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My public high school education at its finest.
During my senior year of high school, I intentionally bombed the Advanced Placement test for history. I didn’t give a shit about history, so I figured getting stuck in the remedial class would make for an easy A on my final report card before graduation. Am I motivated or what?
Ms. Wolski was the history teacher assigned to our collection of hopeless slackers. She was an aging hippie with short, spiky white hair and thick square-framed glasses that she owned in ten different colors. It has never been confirmed, but I think she lived on another planet.
For the first two weeks of class, we learned all about the lead up to World War I and how Franz Ferdinand’s angular riffs took the Glasgow indie scene by storm, setting off a chain of events that quickly expanded into a global conflict due to the complex payola system plaguing European radio stations at the time.
Strangely, she then concluded the lesson by giving us a pop quiz about Ancient Egypt. More than half the class was perpetually stoned and didn’t even notice that the test was on material from an entirely different century than the one we were currently studying. However, a few of the overachievers called her out. “Time is cyclical,” she explained, sipping a potent herbal tea that smelled like a hamster. “Please be sure to use a number two pencil on the scantron sheets.”
Always quite the name dropper, Ms. Wolski claimed to be a close family friend of the Olsen twins, purportedly commissioned to ghostwrite their autobiography. She once compared Mary-Kate’s emotional depth and introspection to that of Martin Luther King, while Ashley’s analytical mind and problem solving acumen rivaled that of Sir Isaac Newton.
To prove her point, she wheeled in one of those television carts and showed us reruns of Full House. Every five minutes or so, she’d jump up on her desk, drop an apple on the screen, and shout, “You’ve got it dude.” Unfortunately for Ms. Wolski, during the commotion, her tea was knocked over, leaving a small crack in her "Meat is Murder" mug. Understandably, we were all laughing too hard at Dave Coulier to notice.
The next day, Ms. Wolski greeted us in the usual way — by aligning our chakras using a love crystal gifted to her by David Blaine. After removing her mala beads, she reached for her tea and began to take a hearty gulp. The hot, pungent liquid spilled through the cracked mug and stained Ms. Wolski’s paisley blouse with sludge. Mortified, she ran from the classroom in tears.
Unfazed, we watched another episode of Full House to pass the time, and about halfway through the period our teacher returned. She was wearing a new paisley blouse and had even switched her glasses to match. I’m not sure how she changed so fast, considering she rode a bicycle to work to reduce her carbon footprint. But what I do know is that as she apologized profusely for depriving us of that day’s lesson (“Why Henry Kissinger’s War Crimes Were Actually Paul McCartney’s Fault”), she instinctively took another large sip from the mug and doused herself with tea again.
After that, we didn’t see Ms. Wolski for a week.
Needless to say, history class didn’t end up being the easy A I had hoped for. Although, to be fair, Ms. Wolski did give us a complex trigonometry proof as our final exam. “All of the great innovators in history, much like my goddaughter Ashley, were polymaths,” she reasoned. “Focus on your breathwork and the subject matter will reveal itself to you through your third eye. Now Matthew, put that pen down. You must use a number two pencil on the scantron sheets. Your time starts now. You may begin.”
I got a B-minus.