One teacher that stood out to me was Sergeant Carey, who taught military science for the sophomores. The first day of class Sergeant Carey told us, “I am fifty-six years old. Some of you may think that’s old, but I don’t think that I’m old because I can still do this.” He then proceeded to perform a sidekick, and his shoe almost hit another student in the face. Sergeant Carey didn’t even have a college degree. He learned from the U.S. Army all that he needed to teach military science.
In 1998 it was impossible to watch the news and not see something about Monica Lewinsky and her relationship with President Clinton. One of the students asked Sergeant Carey what he thought about the affair. He said, “I kind of feel sorry for the president. Not many married men are going to say on national television, ‘Yeah, I got a blow job.’” I was laughing so hard that I turned beet red.
Another student asked Sergeant Carey about his views on gays in the military. In front of twenty or more high school sophomores, his response was, “Before Slick Willy [his name for President Clinton] was in office, we used to take the queers out back and beat ’em.” One student then said that people who are gay could control their libidos. Sergeant Carey’s response was, “How would you like it if you were sharing a tent with somebody and felt a dick go up your ass?”
In April 1999, after the shootings at Columbine High School, he suggested giving some of the teachers guns. However, Sergeant Carey was one of the most caring teachers in the school. When one student’s mother kicked him out of the house, he actually offered to let the student live with him. Out of all the information that students need to process when they’re in high school, one quote to which Sergeant Carey would often refer, and which I took away from high school, was “KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.” This actually helped me when I was in the working world.
Due to the high teacher turnover at Saint John’s, I had several new teachers my sophomore year. For religion, I had a fifty-one-year-old retired insurance salesman, Mr. Bryant. It was Mr. Bryant’s first year teaching, and he had difficulty controlling the class. Students would often talk and interrupt him. One time, Mr. Bryant was hit in the face with a pen. Two fights almost broke out over the course of the year, and there was constant trash-talking. One time, a student said to a Jewish student, “Why didn’t you burn in the oven like the rest of them?” Years later I would find out that Mr. Bryant didn’t have a degree in education and wasn’t qualified in any way to be a teacher. He was just a friend of the associate principal, Mr. Ramone.
One new teacher that most students noticed was the music teacher, Ms. Nelson. She was only twenty-three and very attractive. Most of the boys had no respect for women, so teaching at Saint John’s was a challenge for her. One time I remember a student showed another student a picture of a woman, saying, “I’d rape her.” During mass, students would often roll up their mass programs and then give them to her. She then had to go through and fix all the programs. Another time when Ms. Nelson was a substitute, all the boys farted to try to make her feel uncomfortable. She was very professional and actually handled these situations well. During the next few years at Saint John’s, the music department experienced a sizeable increase, and the number of bands and musical ensembles grew from one to three or four. People used to say the main attraction for Saint John’s was either athletics or the military program. After Ms. Nelson, people now say that the main attractions are sports, the military, and music.
My sophomore year also saw the addition of some new students. There was one student who admitted to beating his mother over the head with his textbook. He told his fellow classmate, “She was being a bitch, so I had to beat the shit out of her.” There was another who was asked to leave Albany Academy, an upscale private college prepatory school, because he stabbed a student with an eating utensil in the cafeteria. I sat next to this student, Dave, during our class religious retreat. I asked Dave why he kept his nails so long. Sure, I was breaking boundaries by asking a personal question, but I wasn’t prepared for his response: “kids on the bus make fun of me, so I scratch them.” Then Dave scratched me, and I had to endure the rest of the retreat with scratch marks.
In late September, my mother attended the meet-the-teachers night. Someone brought up that most of classes had between twenty-six and thirty-four students, when most public schools in the area only had twenty-five students in each class. As a result, the school hired Mrs. Binda, a woman from Mexico to who would teach honors math and earth science classes, which broke each class in about half.
The only qualification that Mrs. Binda had was a college degree in clinical engineering. She had no teaching experience. Her thick accent made her difficult to understand. When I started her class, my grades soon dropped drastically. In fact, she was the first teacher who had to call my mother. Like a good and attentive parent, my mother immediately returned Mrs. Binda’s phone call—but then Mrs. Binda said she never meant to call my mother. My mother thought she had just called her in error—until, that is, Mrs. Binda left another voicemail stating that she wanted to talk to my mother. Again my mother returned the phone call, and again Mrs. Binda was adamant that she didn’t call my mother, even though we
