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Mr. X was the only art teacher for our entire high school. He was an older guy approaching retirement age, and his life had not been a very happy one if his grizzled demeanor was any indication. His dress style was pretty remarkable, however: boots, boot cut Levi’s, western shirts, bolo ties and a coiffure reminiscent of a later era Johnny Cash on a week-long bender. The art curriculum for my high school career consisted of Art I, Art II, Art III and Art IV. Entering Art II my sophomore year, I quickly discovered I had become ensnared in a scholastic Groundhog Day. There was no advancement, as each year followed the exact same syllabus as the last. Some students would actually save their old projects that had already been graded to turn in subsequent years, thus sparing themselves further hassle. He either had no clue this was going on or simply didn’t care. During his slideshows, some of us would smoke cigarettes in the back of the classroom. On the occasion that he would actually notice, he’s stop the presentation and go into a spit flecked fit of yelling about how he was going to make sure that whoever was doing it would end up in a heap of trouble and that “neither the President nor the Pope” would be able to help us out of the conundrum. After a few minutes of this and his eyes darting around the room he would peter out and resume the presentation. He never found who was smoking because by then we’d have finished our cigarettes. I imagine that his salary was probably triple that of a younger, more engaged and more effective teacher might have been at the time.

Mr. Y was generally a nice guy, but – I don’t know how to put this politely – he was a complete fucking dork. He taught Earth Science which was a class geared toward kids that couldn’t cut the more advanced science and biology courses – essentially all of the ‘tards and reprobates. I ended up in his class my sophomore year after having royally bombed Biology due to boredom. Mr. Y was that jovial doofus that just could not keep a class under control under any circumstance, though being a pudgy oaf that couldn’t command an authoritative presence to anyone outside of a senior citizens’ casino bus wasn’t the root of his problem. He actually seemed to revel in the mischief of his rowdy students just as much as they did. Whenever someone would throw something across the room, he’d chuckle and halfheartedly tell them to stop. A few minutes later they’d throw something again. Then he’d chuckle and tell them to stop. Then they’d throw something again. Then he’d just look up at the clock and sigh. Many of his classes would devolve into students chatting with each other while he sat at his desk reading a magazine for the remainder of the period. It eventually became so bad that the administration took notice and began the proceedings to fire him. Wait, did I just say fire? My bad. No, they actually reassigned him to Bethune Memorial High which is a school a few towns over with a majority lower income black student body. It wasn’t until two decades later that I learned this was and still is a common practice that no one really likes to talk about. Mr. Y learned of his fate close to the end of the school year, and for our final exam he assigned six true-or-false questions followed by a viewing of Terminator 2 on VHS. Resigned to his fate, he simply gave that precious little of a fuck at that point. I felt really bad for the kids at the school he was being sent to. I hope they at least got to see a kick ass movie like I did.

Mr. Z – affectionately known by most students as Curly – was one of the few teachers that seemed to express interest in my capabilities (though in retrospect I’m not sure it was for the right reasons). He was a flamboyantly effeminate fellow that taught English at the honors level as well as a newly established Humanities course; both of which I was enrolled in my freshman year. He also directed our extracurricular theater department, which I also became involved in at his suggestion. The character I played in our first performance was that of a curmudgeonly old neighbor, though I can’t recall the name of the performance. I do remember our cast party at a friend’s house afterward though. We ended watching Pink Flamingos on Mr. Z’s enthusiastic wink-wink, nudge-nudge recommendation. Looking back at it that was kind of weird, though what was even weirder was the time he asked me to sneak off and smoke a cigarette with him during a Humanities field trip to Argonne National Laboratory. No, wait…I take that back. A bunch of young teens watching a movie featuring a gaping anus at the recommendation of one of their high school teachers is definitely weirder. I ended up being quite fond and appreciative of John Waters’ work a little later in life, but Curly probably should have toned that down just a bit. Yikes.

Mr. W taught the aforementioned Biology class that I failed freshman year. He was promoted to vice principal the following year when the school’s old vice principal retired. I didn’t have much other interaction with him until my senior year when it became evident that my miserable attendance record would prevent me from graduating on time. He called one final parent/teacher conference to discuss my options, which essentially consisted of repeating senior year. As we sat in his office waiting for my parents to arrive, he scolded me by saying that I had been born a failure and that I wouldn’t amount to anything in life. I should have probably enclosed that in quotation marks because those were his exact words. Mr. W also ordered me to leave the premises when I arrived at the graduation ceremony in hopes of at least being able to cheer my friends on. I don’t know if that’s standard operating procedure for dealing with fuck-ups such as myself, but it kind of felt like he didn’t want my presence to tarnish the school’s image. That gorgeous summer afternoon, I ended up drinking beer by the train tracks while sobbing, believing that my life was officially over.

So why am I writing this now? I’ve already made peace with my own past, whether for better or for worse. I went on to earn my Good Enough Diploma, managed a few semesters of college that I paid for out-of-pocket and eventually ended up living life as an average, ordinary citizen with a respectable job, a decent used car and a mortgage. Life is pretty good these days, and I have no desire to play the victim. I am writing this partly because when certain right-thinking people address the problem of failing schools, they typically point to those in post-apocalyptic urban war zones while caterwauling about Republican greed and lack of funding. My own experience unfolded in quite the opposite. It was at a school in a modestly well-to-do middle-class suburb with ample funding and resources. Only during my sophomore year did the subject of money ever come up, and it led to a student walkout that may or may not have been agitated for by the teachers themselves. The primary cheerleader for this action among the students was an impish little brown-nose twat who also may or may not have been the niece of one of the teaching staff. The funding situation couldn’t have been all that bad though, because the stadium bleacher replacement and track resurfacing proceeded apace later that same year and no teachers were laid off. But I digress. Ultimately it can easily be proven that government schools can reliably produce equivalent shitty results, regardless of their geographic location, their demographic attendance and, perhaps most importantly, their financial situation.

I am also writing this because I admittedly am a petty, vindictive man. Though most of the teachers that helped me fail so miserably are probably retired or even deceased at this point, I still want to see someone really sock it to their present-day ilk. In a way, it is in keeping with their own rallying cry of unity. If they want to stand as one when they perceive their peers are threatened, they should also be prepared to fall as one when their peers fuck up. I didn’t cast a vote for Trump, and I had never heard of Betsy DeVos prior to the 2016 election. Even though I still know absolutely nothing about her, I already know that I like her. She has my admiration simply because of the frothing, venomous hatred she inspires in all of the right people. They say she’s inexperienced. They scream and wail about her kids attending private schools. To them she is the human embodiment of Cthulhu itself in the world of education. She may have been running a diploma mill out of the bathroom of a Denny’s off of a highway in Indiana for all I know, and I couldn’t possibly care less. I hope she crushes them. I hope that their organizational structure is so utterly decimated that they dare not even think of regrouping for the next hundred years. Godspeed, Betsy. Give them no comfort, afford them no quarter.