My High School Calculus Teacher Was a Lizard Creature From Space

Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% offOf all the awful teachers I had to deal with in high school, among the most awful of them all was Jerry Puffball.We called him Jerry. We let his name roll off our tongue like we were spitting out a cockroach.“What class do you have next hour?”“Jerry.”“Did you do the homework for Jerry?”“Nah, Jerry can do his own homework.”He looked like the kind of person who might pull off his human mask to reveal the lizard face beneath. He kind of rolled when he walked, like he was riding a stationary bicycle instead of standing upright. He didn’t know what to do with his arms. They were set at a weird angle like the plastic action figures we used to play with. Also, his head constantly rotated as he moved around, but his eyes went in the opposite direction sort of like the liquid metal assassin in Terminator 2.He never smiled. He had tight lips like a frog and a long forked tongue that used to dart out to keep his eye moist.Jerry. How we hated Jerry.When he lectured, he used to sprinkle his words with pregnant pauses as if he were trying to emphasize the momentousness of every syllable. That only worked if you were a fool. The rest of us knew he’d developed this speaking tick to give himself time to think of something to say. He gave that away by the fact that his eyes always went up and to the right.Then he’d lick them with his forked tongue and make a weird shudder with his neck muscles like he’d just swallowed a gerbil whole.The comical thing was that my dad hated him too. I had a hard time with my dad, so anything that irritated my dad left me feeling a little conflicted, especially when it was somebody I hated as much as Jerry Puffball.For some reason, my dad had to go and watch him give a speech somewhere. I don’t know how that happened because my dad didn’t like to be involved in anything related to me or the school. There was one time I called him to come and pick me up from somewhere and he refused, so I had to hitchhike home on the interstate.But he went and saw Jerry Puffball speak. When he came home, he did nothing but rage about it.“Who was that blithering idiot? He spoke for ten hours and said absolutely nothing. Then he wandered around the stage like a half clubbed penguin too punch drunk to escape. What a colossal waste of my time.”“He’s the guy who gave me a C in computer programming.”“Well...” then my dad’s brain fizzled out because he loved to punish me, but that would mean having to admit Jerry Puffball was right about something. Since he’d declared him loathsome, he couldn’t contradict me, so he just started grumbling incoherently.But though he hadn’t fooled my dad, Jerry Puffball had fooled the school board. They were dazzled by the fact that he had a Master’s Degree, or at least he said he did. They didn’t see too many Master’s Degrees up in our town of two thousand angry, unemployed loggers.Also, Jerry was all into computers. The members of the school board knew that computers were the future. They were all excited about computers.Jerry had a program called Virtus Walkthrough. You could use it to design architecture. It looked like a poorly rendered version of Castle Wolfenstein, but the school board ate it up and sent Jerry all the money he could spend.He spent it on a batting machine because the only thing that connected him to humanity was his love of baseball. I had friends who had the misfortune of being coached by Puffball. There, as with any lecture he gave, it was clear that Jerry didn’t prepare his remarks in advance.“He told us to move our hands really fast when we run,” Jeff said. Then he paused for effect and looked up and to the right and tried to lick his own eyeball in mockery of Jerry.I laughed.Jeff started frantically swinging his arms. “Faster! Move those arms faster! Also, clench your butt hole!”“What?”Jeff looked at me. “That’s what he said. He said we had to clench our butt holes when we run.”“Isn’t it always clenched?”“He told us to clench it harder.”Then Jeff started to run down the hallway, his arms pumping furiously, his butt hole clenched, his tongue darting out to slither up his cheek.I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. “Stop, stop!”But Jeff just went back and forth, staring vaguely forward, his eyes scanning the lockers like Jerry or the liquid metal killer from Terminator 2.The whole baseball team is going to look like a bunch of half clubbed penguins.And they did, and they lost. It didn’t matter that the school board gave them the money for an expensive batting machine. But that didn’t sour them on Jerry. Maybe he’d managed to plant some sort of reptilian seed in their frontal cortex with a lizard like proboscis. I wouldn’t put it past him.Within a few weeks of the first course I had with Jerry, he flipped out because somebody stole the batteries out of the remote control. He slithered up to the front of the room and presented us with an ultimatum. “Those batteries better be returned or there will be consequences.”Another kid, Josh, decided to take matters into his own hands. “I’ll just buy some batteries.”“No man!” I said. “Screw that! We didn’t take the batteries. Call his bluff.”“Nah.”“I’m serious dude, screw that guy. What’s he going to do, he’s got no evidence.”Teachers telling us that we’d be subjected to some horrific punishment was something I gave up believing back in grade school. Never confess! That’s the first thing you learn when you’re subjected to unspeakable torture every day. Confession is a false promise. Once you confess, you get it worse!But Josh must have been from some soft, kind and loving family. He presented the batteries and Jerry was all smug and satisfied about it. “They weren’t the original batteries that were taken,” he said, “but they will suffice.”I really wish we’d seen him flip the hell out when his empty bluster of a threat was ignored, but oh well. I got him in the end.The jerk did give me a C in computer science, but he taught me one thing. He taught me that in order to learn from a class where Jerry was the teacher, I’d have to teach myself from the book.I wrote a program that created an endless loop and burned out a computer.That’s supposed to be impossible. Jerry said so and he had a master’s degree in computers according to the school board.“It’s a fail safe,” he said with eyes that were too wet and which failed to focus on anyone in the room. “You can’t do it. Computers are smarter than us.”Well, I didn’t try, but I did it anyway. It was a consequence of not realizing that Jerry would never bother to teach us anything. The computer sat there sparking and smoking. “Look, it’s the fourth of July!” I said.Jerry wasn’t amused.That was the end of my junior year. I would be stuck with Jerry as my teacher for Calculus as a senior.I remember the principal coming in at the end of Computer Science and saying, “Every student in this room is also taking Calculus.”When he said that, I kind of winced because I knew Jerry hated me and I sort of expected him to show it. But he just stared at the waste paper basket and nodded distantly. “Good,” he said as if he’d just been served a plate of recently killed ferrets for dinner.When calculus rolled around, I told everybody what we were in for. “This guy won’t teach us jack squat. He won’t be prepared. We have to learn ourselves from the book.”