The unhinged teacher quotes I still carry around in my brain 15 years later
I was digging through the back of my pantry this morning looking for a can of chickpeas I swear I bought last week, and found my high school yearbook tucked behind a bag of expired quinoa. The cover’s peeling, someone wrote “have a great summer” on the inside in sparkly gel pen that’s almost rubbed off. I flipped through it for five minutes while my coffee got cold, and all I could think about was all the wild, unhinged stuff teachers said that no one ever called them out on back then. Not the big, abusive stuff, just… the stuff that came out of nowhere mid-lesson, that sticks to your brain like burrs even 15 years later.
10th grade biology, Ms. Hale. She was old, had a perm that hadn’t been touched since the 80s, always wore floral cardigans fuzzed with little pills all over the cuffs. We were learning about mitosis, flipping through those crummy overhead projector slides that were all blurry at the edges, and out of nowhere she just stopped talking about cells and said, “And let me tell you all something—any girl who moves in with a man before marriage is asking for cancer. The stress of living in sin messes with how your cells divide, I’ve seen it. Three girls from this school got it before they were 40, all living with their boyfriends first.” I was sitting next to Lila, who’d just snuck over to her boyfriend’s house the weekend before and told me all about it. She turned so white I thought she was gonna pass out, scribbled that line so hard in the margin of her notebook the paper tore. Ms. Hale wasn’t even mad, she just said it like it was a fact, same as “cells divide into two daughter cells.” What’s wild is, she also gave me a peanut butter granola bar out of her desk drawer once when I forgot my lunch and couldn’t afford the school lunch that week. It was crumbly, a little stale, but I ate it anyway. She wasn’t evil. Just… thought that was the kind of thing you tell 15 year olds, like it’s just another part of biology.
Mr. Grady, my 12th grade AP English teacher, was the cool teacher everyone loved. He let us listen to music while we wrote essays, smoked menthols out the back window during free period, got away with everything because the principal had him as a student too. One day we were doing open floor about what we were gonna do after graduation, and Javi, this quiet kid who always brought tiny succulents to class to set on his desk, said he wasn’t going to college. He was gonna save up and open his own plant shop. The whole room went quiet, waiting for Mr. Grady to say how cool that was, right? He was the cool teacher. Instead he leaned back in his chair, twisted that chipped “World’s Okayest Teacher” mug in his hands, and said, “That’s just you being a coward. People who skip college right out of high school are just hiding from growing up. You’ll be flipping burgers at 35, wondering why you threw your life away.” I remember Javi just nodded and didn’t say anything else for the rest of class. I follow Javi on Instagram now. He’s got three plant shops in Portland, does these big workshops for kids where he teaches them how to grow vegetables in tiny apartment windows. Looks like he’s doing fine. Last post I saw was him holding his new baby, standing in front of a wall of giant pothos that almost reached the ceiling.
7th grade home ec, Mrs. O’Malley, who smelled like lavender candy and stale coffee, made all of us sew lumpy aprons that never fit right no matter how hard we tried. Mia, who was already obsessed with watching travel vlogs back when YouTube was still mostly people filming their vacations in grainy HD, said she didn’t see the point of learning to sew anyway, because she never wanted to get married or have kids, she just wanted to drive around the country in a van. Mrs. O’Malley stopped ironing her sample apron right there, looked up over her cat-eye glasses, and said, “Honey, you’ll change your tune. But any man worth keeping won’t marry a woman who can’t sew a button on his shirt, so you better pay attention anyway, just in case you get lucky.” I thought that was so stupid back then, but last month when a button fell off my wool winter coat, I sat down and sewed it back on in five minutes, no YouTube tutorial needed. So I guess she was half right? Even if the rest was garbage.
I still think about what my guidance counselor said to me when I went in to talk about college apps. I told her I wanted to apply to art school, instead of the business program my dad was pushing me into. She looked through my portfolio of sketches, closed it slow, leaned across the desk, and said, “You’re a pretty girl. Why would you want to starve in a garret when you could meet a nice businessman, have a nice family, keep art as a hobby? That’s what I did, it’s much easier this way.” I walked out of there and cried in the bathroom stall for 20 minutes, until my friend Lila snuck me a Sour Patch Kid through the crack under the door. The bathroom smelled like lemon cleaner and old gum someone had stuck under the toilet seat. I still remember that smell, clear as day.
People talk a lot now about how toxic all those old school attitudes were, and they’re right, but I don’t feel like carrying a bunch of anger about it these days. I don’t think most of them were sitting around trying to ruin our lives. They were just repeating the stuff people had told them, back when they were kids sitting in those same scratchy wooden desks. It just comes out, unprompted, mid-mitosis lesson. And it sticks, you know? I don’t lie and say that none of it affects me now. Last year, when I moved in with my partner before we got engaged, I thought about Ms. Hale’s stupid cancer line for half a second, before I rolled my eyes at myself. When I quit my corporate job to do freelance design a couple years ago, I heard Mr. Grady’s voice in the back of my head for a whole week, calling me a coward. That’s just how it works. It’s junk, but it’s my junk, I guess.
I found my chickpeas by the way, they were behind the yearbook. Coffee was cold, so I made a new one.
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