School's Out (of control)

(Alice Cooper, 1972)

Ok, so this whole teacher thing. When I was in school - it's been thirty years since I graduated from high school - we had a great deal of respect for our teachers. We may not have liked all of them, but we respected their authority. For example, I hated my gym teacher. She was a mean old lady. One day in gym I was feeling really nauseous and asked to not have to dress out. It was my last class of the day and she asked me why I didn't just go home, or did I have something I wanted to stay after school for, basically saying I was faking it. My mom and dad were out of town and the lady who was staying with us couldn't come and get me. The second I got home, I threw up all over the place. I wanted to put my vomit in a bag and throw it at that old hag. But, I didn't. Instead, I got some good gossip on her. SHE SMOKED! A GYM TEACHER! I found out one day when I tried to sneak into the teacher's lounge to see if they had a knife to cut a cake we had for one of the teachers EVERYONE LIKED. And there she was, surrounded by a cloud of smoke, trying to hide her cigarette under the table. Heh, heh, heh. She really didn't like me then. I wasn't allowed to go to our senior pep club picnic because I hadn't attended one of the three required away basketball games because I had to work for a living as a teenager. It was a minor offense she could have easily ignored. I showed up anyway and she kicked me out. I hope she got kicked out of a really important event once in her life - like waiting in line for heaven.

We would NEVER call our teachers by their first names - we didn't even know their first names. We certainly didn't call them by their last names without Mr. or Mrs. or Miss preceding it. Only the jocks dared to assume that air of familiarity, but they had special privileges the rest of us paeans were denied (probably because they could seriously knock the crap out of anyone). Tyler calls his teachers by their last names and nicknames all the time. And teachers are way more laid back. Tyler and his English teacher were joking about a heroin den they both claim to have visited. (How come I wasn't invited? I don't care if Tyler does drugs, but he has to do them with me first.) And, teachers wear jeans and all manner of casual apparel to school. In sixth grade I was sent home because I wore pants (not even jeans) to school. The night before the big rebellion, I spent hours on the phone with my little sixth grade girlfriends. Each one swore they'd break the rules and wear pants. I was the only one who did. And it was really a pair of pants underneath a jumper in a kind of pseudo-pantsuit thing. Really tasteless. But, nonetheless daring.

Now, I think most kids still respect teachers and their authority, but it's like everyone's taken a gi-normous chill pill or something. Guess if we'd had gi-normous chill pills thirty years ago things might have gone differently for me and that hellish teacher. No. I'd still have wanted to throw that vomit in her face.