High School Confidential - Redux

I went back to High School last night and it wasn’t much fun. In fact, it was almost as bad as the first time except this time no one hated me except the Ukrainian math teacher. Well, maybe she doesn’t hate me, but ignoring my phone calls for two weeks and then standing me up at her office door for our meeting does not bode well for “like” status. I knew our conversation would not necessarily be pleasant but usually people wait to meet me before they come to any firm aversions.

It was parent-teacher interview night at the local secondary school my children attend. It is very strange but I don’t remember my parents or family every going to parent’s night in High School. I do remember my mother getting annoyed when she got called to the office regularly and frequently but I don’t remember any parent’s night. Who knows, maybe I skipped that week or it could be a case of parent’s night not being a very seventies kind of thing.

Anyway, I came a rather startling conclusion. The teachers at my children’s high school are decidedly freaky and weird looking. Not all of teachers- just most of them. You got your basic Goths, general punks, drag queens and witches, but oddly enough, it was the teenagers who looked ordinary, normal and sane. What struck me as even odder was - mostly the teachers were from my generation. Did I ever feel left behind, as I did all the weird and freaky shit when I was a teenager - obviously even then I was ahead of my time.

There were a few teachers who looked normal but those ones looked somewhat older than me. Every time I saw one in the hall, I had to fight off a two fold compulsion to stalk the teacher and then beg him/her to teach my child. My son did give me a warning that most of his teachers were “sensitive” so I wasn’t to say or do anything to either offend them or jeopardize his working relationship with them but he hadn’t warned me they were freaks – almost down to the last one. The exception was the Latin teacher. He not only looked normal but he sounded ordinary. I had fun in that interview. We re-enacted sack of Carthage with his action figures. I cannot remember why I never took Latin as it looks like great fun.

Apparently little clues to the teacher’s sex like Ms, Miss, Mrs or Mr are too old school. Instead the teacher’s signs or name tags are identified strictly by last name. I still can’t figure out if the Canadian history teacher I was speaking to was a man or a woman. Let that sink in – the CANADIAN HISTORY TEACHER’s sex could not be readily determined by a visual examination. Public School in the Centre of the Universe. Nothing else like it.