At many points in my life, whenever I have let it slip that I want to be a professional writer (you know, actually make money for sharing my neuroses with the world), the question is invariably asked about how I'm gonna get by until I make it to the Tom Clancy- or Stephen King-like status that denotes success in the bitchy world of publishing.  Never mind that I don't aspire to paperweight-sized paperbacks which people get simply for the status and never intend to read, that is the mark by which we are judged... sorry, got off on a tangent.  When I meet the question of how to get by with a blank stare, the inquisitor usually suggests becoming a teacher.

Teacher?  Teacher?  I don't wanna be no stinkin' teacher!

Remembering the hell that teachers have gone through when I was in high school, middle school, elementary school, and preschool, I have felt unparalleled disgust and fear at the very notion of opening myself up to such an occupation.  The cruel taunts, the practical jokes, the constant lack of respect... and that's just the fellow teachers.  Don't get me started on the crap that kids would put me through.

But after much meditation on the issue, I have thought that perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad career move.  My cousin, the one they call "Brandon" who is a N-S regular, is also a teacher.  He has had a mixed experience with this (the highs of helping another redneck learn to read "The Cat in The Hat," the agony of losing another female student to a sudden pregnancy... though not his child, I stress).  His travels and travails are semi-legendary.  So I have a template on which to base my own expectations of what I would deal with were I to endeavor to teach the children.  After all, as coked-up Whitney once sang, they are our future.

That particular thought scares me to death.

Were I to step into the ivy-covered halls of, say, my old alumni Walhalla High School, I would begin first off by making sure I had a concise and cleverly worded mission statement, something to the effect of "I will try to contain my murderous rage when encountered with the jock children of those jock parents who once harassed me..." on second thought, let's just jump the gun and say I decided to teach on the college level.  Yeah, that works out better.

First off, I'd need a subject to teach.  As I plan to major in English when I *eventually* get around to my degree, the obvious choice would be... Biology.  No, no, I somehow got A's in the lower level Bios at Tech but reinforced my commonly held stereotype (held by me) that I was bad at science by barely surviving the highest-level Bio with a C.  English it is, or History: my knowledge of the different phases in German tank production during WW2 would finally come in handy.  Either way, I would be set on a course for fun.

In college, unlike high school, you get a certain amount of leeway with your approach to teaching.  The professors I've had have varied from by-the-textbook automatons to laissez-faire pushovers.  I opt for something in between.  An authoritarian laid-back guy.  How hard could that be to pull off?

I guess it would be fine to let my students talk (after all college is the place where you discover who you really are, and how you can't do a damn thing about it due to your parents), but too much discussion could ruin class discipline.  Therefore, a measured balance in which I, the teacher, get to talk, and the students get to weigh in with their thoughts.  Throwing erasers at them is right out these days as a way of casting fear in them, so I'd have to bring my Gloch to school everyday.  I'm sure the administration would understand.

Also, I have an aversion to cell phones.  I don't have one now, and I can't see a need for me to have one when I'm a teacher.  But that's all fine for me, some people must have them.  You know, for drug deals and the like.

But woe be unto the innocent cell-phone owner whose ringer or vibrator goes off during one of my many lectures about the importance of "Playboy" to western literature.  I have it all planned out:  I will kindly ask the student to surrender his/her phone, take it up to my desk at the front of the class, pick up a handy baseball bat (real wood, no aluminum), and pull a Morgan Freeman like in that one movie he did, with the baseball bat in an inner city school.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me say I would smash the living bejesus out of that phone.  That would teach them a lesson.

My teaching techniques would be in accord with my own beliefs that people are inherently stupid.  In order to get my point across, I will chastise those students with whom I disagree politically.  If anybody dares to talk about "conservatives this" or "conservatives that," I will tell them they are stupid, that their parents would have done better if they'd believed in abortion.  I will even go so far as to dry-hump a mannequin with a Ronnie Reagan mask in order to make them cry.  As for those who traffic in sexist, racist, and other -ist kinds of views, there's still that baseball bat.

I wouldn't be the kind of inspirational teacher that Robin Williams played in Dead Poet's Society, but that sits fine with me.  For some reason every teacher from grades 6-12 thought it was a good film that we, as students, needed to see over and over and over and over... I was ruined on that film before I turned 16.  Inspiring kids to meet in a cave and recite poetry into the night is never a good plot for a movie, and what's more it would never work in real life.  So I'd have to be more masculine, more manly.  Anyway, I couldn't be a Math teacher like Eddie "Crater face" Olmos in Stand and Deliver.  I hate math, and my students would hate me after their first tests came back in the negative portions of the grading scale.

So, perhaps teaching isn't for me.  I'd be fired quickly.  Hell, I'd fire me if I hired myself as a teacher... whoa, that was confusing.  Anyway, my point is maybe this teaching gig isn't for me after all.  Rather than having oodles of time to finish my big novel about German tank production during WW2, I'd have to grade half-assed essays by know-nothings who think every last opinion of theirs is worth airing.  I'd be miserable, but not in a inspired-to-write-more way (more like a inspired-to-drink-more way).  I am out of line with teaching, but there's got to be other jobs I can do.  There will always be a need for garbage men, after all...

- Trevor