“Yeah, whatever,” everybody said. They hadn’t dealt with Jerry before, so I couldn’t really blame them for not believing me. Plus, it’s a big pain in the ass to try and teach yourself calculus from a book. But I did it. Once you figure out how, it’s not so hard. The book had the cover of a violin on the front because the hole in the violin looked like the symbol for an integral. Math people are a hoot.Predictably, everybody in the class struggled but Grady. Grady’s success was nothing Jerry could take credit for. He’s a damn math savant. I didn’t realize that until I got to be 50 and I realized I’ve never met anyone in the world who could just glide through calculus like he was going through a slide at the water park. Grady was the kind of guy who would buy a graphing calculator for fun and then sit around programming it to do astonishing things. We got along well because 90 percent of the time Grady knew everything from pure intuition, but the other 10 percent of the time I could fill in the gaps because I’d read the book.Whenever I explained something to Grady, he just laughed as if he was foolish for not having realized that before. He gave me too much respect for my contributions. I didn’t know what I was talking about, I was quoting the book.On the tests, I got better grades even than Grady because Grady just didn’t care. He knew math backwards and forwards and Jerry’s little tests didn’t matter to him. I think Jerry didn’t like that I was the best Calculus student because the wreckage of his burned out computer still sat against the back wall.I put up with it for most of the year, but Jerry really started to piss me off. At the end of the first semester, he gave us a bizarre question. “If a six foot tall man is walking past a light pole at 5 miles per hour, what’s the rate at which his shadow grows as he passes?”You get all these b******t questions in calculus. There’s one scenario called Gabriel’s horn. It’s a horn that has infinite surface area but finite volume. Math people think that’s just hysterical. The rest of us are like, “Whatever, we just want to get out of this classroom.” Grady didn’t even bother to listen to that lecture, he’d deduced the existence of that and stranger objects in second grade.So, I diligently did Jerry’s ridiculous problem and handed it in. Jerry marked my answer wrong. He marked everybody’s answer wrong and laughed at us for how simple our responses were.“Okay then,” we said. “How do you do it?”He was one of those teachers who used an overhead projector, but he always kind of mounted it with one leg like a freak of nature. He liked to wear these absurdly tight pants and gray leather shoes so he could grind up against the projector as a form of dominating us I guess.So, he grabbed his marker and bit off the cap like it was a wriggling amphibian. Then he started doing the problem. He got about two seconds in when it was clear he didn’t know what he was doing. I think he realized he was supposed to have written that the man was walking away from the light pole, but he had him passing it, so that made the math way more complicated because instead of a lengthening shadow you have a curving shadow.Math always gets more complicated when there are curves.Anyway, Jerry worked on it for a while and he gnawed on the marker cap. Then he froze and just stood there for like fifteen minutes. The only thing that moved was the fan at the back of the projector that spun in desperation as if it were signaling for help.Grady just sat there silently laughing. He always knew when the math joke was on the teacher and he appreciated it more than anyone.The bell rang.“Okay, we’ll get back to this next time,” Jerry said. But we never did. He never told us how to solve it, and he never admitted that he was wrong.Jerk.But I got him eventually.About three quarters of the way through the year, we had another of Jerry’s dreaded tests. The previous test, he’d given us bright yellow scratch paper.Jonathan, another student, the salutatorian in fact, had requested a different color. “That yellow kind of freaked me out, can it be another color?”Jerry laughed at that, he liked learning of new ways that he’d managed to torment us. “Studies have been done,” he said, looking up and to the right to make up whatever b******t he was about to spew, “that the color of the scratch paper changes how you think.”Whatever.He got done handing out the scratch paper which was blue. Then he started handing out the test.“I expect you’ll find this test easy. I completed it myself just before class.”“Well, how long did it take you to do?” Jonathan asked.Jerry, in his typical smug and superior voice, still only making eye contact with things like the table legs and the ceiling tiles instead of real human beings, uttered, “It took me approximately nine minutes to do.”For some reason that pissed me off and I decided I couldn’t let that kind of self satisfied bragging go uncontested.“Well,” I said, using my unabashed booming voice that’s capable of drowning out national anthems at sporting events, “how many did you get right?”Every muscle in Jerry’s body puckered up so tight I think he ruptured his butt hole. Jonathan’s eyes got wide in that look that says, “That’s really funny, in fact that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, but I think there will be consequences for saying that.”All the other students went silent because they’d been conditioned by abuse never to laugh at an enraged authoritarian.Everyone that is except for Grady. Grady hadn’t got the memo.Not only did Grady begin roaring with laughter, he threw himself down on the table and started smacking it with his hand. He laughed until he cried. Grady didn’t care. He knew math better than everyone except for maybe six people living in the world.Jerry finished handing out the tests in silence, then he went to sulk in the moist, hollowed out log he’d set up in the corner of the room. He flicked on a heat lamp and waited for us to be done.I did fine on the test, everyone else failed.“You guys gotta read the calculus book, Jerry won’t teach us squat.”On the final exam of the year, Jerry gave us the same question about the man passing the light post that he couldn’t figure out before.I copied the same answer I gave the first time. Screw Jerry. If he was going to rehash his failures of the past, then I’d make him acknowledge my successes.How many did you get right, Jerry?How many?Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% offI'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe