King Dork

French is mainly notable for the fact that no one in the class has the barest prayer of reading, speaking, or understanding the French language, despite having studied it for several years. AP social studies is just like normal social studies, except the assignments are easier and you get to watch movies. Plus they like to call AP social studies “Humanities.” Ahem. . . . Pardon me while I spit out this water and laugh uncontrollably for the next twenty minutes or so. This year, “Humanities” began with Foods of 13

the World. The basic idea there is that someone brings in a different type of ethnic food every day. And the class celebrates cultural diversity by eating it. Day one was pineapple and ham, like they have in Hawaii! We were gifted and advanced, all right. And soon we would know how to have a snack in all fifty states.

I suspected regular English was going to be a drag, though, and I wasn’t wrong. AP teachers tend to be younger, more enthusiastic, and in premeltdown mode. They are almost always committed members of the Catcher Cult, and easy to manipulate. The regular classes, on the other hand, are usually taught by elderly, bitter robots who gave up long ago and who are just biding their time praying for it all to be over. Getting in touch with your inner Holden is totally use-less if you wind up in a class taught by one of the bitter robots. You will not compute. Or if you do compute, the bitter robots will only hate you for it.

I didn’t get into AP English because my tryout essay last year was too complex for the robots to grasp. So I ended up in regular, nonadvanced English, run by the ultimate bitter robot, Mr. Schtuppe.

“I don’t give out As like popcorn,” said Mr. Schtuppe on that first day. “Neatness counts.

“Cultivate the virtue of brevity,” he continued. “There will be no speaking out of turn. No shenanigans. No chewing gum: of any kind.

“Shoes and shirts must be worn. There will be no shorts, bell-bottom trousers, or open-toed ladies’ footwear. No tube tops, halter tops, or sports attire. Rule number one, if the teacher is wrong see rule number two. Rule number two, ah . . .

if you are tardy, the only excuse that will be accepted is a death in the family, and if that death is your own— mmmm, no, if you die, then that death is, ah, accepted as excusable, mmm . . .”

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Mr. Schtuppe’s introductory lecture was not only morbid, but had a few glitches, as well.

It is like his bald robot head contained a buggy chunk of code that selected random stuff from some collective pool of things teachers have said since around 1932, strung them together in no particular order in a new temporary text document, and fed this document through the speech simulator unit as is. And sometimes there was some corruption in the file, so you’d get things like “my way or the freeway.” And of course, all the girls in the class were in fact wearing halter tops, and practically every guy had on some kind of “sports attire.” You can’t have a dress code for just one class. It was nonsense. There must have been a time long ago, in the seventies, I’d guess, when he had been in a position to impose a dress code, and he kept it as part of the introductory speech because—who knows? Maybe he just liked saying “open-toed ladies’ footwear.”

Mr. Schtuppe was still droning on about forbidden footwear when the bell rang. He stopped midsentence (he had just said “In case of ”) and sat down, staring at his desk with what appeared to be unseeing eyes as the kids filed out.

I had a feeling that everyone in that room was thinking pretty much the same thing: it was going to be a long year.

H IG H SC HO OL I S TH E P E NALTY F OR

TRAN SG R E S S ION S YET TO B E S P EC I F I E D

Despite the ominous beginning, the first day of school had been refreshingly uneventful and easy to take. So, after weighing our options, we decided to go back and do it all over again the following day.

I had been curious about how Mr. Schtuppe would 15

launch day two of English for the Not Particularly Gifted, and I was pleased to note that he stood up at the beginning of the class period and simply resumed in midsentence where he had left off the day before.

“Fire proceed to the exit in an orderly fashion,” he said.

“No talking.” While part of me was a bit envious of the AP

English students, who were at that moment probably watching a movie or eating cookies or something, I was mainly just fascinated to watch my own educational train wreck in progress.

Mr. Schtuppe had a certain charm, if you looked at the situation in the right spirit. He liked to call the girls gutter-snipes and the guys “you filthy animals,” and he would say it with this weird smile that made him look like, I don’t know, the devil or something. A shiny pink devil with a lot of ear hair.

First on the program in Mr. Schtuppe’s class, when the introduction had finally ended, was a book called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. “In 30 days, you will learn how to make words your slaves.”

This book is a big list of fancy-pants words, and our job as self-improvement vocabularists was to prove we knew what they meant by saying them aloud and using them in sentences.

Mr. Schtuppe’s unique twist on this was that he managed to mispronounce around half of them.

“The first word is ‘bete noire,’ ” he said. But he pronounced it “bait noir-ay,” with the emphasis on the “ay.”

“Bait noir-ay,” we said in unison.

“Excellent. Now, class, listen carefully: magnaminious . . .”

(We would have to wait till the end of the alphabet before we witnessed Mr. Schtuppe’s finest hour. That would be “wanton,” which he pronounced like “won ton.” The deli-16

cious Chinese dumpling often served in soup at the Pacific Rim’s finest eating establishments. That’s why Sam Hellerman and I will sometimes refer to a sexy girl as a Won Ton Woman.)

Of course, if I had known how important mispronunciation skills would prove to be in my sex life and in the