Driver's Ed

POUNDS’ questions from my last entry got me reminiscing about my many academic sins, and I now regret accusing my Driver’s Ed teacher of being a lush. True, he had that reputation, so I ran with it in the previous post, but I have no proof that such was the case. All I know was that the dude was practically comatose throughout class, and nobody learned a damn thing from him. Although I took it upon myself to occasionally liven things up. The only time I actually got the teacher’s attention was when I started going “vroom vroom” and then proceeded to drive my desk around the room.

He kicked me out of class that day. SOOOO worth it.

Driver’s Ed brought out the worst in me. The family discussed this over Thanksgiving, too, and my mother decided that I got along great with teachers I respected and then went out of my way to make life a living hell for the rest of them. There is some truth in that statement, although it ignores the fact that at one time or another, every one of those teachers I loathed ended up subbing in Driver’s Ed.

My brother recalled the time that Coach Moriarty filled in for McLeish. I didn’t know Coach Moriarty, he being one of those athletic types, but I knew instantly that I didn’t like him. So, during the course of the class period, I decided to insert a capped pen into my left ear.

I was sitting in the very back of the room. I said nothing. I was just sitting there, a placid smile pasted on my face, with a pen in my ear.

It didn’t take long to get a reaction.

“Hey, you!” Moriarty said after a minute or two, pointing directly at me.

I feigned surprise, even looking over my shoulder to see if perhaps he was addressing someone else.

“Yeah, you!” he said, angrier this time. “Take that pen out of your ear!”

“What?” I answered, perhaps a little too loudly.

“I said take that stupid pen out of your ear!”

“What?” I said again, almost shouting. “I can’t hear you. I have a pen in my ear.”

That got some nervous laughter from the rest of the class, who were a lot more scared of this twerp than I was. Still, it was enough to show that I had succeeded in undermining this little tyrant’s authority. This displeased him mightily, and you could actually see the veins in his neck begin to throb. Through clenched teeth, he asked me my name, and I gave it to him pleasantly. (The calmer I was, the madder he got. )

So he tried to up the stakes a little bit.

“What would your father say if he knew you were sitting in my class with a pen in your ear?” he demanded to know.

“Gosh, I’m not sure,” I said with wide-eyed innocence. “You’ll have to ask him, I suppose.”

“I’ll do that!”

The moment was gone after that. The rest of the class passed without incident. Although I seem to recall that I spent the remainder of the period with my head on my desk buried underneath my notebook binder, which I’d made into a little fort in the hopes of bugging him even further. But that got me nothing. I’d used up my best material with the pen-in-the-ear gambit.

My brother, who actually WAS a high school athlete, bumped into Moriarty after that, and the esteemed coach asked “What is with your brother?! That guy is out to lunch!” He then told my brother that he’d tried to call my father, but he couldn’t get him because he was out to lunch. “Not like your brother, though – he was literally out to lunch.” Because, you know, Dad was eating lunch. Unlike me, who was just nuts. Not literally nuts, like walnuts or cashews, but figuratively speaking.

Was there a point to this? Other than Driver’s Ed sucks?