reijys replied to your post:
this is still one of my favorite stories from high school and we didn’t even go to high school together
my favorite story from high school is - I don’t think I’ve ever told this story publically but ok so
ya’ll know I’m from the boonies of los angeles but if you don’t: I live in a part of los angeles that people actually think is lomita and not los angeles that’s called harbor city and is neither near the los angeles harbor or a city
it’s not a bad place to live or anything ok it’s just that we don’t have grocery stores and our division of the los angeles school district only has ten schools and narbonne is consistently number 10 because we’re the boonie school everyone else sends their problem students to and then when they’re too much of a problem for narbonne they send them to gardena but that’s another story
the point here is that there were enough pregnant girls at narbonne that we had a juno club and so many drugs that some of us wore dare shirts ironically
there are two parts to this story: the first is that tenth grade honors english was the worst goddamn time of my high school career and for the first semester of tenth grade english I had an old white guy for a teacher named mr. hoffman or something like that I’ve scrubbed most of the details of tenth grade english from my mind we’ll call him hoffman
hoffman was an old school guy, like he’s probably what everyone pictures when they picture a college professor: old, white hair, wore a lot of crisply pressed button-up shirts with bowties, 100% didn’t ask to be teaching 10th grade english at narbonne high and 500% did not ask to be teaching the Problem Class of 10th grade english at narbonne high
”reili,” you say, “I thought you said you were in honor english” I was but here’s the thing: hoffman’s class of honors students was me and one other girl
that left 22 other miscreants and riffraff who all smelled like weed and axe body spray with a collective iq of about 45 on a good day which might seem mean except I had to sit through them discussing julius caesar and you didn’t
let’s just say sonnets are both not hedgehogs and I finally understood, in that class, why people hate reading shakespeare
I also skipped that class so often the detention centre called my journalism teacher and told him that if I didn’t start going to class they were going to start walking me to class because they were so tired of seeing me and I wasn’t even trying to skip
of course the important part of this whole story is that hoffman’s class was located in the bungalows next to the bathrooms and the college center
(yes, you read that right. our college center was located between the bathrooms, at the very edges of campus because narbonne sincerely was proud if you managed to graduate and not drop out to have a baby but maybe you shouldn’t tax yourself too much and think about college)
the second part of this story is that in the second semester I transferred out of that cesspit and went on to write twincest to piss off my extremely conservative other tenth grade honors teacher because if I had to be miserable reading my fellow students’ poetry then she had to be miserable reading my filth and sin
what follows is the most accurate account of the bizarre events that led to hoffman’s mental breakdown and subsequent immediate resignation, told to me by several people who weren’t in the class:
about halfway through the second semester, someone hotboxes the bathroom which normally wouldn’t be such a big deal except that hoffman had been slowly going crazy (having been in his class I 100% believe this part) and he was Absolutely Done with this shit like ABSOLUTELY DONE
attacks a student, everyone’s screaming, there’s blood drawn, I was told that the kid cracked his head open and an ambulance had to be called (which I absolutely don’t believe but it makes for a better story) and shit’s cray, you know? especially because after this hoffman just like
he’s so fucking done he just walks out of the class and the school and then for the rest of the semester there’s just a substitute teacher there and nobody ever heard from hoffman again
