Higher School

During my sophomore year of high school, the school hired two gym — excuse me, physical education — teachers for the year, with the understanding that only one of them would be kept after that year.

One, a former Marine with a buzz cut, was close to being a fascist, and was astonished when any of us didn't share his enthusiasm for sweaty physical activity. (A passion, I'll point out, that he talked about but never appeared to partake in himself.) The other had longer hair and was much more laid back, occasionally cutting class short on hot days.

Unfortunately for most of the students, gym teacher #2's car was found abandoned along the side of the road, apparently after an accident. The police found a bag of marijuana in the car and, some time later, found the gym teacher. who'd fled after the accident.

You can guess which teacher received the contract for the following year.

That teacher, who insisted on being called "Coach" by the students, would have been surprised by what we called him behind his back: his name was Schlenker, but we referred to him as Canker.

"Clueless" might have been closer. He once asked us to form a semi-circle, and we dutifully sat in front of and beside him. He looked behind him and saw no one there. "Why isn't anyone behind me? he asked. Another day, when he was teaching the health unit, he asked us which would get a person cleaner, a shower or a bath. Our consensus was the shower, because laying in a bathtub meant soaking on one's own dirty water. With a gleam in his eye — the wily Coach had put one over on the students! — he informed us we were all wrong, wrong, wrong. A bath, he said, would get a person much cleaner. Why? Because after soaking in a bath one should drain the water and quickly rinse under the shower.

Our protest that his solution was neither a bath or a shower, but actually both, fell on deaf ears.

He also, during driver's ed, insisted that the gears on an automatic transmission car were Park-Neutral-Reverse-Drive. When I offered the observation that Neutral was, in fact, between Park and Reverse, he was so incensed that he sent me to the Principal's office.

It was the best day in gym class I ever had. No one ever had to exercise in the principal's office.