Hello, friends!
It happened. The Big Move. My father is now in his new apartment with only a few complaints (mainly about the things I threw away or didn’t bring). He seems happy with it and I hope he hasn’t gotten sick of us yet. I’ll be going to the old place to go through decades worth of papers and such this week.
Welcome to the 129th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and how I became a mean teacher.
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Work on Project: Moons was scattered since most of the week was about packing and moving and stress and depression. A measly 1,200 words was added to the book, bringing the total to 74 pages.
I joke about the word measly. Writing—creating—every day doesn’t just mean time spent with ass in chair typing. I’ve thought a lot about Project: Moons and the fantasy/science fiction book idea, as well as a few other ideas. I also am gearing myself up mentally to get back into Project: Amusement Park for the third draft.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the comic book character I based on my father. Gabby Ray is a cowboy and I see him being able to tell relevant stories in a funny way. Moving my father has given me tons of ideas. Would I spread myself too thin trying to write a draw a comic book as well as write my novels and such?
I don’t think so.
Would it muddy the waters of who I am as a creator? I don’t think so. The fact is, I love to tell stories and will tell them any way I can. And in today’s world where pop culture and entertainment come from so many places, I don’t see how this would be bad. Or maybe I’m fooling myself.
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Summer vacation is a time for reflection for those of us who make our living in education. All right, all right, that’s bullshit. Some teachers/educators I’m sure reflect in the summer, I try to turn it all off. That was just too good an opening. Actually, it reads like something you’d see in some education blog, which this ain’t. The truth is, I’ve been trying not to think of hell—er…I mean school—for the last two weeks. That said, my mind wanders and I needed a topic for today’s essay and here we are.
I am a mean teacher.
Should that be capitalized?
I am a Mean Teacher.
Hmm…all right. I’ll go with that.
I wasn’t always the Mean Teacher. I started my career as the Funny Teacher. The first seven years of my teaching career I was told by many students that I was funny. I heard it from other teachers, too. “The kids say you’re so funny,” they’d say. “That’s a lie,” would be my response, which generally got a laugh. I was sassy, I was goofy, and I was sarcastic. This helped since in my role as a teacher, I was the Exploratory teacher for my career technical program.
Infodump:
Exploratory — The process of exploring different career technical programs in order for students to see what fits them best. From 2008 through 2017 (I think), I’d have exploratory students every 4.5 days for the first half of the year. From 2017 on it was every 3 days.
Career technical program — Shop. Vocational-Technical schools will refer to shops as career tech programs now because people on the outside give “shop” a bad connotation.
I did a good job. We were always in the top 5 of 27 programs the kids could choose from. Not as good as my predecessor, a veteran teacher who maintained the top 3 during her four years doing exploratory, once even hitting number 1, but healthy.
Around 2014, though I began to notice a change. Part of it was because I was seeing more students now because administrators who are long retired now fucked with us at the behest of a know-it-all who saw me as a real threat to his brother, another exploratory teacher. We went from 13 seats in a creative program to 18. Thirteen was already too many seats. And there was another creative program with 12 seats to fill. Also run by a friend of the know-it-all.
The other thing that changed was my reputation. I began to hear that I was “mean.” This flummoxed me. I hadn’t changed anything in the way I taught. I still told jokes, was goofy and sarcastic. So what was happening?
Finally, this past year, I figured it out. My 12-year-old helped me.
I asked her to do something and she said no. I held her accountable and she asked, “Why do you have to be so mean?”
“I’m not being mean,” I said. “I’m being a parent.”
By the second syllable of parent, I got it.
Yes, I played and was goofy and told jokes and all the rest. But I was also strict. I also had rules in my classroom. I ran my shop like a class. Instead of standing around and showing off testosterone, I had rules about talking when I was teaching and not chewing gum and a plethora of other things that helped my classroom run efficiently.
This, apparently, was mean.
Now, if you’re over the age of 25 and reading this, you probably think I’m crazy. I thought I was crazy. So, I asked my current students.
“I know I have a reputation for being mean,” I said to them. “Why do you think that is?”
Now, let me explain that my students—most of them, anyway—love me. They get what I do. They drank the crazy Kool-Aid I was serving. They saw that I am a creative person who likes a certain amount of structure and they were there for it. Most of them, anyway.
The consensus I heard was that I had rules and wouldn’t let people goof around whenever they wanted.
“You hold us accountable, Mr. Gauthier,” one student said. “Lotsa kids don’t like that.”
I noticed a change in the students coming into the school around 2014 and I couldn’t figure it out. The one thing these kids had in common was they were born in 2000. I thought I was crazy with that idea but as the years passed, I became more and more convinced that this was a huge reason.
As the teachers who taught me retired and as education changed, so did the students and their parents. Schools became more and more frightened of the student whose parents will lawyer up because they didn’t get the desired grade. In order to appease parents, more and more was given over. This only encouraged the kids who received those benefits to grow up and expect those and more for their kids.
As anti-intellectualism became more and more rampant, along with standardized testing, the job of the educator grew more and more into the role of the entertainer. That’s a role I’m good with, however, the audience changed. There began to be less and less in common with the students not only because I was becoming older and they were staying the same age, but because popular culture became more and more fractured.
Marvel Movies were the last gasp before the pandemic. Now, I can’t even get the students all together on those. There’s too many of them and they came out either when the students were babies or—and this saddens me—they weren’t born yet.
This may sound like the rantings of an old man who’s losing his ability to resonate with the youth, and perhaps it is. 48 is a little more than a month away for me and that’s, like, a real adultperson. The thing is, though, there have been huge changes and they’ve grown worse since 2020. Part of that is generational, part of it is that we never really dealt with the Pandemic and are now living in a world that’s on fire.
I’d like to say I’m hopeful that things will change but I just don’t see that happening. With the buy-in of AI technology from educational administrators and the equitable but damning daily use of Chromebooks/laptops in the classroom, the continued splintering of popular culture, and the general disdain for the arts, things will not be getting better. Not for a bit.
The hope, though, is in the few who Get It. Those students who sat in my exploratory classes and understood that I taught with passion. That the rules were designed to help, not hinder. They get it and they’re the types who will keep the ideals alive.
Unfortunately, they are in the minority. But then, I guess that’s usually the case. The few help the many.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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