REAL LIFE SITCOM TEACHERS
I loved to live/relive vicariously through my girls, especially as they went through school. One through line that I particularly enjoyed were the sitcom character teachers.[2] The Va-va-va-voom French teacher who only wore two piece Danier leather outfits in hot colours and took vacation for fashion week; the science teachers who strangely leaned into the fact that they have a PhD but were inexplicably teaching grade 9 chemistry; the high school coach who is waiting for the next Olympian to arrive on his team and be his ticket out of the junior-junior-junior leagues.
Most of the teachers that have come through our lives were totally fine, some were great, and few were really special. Others…not so much:
Monsieur Pierre: Monsieur Pierre was my grade 2 teacher. I can remember almost nothing from elementary school except the time one of the kids got his tongue frozen to the metal play structure during winter (because, kids) and the entire grade filed past him on the way back inside while the teachers went to get a kettle on boil. So, the fact that I can remember Mr Pierre is unusual. Monsieur Pierre was dapper. He styled his hair like a model from a Grecian formula commercial and wore cologne. But the main reason Monsieur Pierre occupies mental real estate is that he was the cause of one of the most exciting moments in my young life. One year my parents thought to motivate my older brothers and I by promising $1 for every A we got on our report cards. This was clearly not intended for me, but they were very dedicated to being fair and equal with us. My grade 2 report card had 20 sections (presumably for things like popsicle stick building and colouring? What could the 20 sections possibly have been for?). Monsieur Pierre gave me an A in each one - meaning that I had just “earned” $20!! At the time, this was the equivalent of winning the California PowerBall lottery (currently valued at $1.3 Billion). This was both the most exciting, then the most humiliating thing to happen to me. I couldn’t wait to get home and opened my report card in the school yard. I was so excited a peed my pants…my SNOW pants. Totally worth it.
Principal Lancaster: Mrs. Lancaster was my lower school principal at the all-girls school I was moved to in grade six. Mrs. Lancaster was mean.[1] She seemed to take great joy in creating rules and devising bizarre punishments for breaking them. Case in point: every student had to have the school hymn memorized. To ensure that we were absorbing whatever morality message the hymn presumably extolled, and not just mouthing the words, the entire lower school had to write out the hymn (including exact olden-timey wording and punctuation) in “chapel” (aka gym floor). If you got more than 3 mistakes, however small, you had to go to Mrs. Lancaster's office and sing it to her. Your own private operatic hell. My friend T had the misfortune of being seated for the hymn test right beside the row of teachers and had to do the Aria punishment. I was on the far side of the room and fully copied off of the girl beside me (Thank you Perminder). Mrs. Lancaster hated me. In later grades, when I was on the honor roll, she came up to my parents and I at graduation and said, “I would never have believed it” then walked away. So, not surprisingly the feeling was mutual. As such, my favourite Mrs. Lancaster memory revolved around a local flasher (a harmless old man with dementia), dubbed “Mr. No-Pants", who they were always warning us about during announcements. One day, probably a day I had just been chewed out for having a smiley face button on my tie [2], I walked past Mrs. Lancaster’s car parked out front of the school…and saw Mr. No Pants sitting in the driver’s seat in his overcoat and…you guessed it…no pants. You the man, Mr. No Pants!
The Prison Guards: My friend T and I were two of a small handful of girls who joined the school in grade 6. It took us a while to come to terms with all the conformity and rules. We were so out of our element that we were constantly getting in trouble without ever knowing why. Eventually our digressions built up to the point that we were hit with a Saturday morning detention. The final straw? Apparently, it was going on the monkey bars during recess after the whistle (which we didn't hear) had been blown. Breakfast Club this was not. The two of us arrive to find not one, but two teachers on duty to oversee us. We were such terrible tweens that we required a 1:1 supervision ratio. We were tasked with writing out a section of the dictionary while the not-actually-nuns (but societally might as well be) sat in rocking chairs and read to us from the bible. I don’t know how long we were there…long enough to require a food break. I do know we learned nothing, because the first thing we did after the detention was play on the monkey bars.
