The Alternative to Classroom Violence

It’s been awhile since our country’s last school shooting and I fear that the clock is ticking down to yet another Ritalin-saturated kid going berserk and blowing away his teacher or principal. Before that happens, I make this plea to every student in America. “Please stop blowing away your teachers or principals!” Honestly, what has society come to when a kid brings a gun to school and…

Okay, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I’m afraid I must step down from this particular soapbox. That little bout of self-righteousness was actually nothing more than thinly veiled jealousy. The fact is there were plenty of teachers at my high school who I wished somebody would shoot, but nobody ever did! It didn’t seem like such an impossible dream considering the fact that everybody in my town owned a gun. Of course, this was rural Maine and most of those guns were hunting rifles—which I suppose were harder to conceal under a varsity jacket.

Hindsight being 20/20 and all, I am glad that nobody ever busted the proverbial cap on some of our more detestable teachers. First of all, I was in a lot of those mean old codgers’ classes, and I mean, hello… ricochet. Second, it took our janitor months to clean up vomit. And third, in the midst of a generation fixated on instant gratification, I was taught a valuable lesson. In situations like these, prolonged torture was often far better revenge than instant death. Pushing a teacher to the edge of sanity by undermining their authority was more priceless than a canister full of bullets.

Subtlety was the key. Subtlety and teamwork (another good lesson). Spitballs and outbursts were fun and all, but all they gained you was detention—which only served to strengthen the teacher’s perceived dominance. No, if any subversiveness was to be accomplished, it had to be done a little at a time over the course of an entire year. And every kid in the class had to be in on it. Divided we fell. United, we said, “They can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

In Mr. Guinness’s Life Science class, we started simply. Many of us wore those digital watches that beeped on the hour. Before class one day, we spent ten minutes synchronizing them exactly two seconds apart. At precisely ten o’clock, Mr. Guinness’s lesson was interrupted by a chain symphony of hourly reminders: beep-beep…boop-boop…tweet-tweet…chirp-chirp…honk-honk…yuk-yuk… When he turned sternly from the blackboard, we were all diligently taking notes, innocently unaware that anything unusual had occurred.

While discussing the reproductive system, we took sadistic pleasure in getting Mr. Guinness to say words like Sperm and Testes over and over again. “Uh, Mr. Bailey, what bone did you say this was…? Oh, the pubic bone!”

By the end of the year, Mr. Guinness’s hair had started to thin and turn gray. The confident air he’d projected on that first day of class was a faint shadow of the rattled fear that now emanated from deep within his tortured soul. His breaking point finally came during our study of the digestive system and a lesson on Peristalsis, which Mr. Guinness described as the process by which the intestines move food through the body using “wave motions.”

To illustrate the point, the whole class spontaneously broke into “the wave”, moving from left to right and back again. Our favorite game became to see how many times we could “peristalsize” while Mr. Guinness’s back was turned. I think the record was something like fifteen. When Mr. Guinness eventually caught us in the act, we erupted in laughter, telling him that we were just trying really really hard to study Peristalsis.

Something finally popped. He slammed his pointer on the desk so hard that everybody jumped. His head turning purple and his voice reaching an inhuman pitch, Mr. Guinness bellowed at us to “SHUUUUT UUUUUUP!!!” With pure satisfaction at his complete and total loss of control, the smug look on everyone’s face said the same thing; “You can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

So kids, take it from me. Shooting your teachers, although tempting, is never the right decision. There is far more fun to be had, messing with their heads. So be creative. Work together. And when you get suspended, don’t you dare tell you parents this was my idea!