"You seem to know what you are doing"HAHAHAHAHAHA

To be the teacher I needed in high school. – Guest Submission

Dean Winchester ⇢ 15x08 “Our Father, Who Aren’t in Heaven”

(it involves putting hobbes into a dress and taking polaroids; she still has the photos, even thirty years later)

she does her homework. does his homework too, sometimes, because mrs. wormwood gives them different math problems to discourage cheating, and susie likes math. his mom finds out when they’re in sixth grade, and offers her four times the going rate to tutor calvin in math. she agrees, because even at twelve she knows college isn’t cheap (not the ones she’s eyeing, anyway).

she has to learn quickly about superheroes and dinosaurs and aliens, because calvin won’t listen unless there’s at least one. she has her own opinions of aliens (real, but not the tentacled fanged monsters calvin draws in the margins; her aliens are gorgeously strange monsters, elegant, like a degas painting reflected in rainy puddles, glittering in distorted neon), and dinosaurs are cool, but they’re a boring sort of cool, not black hole kind of cool, so it’s only superheroes she lets him go on about.

this turns out to be a mistake. though he draws aliens and ray guns and flying saucers on the back sides of his homework, he has a whole thing built up around stupendous man. she’s seen the costume, but didn’t know there was lore. she doesn’t want to know the lore.

it’s stupid. no one can just fly. that’s not how the world works. capes are dumb. she can’t believe his mom made him another costume after he hit a growth spurt.

she still tutors him, but they drift apart in high school. calvin and moe somehow become friends, become even bigger assholes together, and susie discovers calculus and girls. she gets into harvard and yale and stanford and others, chooses to go to california. he waves at her from his driveway while she drives away in the moving truck.

“you were never stupid,” she tells him on the phone when they’ve drifted back into each other’s lives her senior year. “you just didn’t care.”

“yeah,” he laughs, and she pretends she can’t hear the desperation in it; his girlfriend kicked him out, he lost his job, and he’s now in the unfortunate position of acknowledging that his father was right and education was important. she has two finals to study for, the nasa interview next week, and a grant application to finish, but he’s had a rough week. she can take an hour to listen.

“the community college isn’t bad,” she suggests, though she knows it sounds patronizing coming from someone set to graduate stanford with honors.

“you mean i can’t just put on my stupendous man costume and live off the media attention?”

susie snorts. “not spaceman spiff? there’s a tv show there, i’m sure.” she’s been watching a lot of star trek in what little spare time she has.

“nah,” he says, “spiff’s always been your territory.”

they drift apart again, she goes to houston and he goes to art school. she loses track of him entirely right around curiosity’s landing. she skips their twenty-year reunion; she’s in the middle of a move down to chile for a three-year stint at atacama.

a package arrives the middle of her second year in the desert.

it’s a comic book. spaceman spiff, volume one. hardcover, full color. one of his signature tentacled fanged aliens takes up most of the entire cover, while a small astronaut with a ray gun hides behind a rock. he’s gotten much better, but it’s still unmistakably calvin’s art.

except - she squints at the astronaut. she flips open the book, thumbs through a few pages.

spiff isn’t the calvin-insert she remembers from their youth.

it’s her.

mousy brown hair, button nose, mr. bun tucked away in the back of her rocket ship.

she flips back to the first page.

anyway i go in to see paul one week in the summer of 2016, and i’m doing my usual bullshit which consists of me talking shit about myself, and paul is staring at me, and then he cuts me off and says that he’s got a new tool for helping people recognize when they’re using negative language, and gets up and goes over to his desk

and i’m like alright hit me with that sweet sweet self-help article my man, because i’m a linguistic learner and whenever paul’s like here i have a tool for you to use it’s pretty much always an article or a book or something

paul opens a drawer, takes something out, and turns back around. i stare.

i say, paul.

is that a nerf gun.

yeah, says paul.

i say, are you gonna shoot me with a nerf gun in this professional setting.

he happily informs me that that’s really up to me, isn’t it. and sits back down. and gestures, like, go ahead, what were you saying?

and i squint suspiciously and start back up about how i’m having too much anxiety to leave the house to run errands, like it was a miracle to even get here, like i’ve forgone getting groceries for the past week and that’s so stupid, what a stupid issue, i’m an idiot, how could i–

a foam dart hits me in the leg.

i go, hey! because my therapist just shot me in the leg. paul blinks at me placidly and raises an eyebrow. i squint again.

i say, slowly, it’s– not a stupid issue, i’m not stupid, but it’s frustrating me and i don’t want it to be a problem i’m having.

no dart this time. okay. sweet.

so the rest of the hour passes with me intermittently getting nailed with tiny foam darts and then swearing and then fixing my language and, wouldn’t you know it, i start liking myself a little more by the end of the session, which is mildly infuriating because paul can tell and he’s very smug about it 

and this fucking moron is saying that the joke is funny because the statue of liberty looks like the number 4.

