They were pretty boring ghosts.

In geometry class, we once had a guy in his late twenties wearing a suit. We asked him about what he was like, and he said "Well basically, gospel music is my life." He went on about how he like to sing gospel music, produce it, probably jerk off to it. Someone said, "I don't like gospel music very much." The teacher stood up, and shouted over the desk, "WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?! YOU WANNA GO?! LET'S GO PUNK, LET'S DO THIS!" We didn't say anything else.

Elementary school had the best substitutes, though, because they felt superior to the children, probably some kind of satisfaction they couldn't get elsewhere. Miss Combs, for example, tried to fool us fifth graders. She weighed at least three hundred pounds, and had to do the characteristic sitting stance of someone that fat, wherein you have to spread your legs so your gut can hang between them. She had a yankee accent and talked during the whole period about what we kids were learning these days, and what our real teachers were like. She tried to make us laugh by dumbing down her humor to what she thought could match our pitiful IQ's, but wound up sounding like she was retarded. Miss Combs farted mid-sentence and was totally busted. Instead of ignoring it or playing it smooth, she blamed it on a boy on the other side of the room who was reading a book. She then made fun of him for farting and tried to get us to join in. "What's the matter, did you have to let one rip in the middle of class? Ha ha! Hey everybody, Chris just farted! What a dork!" A girl then looked at Miss Combs square in the eye and said, "Miss Combs, we know you just farted. Why can't you just admit it?" "I didn't fart, huh huh huh." said Miss Combs as she looked about nervously.

The queen of substitute teachers, though, was Miss Bilbrey. She was the mother of a teacher at the school who herself was in her mid-fifties, and Miss Bilbrey was about 85. She made this face at all times, even at rest:



This woman had been an elementary school teacher until they told her to go home, at which point she became a substitute teacher and started right where she left off. She was crabby, cantankerous, and stubborn. More entertaining, though, was her drowsiness. Bad things happened to Miss Bilbrey in her sleep. She once fell asleep in class and was stapled to her desk. Another time, the students took her purse and put it above the ceiling tiles. Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but I only tripped the woman (on accident, but isn't it more interesting to end the sentence there?). She would always come in and tell us to start on our "readin' and writin' and lessons!" She was a total stereotype which we, children raised by television, immediately realized and were overjoyed with. It was like watching a cartoon old woman walk around and talk, a Nickelodeon hologram lady sent from Orlando, Florida directly to us.

Yes, it was people like Miss Bilbrey and those mentioned above that have made me who I am. They provided the margin of error in the teacher's population that makes students into more interesting, character-driven, and well-rounded individuals, and for this I really am kind of thankful. Had I gone to a better school, I wouldn't have so many laughs at other people's weirdness, but I also wouldn't have seen what I might turn into if I didn't work hard in school. Some of these folks, for all I know, may have been planted by the Superintendent of Schools to teach us a "life" lesson that our regular teacher could not have done. They may have been instructed to say "Duhh, I love methamphetamines and those damn video games. When I was in elementary school all I did was fail spelling tests and talk during study hall. I didn't share when I was a child. I love teen pregnancy. Duhhh. But look how I turned out. Duhh."

But then again, I probably would have laughed at them all the same.