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The Weirdest Things My Teachers Said to Me: Part 1
“And so man was cast out of the garden and forced to live a mortal life with pain and suffering, and it was only by God’s grace and his sacrifice of his only son that we now have a chance at heaven,” concluded my teacher with a pleasant sigh, as though he was presently feeling the sin washed off his body. Half the class stared at him with mild shock, the other half stared into space with disinterest. This was not a typical Sunday school class.
In fact, it was not a Sunday school class at all. It was a social sciences class at a public high school, and our ultra-conservative Christian teacher happily used his platform to preach rather than teach.
Mr. Harris couldn’t seem to help himself whenever the topic of the Middle East came up. His lecture inevitably veered into the Holy Land — or praise of George W. Bush, who’d saved us from the WMDs. He skipped over the part of our textbook that talked about minority issues, and of course there was absolutely no discussion of The Gays permitted.
I was happy to contribute to the class discussion by bringing up these missing topics. I admit I derived amusement from Mr. Harris’ scowl as he declined to call on me. Fourteen-year-old me gave no f*cks (what happened to her?) and unashamedly left my between-class reading — Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance — on the corner…
