English Teachers

There is not a teacher who is disrespected more than a secular studies teacher in a yeshiva environment. Rabbeim will tell students to respect their secular studies teachers while at the same time tell students that the afternoon classes are a waste of time and merely a government requirement.

The schools don't usually go for the top-end teachers either, preferring to allocate their dollars on lesser quality teachers. This blend of low quality teachers and an imbued sense of looking down on the materials from the genral student body led to many interesting developments.

One classic teacher was Mr Hayes. His effeminate nature didn't sit well with most of us. But it was speech impediment, or perhaps accent, that caused him the most problems.

Trying to maintain order, he would say Let's be in our seats now. Except it came across as Lez Be In our seats now, a phrase that could never cause order but get the class to sit down from lauging so hard (You think it sounds adolescent? of course that was adolescent. What do you think we were?). He had the peculiar habit of calling everyone Master, which caused all sorts of problems when a Zev Bader entered his class.

My Hayes had replaced Mr Bostwick, a nice enough teacher who once decided not to come in to school one day because his car spun out and was pointed in the direction of home.

There was Mr Norde, a fiery black math teacher who enjoyed preaching that Geometry was life and once walked into the classroom to find Why is Mr Norde so tall? Hint: Because his Knee Grows written on the board. The student who wrote that was given a slap on the wrist punishment, because he was one of the top bochurim in the shuir. This was the same student who went running to Rosh Yeshiva when he came across the word breast in a Shakepeare play we were reading, and got the school to ban the play.

There was Mr Henderson, who could not say my name at all, and called me Air all semester long (A name that somehow stuck, perhaps making him the most influential teacher in my life). He once bragged to the class that he had built a boat, and then had to take it apart because he could not get it out of his basement.