Due to his other commitments as an associate principal, Mr. Ramone would often arrive late to class. He would eat lunch during class and was very unorganized. During the last day of the marking period, we would grade other students’ tests. One student asked if there was going to be a curve. Mr. Ramone replied, “Depends if I have a glass of wine with dinner tonight.”
Like almost every freshmen English class in high school, we had to read Romeo and Juliet. I just considered it an ancient chick flick. I could never understand why teachers try to promote reading in children by giving them the most boring and ancient books to read. Romeo and Juliet love each other and then kill each other because they cannot express their love. For some reason, ninth graders are forced to read this book, and Mr. Ramone’s class was no exception. Of course, we had class discussions on the readings. Mr. Ramone gave a lecture one day on how the character Tybalt was a “coward.” The next day, Mr. Ramone asked us to summarize the discussion that we had the day before. Like a good student, I raised my hand and said that the theme we discussed the previous day was how Tybalt was a coward, and I gave my rationale for this argument. Mr. Ramone then replied, “Would you?” insinuating that I was even a coward. My family was spending six thousand dollars a year so I could discuss how Tybalt was a coward. We didn’t discuss literary elements used by Shakespeare—style, grammar, or tone. No, our class was just about Coach Ramone thinking Shakespearean characters were a bunch of pussies.
Working in a private school gave teachers more autonomy, so they weren’t censored as much. Each week in English we had vocabulary words that we had to memorize and then be tested on. One week, the word chastity was one of the vocabulary words. In teaching this term, Mr. Ramone said, “Chastity, as in Chastity Bono, the daughter of Sonny and Cher. Of course, she’s the biggest dyke on the planet.” All these years later, I still remember the hate that was being taught at Saint John’s. Regardless of one’s opinion on homosexuality, I have worked with many lesbians, and part of working and living in today’s world is treating all people with respect. This tenet was not part of the curriculum at Saint John’s.
During the school year, I would see Mr. Ramone go up to a student, grab him by his throat, and say, “Don’t mess with me. I’ll screw you, and ask anybody I’ve screwed before—you don’t want to get screwed by me.” When one student asked a question and said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” Mr. Ramone replied, “Well, whoever told you that was lying to you.”
For math, I had Mr. Robertson. On the first day of class, he had the students fill out cards with information such as their name and phone number and their favorite movie. My favorite movie growing up was Christina Applegate’s Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, but since I was an extremely insecure teen, I lied and said Independence Day or something like that. When one of the other students said Showgirls with Elizabeth Berkeley, the teacher’s response was, “You just like looking at those big ol’ hooters.”
If there is one teacher that anybody who went to Saint John’s remembers best, it would have to be Mr. Fuller, the global studies teacher. Mr. Fuller had been teaching at Saint John’s since the early 1980s, and his thick Long Island accent was evident in words like “Incers” instead of “Incas.” No student ever had Mr. Fuller who didn’t receive detention. If you showed up without doing your homework or it was of poor quality, you got an automatic detention. Mr. Fuller also assigned detention for students who didn’t have their books covered or if they failed a test; he even once put somebody in detention for not putting periods at the end of his sentences. Paul, Anthony’s son, had Mr. Fuller three years earlier for global studies and told me that at the end of the school year, Mr. Fuller asked if there was anybody who didn’t get detention. Two kids raised their hands. He gave them detention for not receiving detention.
The first day of class, Mr. Fuller slammed the door and made everyone take out a piece of paper and a pencil and write down the rules. The first rule was that there would be a test every day. Not only was Mr. Fuller’s main duty to teach global studies; he also tried to teach all of his students the importance of being honest. He would always say, “Global studies will come and go, but honesty will always stay.” Whenever he assumed that students had cheated or lied about doing their homework, he would say, “You’re a liar and a cheat. Get out!” Once he told