The Three Miss Bosoms: The upper school had a whole contingent of teachers who dated back to antiquity. They were originally hired to teach finishing school topics like typing and sewing and Latin. They were still around because the school weirdly had a tenure system and they couldn’t fire them even though they were way past retirement and their subjects were no longer taught (as of the grade behind mine, of course). The typing teacher got repurposed as the computer science teacher - because same/same clearly. Just using a different machine for doing Mavis Beacon drills. The Latin teacher became the visual arts teacher where she was famous for throwing chalk at people and teaching camp level arts and crafts instead of actual skills. Needless to say, no-one from her graduating classes went on to Arts college, myself included. The sewing teacher got conscripted to admin duties. These three women, as well as our OG senior school principal Miss Denis, all looked like the queen mom in varying sizes. And they all had enormous bosoms. The sewing teacher would use her chest as a literal shelf whenever she required both hands. If you came to her for help hemming something, she would cast an eye about for place to rest the book in her hands and, not being able to see the handy desk right below her, would file the book away atop her gigantic uni-boobs. It was awesome.[3]
The General: The General was a kindergarten teacher who probably started out warm and loving, but should have retired long before our kids were in her class. The General was the first teacher with whom we had a parent-teacher interview. I arrive expecting an update on our daughter S’s dexterity with craft scissors and Elmer’s glue. Instead, she tells me S may have to be held back (in kindergarten??) because “she cant write her name”. At this stage S clearly has dyslexia and writes everything backwards and right to left like Leonardo Da Vinci, but is too young to be officially diagnosed. In response to my trying to illicit support to help S, the teacher tells me that the problem was that I “clearly wasn’t spending enough time with my children.” Given that I had left work to spend ALL of my time with my children, this was a great way to reinforce my fears of being a terrible mother (see: Beta Baby).[4]
Mr. Hand: After the General, I learned to go in on the offensive in S’s parent teacher interviews. The most common Moma-bear point of contention were teachers who gave “30 minutes” of homework a night, that was really 1 hour of homework, which for S meant it would take 2 hours. S was (by necessity) great at self-advocating, but sometimes she would get a teacher who just wouldn’t listen. In one case she asked me to go in for the P-T session more so that I could fully understand what she was dealing with than to affect any change. To share her pain basically. I show up for the interview right on time. After waiting at the door for ten minutes, having not been retrieved from the hall, I inch my way in. “Hi! I am here for the 5:00 slot.” The teacher is at his desk looking at his computer. Zero response. I go back to the hall to reconfirm the room number and schedule. Sure enough: right place, right time. I try again, walking fully into the room. “Hello”. Again nothing. Weirdly (because I know it’s not the case), I wonder if he is deaf. I go right up to his desk so that I am in his peripheral vision and, waving my hand in greeting, try again. “Hello??” And he gives me the HAND! Palm flat, he extends his arm towards my face, saying nothing (Though the hand says it all, really). After 30 seconds that feel like thirty minutes, he deigns to receive me. I try to regain the upper hand by explaining that S may need extra time to read Great Expectations which he had assigned to be read in a single week (as homework for one of 8 courses the students simultaneously carried). His response was to refer to the book as a “door stop” and lament (to a parent in a parent teacher interview) that it was "SO boring". Right, Coles Notes here we come.
Ms. Soft Talker: a couple of years later, S is taking her prerequisites for university and needs Physics for one of the programs she is interested in. The course is going fully awry, and the teacher is not giving an inch on accommodations. S, for example, has been placed alphabetically in the room, meaning that she is in the far back corner. She can’t see the board and can’t hear the teacher. But her request to sit in the front is roundly refused. The first test includes a question with insufficient data to be answered. The teacher later owns up to the error but still docks every kid in the class the 25% the question was worth. S needs the course, so M & I both go in for this PT interview. We are at a very small round table. We inquire whether it would be possible for S to move to the front of the room so that she can hear better. The teacher answers “whisper whisper whisper”. We are a foot and a half away and have no idea what she said. It goes on from there in the same vein. Result is S drops the course. The teacher later gets fired, only to turn up across town at C’s school. C reports that her new physics teacher knows S. "Uh-oh”, I think. Fast forward to the first test…which STILL has the same unanswerable question. Here we go again.
The Absentee: C was prepared for Physics with the soft talker because she had early experience teaching herself. One year she came home and proudly reported that the teacher put her in charge of teaching the math lesson to the other students. “What was the teacher doing at this time?”, I ask. “Watching TV on his iPad.” Another day (same teacher), C returns from school and says (again proudly) that “it took ALL DAY, but I learned how to do a back walkover”. I highlight, with my Staples hot pink highlighter: ALL DAY.
Mr Happy Days: Not all sitcom teachers are bad. C had one of my favourites. A teacher who didn’t believe in shoes and called all the kids “muchachos”. If you answered a question correctly, he would gleefully respond “Happy Days!”
El Captain: When H started high school there was a guy who she took to be a teacher because he had a full beard. He would come into classrooms and chat up the grade 9 students. Everyone called him “El Captain”. It turned out that he wasn’t a teacher at all. He was the student in charge of the “Spaceism” club that annually went on a mock space mission in a simulator. “El Captain", as you might surmise was the captain in command of the space mission. Reality not stranger than fiction … but pretty much running the line.
The Fake 101 Prof: Whenever the girls got bad teachers, we always advised them to make the most of it and try to build a positive relationship with them if they could. They aren’t in the clear after high school - they will get doozies in university as well. I know this because I was one of those “profs” that they foist onto first year students. In my case, I was a first year MA student. I had peers who were classmates one term and my students the next. I was "teaching” subject matter that I hadn’t given a thought to since I took the same 101 course myself. I would learn the content the night before class. I didn’t use the throw the essays down the stairs marking technique. But having been told to make the class average 70%, regardless of the quality of the work, I could relate to this methodology. Years later, a friend who I “taught” told me it was his favourite class from all of university. I am pretty sure that the engineering student who thought he was taking a bird course but got a terrible mark because he handed in his essays in bullet form, didn’t agree. Can’t ride the bell curve when you are the low point benchmark. Even if your teacher is really just doing academic performance art.
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[1] To out myself as equally mean, mostly what I remember about her appearance is that she was balding and styled her hair in a female version of the Trump comb over.
[2] There were many, many rules about not introducing any element of individual flare to your uniform. Because I am a contrarian, and also a pain in the ass, I once sewed colourful buttons on my beige school-approved button down, because there was no explicit rule against that. At least until I did it. Then there was a rule. Come to think of it, this sort of behaviour may be why Mrs. Lancaster didn’t like me.
[3] We discovered that if you asked for help on part of your sewing every day, Miss Bosom 3 would bit by bit make your entire outfit for you. We all got As in sewing.
[4] To my credit (if I do say so myself), I later spent an entire month reading a 20-page beginner reader chapter book with S where she learned every single word by memorizing it, not being able to read phonically. The book was ironically called “Climb the Mountain”.