I long time ago I hated my high school math teacher and he hated me back. It didn't start out like that though, we just kind of fell into it. It was tough to figure out what I was supposed to be doing there. I would get dropped off and follow these instructions written on pieces of paper that said PE, or ECON, and I walk to the back of the class and sit down.
I spent the rest of class doodling or writing little stories or whatever. I couldn't hear anything back there, which was fine, because everything the teacher said came directly from a book that I would read on my own time, and I wouldn't have been able to hear anything if I tried, because the rest of the class spent their idle time chatting it up.
My math teacher was an old adjunct, all I remember about him is that he wore Birkenstocks with fuzzy wool grey socks. I only remember because the class gave him all of the shit over it. They had a hard time understanding the fashion choice, so they would always ask him things in the form of a question. Stuff like, "What do you do when it rains?" Or, "Who dressed you?" But he didn't seem to mind much I guess, because he showed up everyday wearing the same thing.
During his lectures he would randomly ask kids to come up and solve a problem on the dry erase board, I spent everyday in fear of going up there. In his class I wouldn't doodle or write, I followed the lecture and did the problems, because I knew it was only a matter of time till my name was called. The math wasn't the problem, it was the walk up, and then the writing of the problem on the board.
Not many people in high school liked me, don't really know why, just didn't. Which was an easy fix, show up, sit in back, stay low and quiet, speaking only to people I trust until the final bell rings, then get out. But unfortunately I shared classes with the same students that didn't like me, and the teacher asking me to come up front was putting me directly into their line of fire.
This situation would always cause panic attacks in me, as in I would just sit in front of the dry erase board frozen. I could hear the laughs behind me, so I couldn't turn around, I could feel the teachers impatience with me, so I couldn't speak. The seconds feeling like hours, the shaking, the stillness, all of those things.
My high school math teacher hated me because I spazzed on him one day. I was in front of the class staring at the board, and to my left I hear "You can't divide twelve and three?" It was him. Everything went from nothing to something, I got so mad. I had never said a thing about his Birkenstocks, I had never made a sound in his class, but in my mind here he was making fun of me with them, I felt betrayed.
So I wheel around and in the span of a second I was nose to nose with him. I was cursing and threatening and carrying on, I wanted him to hit me. My line of reasoning at the time was "Fuck him, fuck them, fuck everything, lets go." He called security, they came and subdued me, then dragged me to the principals office. I was at home suspended within the hour. The math teacher and I never shared another word the rest of the semester, and I never had to go up to the dry erase board again.
The Protoculture Mixtape V.15