“you know what i think a good number for a woman is? forty five”

(because if she’s elected, she will be the forty fifth president)

so there’s this girl in my spanish 2 class. we’ll call her kayla.

kayla is a sophomore. she is funny and outspoken and a little crazy. the main thing to remember about kayla is that she will stand up for herself when needed. and that’s why something happened with her and my spanish teacher.

we’ll call my teacher miss irving. miss irving has been teaching spanish for 30 years. she’s a little forceful, hates technology, and hates when people don’t just listen to her without questioning it.

it began when kayla entered class late near the beginning of the school year. “sorry, ma’am,” she said to miss irving. “i was at the counselor’s.”

miss irving looked up at kayla and asked for a pass. kayla didn’t have one, but she said that miss irving would be able to call the counselor and the counselor would verify her visit. miss irving refused to do so and gave her detention on the spot. kayla started trying to justify her own actions, and she received yet another detention.

this marked the beginning of a long, long feud. every time kayla did something, miss irving would reprimand her for it. kayla put on chapstick or began to eat in class and miss irving began to yell. kayla read a paragraph slower than the rest of us and miss irving would snap at her. slowly, kayla began to get fed up.

the last straw for her was when she asked miss irving to go to the counselor during class, and it changed everything.

“miss irving? i have an appointment with the counselor down the hall. may i go?”

“obviously not,” my teacher snapped back. “you can’t leave in the middle of the class.”

“but i need to see her, i have an appointme-“

“i don’t care. you’re going to translate that paragraph-“

“ma’am, i already translated it-“

“well, then i’ll give you more work to do-“

“no.”

at that word, all of the heads in the clasroom turned. it’s an unspoken rule that you don’t say no to miss irving. but kayla had fire in her voice, and was now standing up and glaring at the teacher.

“excuse me?” miss irving responded, and kayla went off.

“no matter what i do, you get on to me about it. i have issues that i need to take care of that you refuse to understand. you’re a teacher. you’re supposed to care about us. it’s your job! listen to me carefully: i. have. mental. health. problems. and there are times i need to eat in class or i need to go to the counselor’s office because of it, so could you just get off of my ass about it and try to understand?”

miss irving turned beet red and sent her to the principal’s office.

what followed was a battle between the two. miss irving kept emailing kayla’s parents, but kayla’s parents took their daughter’s side. then my teacher emailed kayla’s other teachers and asked them to take her side, but the other teachers said they didn’t ever have problems with kayla.

kayla went to talk to the principal about the situation and told her what was going on. the principal talked to miss irving, and miss irving lost her teacher of the year award for that year. she also received a strike on her teaching record for refusing to respect a student’s mental health protocol. and kayla won.

miss irving still teaches our class and we still have kayla with us. now, miss irving doesn’t hide her hatred for kayla at all. she expresses it fully to her other classes. and most of those other classes hate her as well.

but my class and i love kayla. because kayla has a newfound power, and she doesn’t take it for granted. instead, she uses it to help us.

and this matters so much to me because, one day, she helped me.

i have generalized anxiety disorder. one of the methods i can use to calm myself down is by doodling, and doodling also helps me listen more closely to the teacher’s lesson. so i started doodling on the edges of my papers in spanish a lot, especially when we started having tests every class period and it became very anxiety-inducing for me.

miss irving started taking points off for every doodle i made. and i mean A LOT of points. i drew an eye in the corner of a worksheet once and i got an 80 instead of a 100. when i tried to explain that it was for my anxiety, she didn’t care. so now i had even more anxiety because i couldn’t reduce my anxiety.

one day, miss irving was lecturing and i was doodling, when she started to yell at me for it.

i can’t remember a lot about what happened because at that moment i went into a full blown panic attack. but what i do remember is kayla standing up and yelling at her.

“what are you doing? stop! she’s obviously having a panic attack!”

she came over to my desk and led me through breathing exercises. calmed me down. told me my doodle of half a face looked really good, asked me how long i’d been taking art and about my disorder. the entire class was silent, watching, and miss irving was fuming.

when i was calm enough to, i thanked kayla, and she squeezed my hand in a silent alliance.

then miss irving walked back to the whiteboard and never said anything about my doodles again.

the moral of the story? just because a teacher or principal or parent is older than you doesn’t mean they deserve to be obeyed no matter what. if what your “elders” say to you or do to you belittles you, tears you down, or keeps you from being able to get help or be a better person, they are not doing their job, and you can stand up for yourself and others.