Sometimes I think about my high school English teacher. She was a few years away from retirement but still too many years for her liking. She was completely fed with teaching. But instead of many teachers who are fed with teaching but try to hide it and just project their frustration of their students, she would joke about how tired she was of teaching all the time. Every Friday she would make a thank-god-it’s-Friday joke. Every Monday she would bemoan the fact that it was Monday. If she could spend the class hour doing something remotely adjacent to teaching but not teaching, she would seize the occasion, like showing the entire school the pictures she’d taken on the school trip.
On our last year, because of some rule of our school, we were supposed to have only one subject between English and Art at our final exams, and we as a class would be able to pick which one. We picked art so basically our English teacher found herself in a position where she could teach us, like, 1% of the program and it wouldn’t matter since we wouldn’t be examined on her subject.
So this woman with not a single fuck left to give spent almost an entire school year doing things like reading us letters written to Lord Byron by some lover of his (as you do), and, of course, showing us movies related to modern English literature (that I would illegally download and put on a DVD for her. She would call me her little pirate). The movies included movies like an adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest (cute and harmless), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (an adventure. really try showing a bunch of eighteen-year-olds the movie Tess of the D’Urbervilles.) and fucking WILDE. You know what Wilde is? Well, it’s about Oscar Wilde. And it is about his relationships with men. And it’s, well, fairly explicit. Like, it’s not the kind of movie that one would think ‘mmm I’ll show it to a class of teenagers’. But did this woman give a fuck? No she didn’t. She just showed a class of teenagers a movie about men having sex with men like it was nothing. No one in the class made a single joke or mocked the movie, and afterwards she complimented us for being much more mature than she expected, which means she expected us not to be mature about it, which means that she just was ready to watch the world burn and she didn’t give a single fuck about it.
So this about-sixty-year-old woman had a lot of very Catholic kids, in Italy, in 2008/2009, watch a fairly explicit gay movie like the personification of a ‘deal with it’ gif and no one batted an eye
A hero.
(via littlestartopaz)
