Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #011

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #011 – “Fuck Mr. Olding”

The coolest people you meet in life can be such a letdown sometimes.

What’s even stranger is that those very same folks can be involved in these strange but significant times in your life, whether intentional or not, and the ripple effect might very well carry on for years & years afterwards.  Like…do you think I WANT to be sitting here writing about a teacher I had in the eleventh & twelfth grade?  Hell no!  Alright…maybe.  It does kind of seem like something I might do – but I’d way rather be writing from a celebratory standpoint rather than trying to work out past traumas in real-time.

It is what it is, as they say.  Here goes…

The grade eleven experience with Mr. Olding and the English class he taught was good enough for me to know I wanted more of what he had to say…other than that, it’s pretty much a blur.  Admittedly, I wasn’t doing all that great as a student overall, but thankfully English came naturally to me.  So for one class, I was able to relax, and I didn’t have to try my hardest in order to just keep up & get a passing grade.  In English, I could excel without much effort – and that was definitely something Mr. Olding had noticed.  I can specifically remember him asking me to stay after class for a moment so that he could talk to me about something one day, and without even thinking twice, I simply headed out of class when the bell rang.  It wasn’t anything massively important, and the next time I had his class he reminded me that he had asked me to stay behind, then laughed about what a space cadet I could be.  He wasn’t wrong.  I wasn’t trying to duck responsibility by leaving, I wasn’t even in any trouble – I was just absent minded.  “The teachers and I call you the accidental genius,” he said.  I was far from that assessment, but with even 10% effort, I could have taken a high B straight to an A+ in English if I felt so inclined, which I didn’t.

That being said, I had just enough juice in the tank to qualify for advanced placement English in grade twelve, which is the year I remember much better when it came to Mr. Olding’s impact on my LIFE.  I was in full rebellion mode by that point.  My school wasn’t offering enough electives that interested me, and we were the first official graduating class of Riverside Senior Secondary in Port Coquitlam.  Rather than fill the extra space with something I didn’t want to participate in like more social studies or science or another language – I opted for doing absolutely nothing instead.  I made sure that with the courses I was taking that I’d have enough credits to graduate if I passed them all, and decided that I’d just take a free block instead of taking meaningless classes I had no interest in.  The school itself wasn’t even set up for anything outside of social compliance at that time, so yes, after about three weeks into the year of doing nothing but pulling out my sleeping bag from my locker and having a nap in the hallway, rubbing the establishment’s face in the fact that they didn’t have as much power over me as they thought they did, my parents eventually had to go down and argue with the principal on my behalf about whether or not I had the right to choose not to do stuff I didn’t want to do.  It took some convincing, but eventually we won that battle, and my free blocks were preserved.  Which was ultimately a good thing – trust me when I tell you, the last thing you’d want as a teacher was to have me in your class if I didn’t want to be there.  Thankfully, with his aloof and playful style, Mr. Olding never really had that problem.  I might still not have tried as hard as I should have, but I was genuinely interested in the bizarre stories he’d tell, and I had a massive appreciation for how he was able to tie his teachings into things we were experiencing in real life outside of class.  It made the things he’d say have an extra layer of relevance, you know?  So while I’d be the first to tell you that I should have still tried harder in his classes, I would still tell you that I ended up putting 100% more effort into the most menial assignments in English than any other class.  In grade twelve I was in regular English, Advanced Placement English, and Literature (with a different teacher)…but you get the idea…there was literally nothing else that interested me, and no longer having to be a victim of Math or Science or French in the final grade, I was basically free to do whatever I liked and that was the end of it.  Honestly it felt very liberating…like the choice to not participate in classes just for the sake of earning another pointless credit was one of the first real adult choices I ever made.

Mr. Olding was one of those teachers the kids genuinely talked about though.  The cool guy.  The guy that would make you think, make you laugh, and make you want to participate.  Hell, I can remember him even handing out MIXTAPES to us kids one day at the end of a class…like, who does that?  I still remember it having a song by the Odds on it and thinking to myself something like, well yeah The Odds are great – but that’s the song you chose?  Even that kind of stuff intrigues me though.  To this very day, the songs you’d choose from a record as your favorites will tell me so much more about you than you’d ever begin to understand.  It’s like having a psychic power of sorts, only it’s real.  Anyhow.  The dude was great in every sense of the word.  I wouldn’t go as far as to say he was any kind of style icon, but neither was I.  I wouldn’t be the guy to tell you he fit in with the rest of the faculty, but I didn’t fit in with the rest of the students around me either.  I wouldn’t even say he could create a lesson or tell a story without going on five different tangents in between point-A to point-B…and…wait a minute – was he a version of ME from the future?  Sure he could teach me about Vonnegut and point me towards cool-ass things I didn’t even know existed in literature yet – the technical stuff that anyone could teach themselves by picking up the right books – but as far as the fundamentals of HOW to communicate, we were the same.

Once I realized that, my whole view of the world began to shift…and for the first time ever, I felt like I was finally beginning to understand where I fit, and felt like I might have some kind of purpose in life.  I even (don’t go telling him this) began to TRY a little harder, because I wanted to show him that respect.  Class after class, I began to participate more & more, and I made efforts where I never thought I would.  Why?  Because for a hot minute there, I thought that being a teacher was the coolest thing that anyone could ever do…and with Mr. Olding’s blueprint, I felt like I could become the best teacher that ever was.  I felt like he had an incredible grip on my interest in English, writing, and communication, and that he fully understood the influence that he had on me; but my mistake was in thinking that was a good thing.

We had speech-writing competitions back in those days.  I sailed through the one we had from the previous year by writing a speech about how the sunset should be considered the eighth wonder of the world.  Did I really feel that way?  No – but it sure seemed like the kind of theme that would resonate with the ladies, and I was right about that.  As a greased-up guy growing up through the grunge era, I consistently punched way above my weight when it came to the girls I was lucky enough to date in those years…but I digress.  The point is that even though I was a fairly shit public speaker for the most part, I understood how to play to an audience, how to summon courage when I needed it, and how to write things in an engaging way that people would want to stand up and cheer for – so I naturally aced any of the speaking competitions we’d have, or written assessments we’d have on tests throughout schooling.  Given that I was even more engaged as a student myself in grade twelve, I assumed I’d do even better.  Oddly enough, that didn’t end up being the case at all…so allow me to explain what REALLY happened.

About a week or two prior to the grade twelve speech-writing competition, I decided to write Mr. Olding a letter.  There’s this CRAZY part of my personality that is obsessed with the idea of being respectful, polite, and thankful to those that help and/or inspire me – and if you’re one of those people, you know that I made every effort I could to go out of my way to tell you how much what you did or who you are means to me.  And you know something?  99.9% of the time, that’s been extremely well-received by all.

This is a story about the .1% that fucking sucks.

I write this giant letter to the guy, and it’s basically all about how I’m observing him, listening to his words, and doing my level best to absorb not just what he says, but how he says it.  Effectively, I’m telling Mr. Olding that he is indeed, the blueprint I wanted to model MY ENTIRE LIFE after, and thanked him for providing a stellar example of how to be a great teacher.  I mean, I could practically imagine how freakin’ cool it was going to be years and years into the future, when a random kid that nobody thought much of just like myself would end up writing ME a letter just like the one I was writing to Mr. Olding, and how rewarding that full-circle moment would truly be.  The guy was a genuine hero to me, and he seemed to get me in ways that no other teacher ever did.  Again, that’s likely because there were some massive similarities between us.  The main one being, when he’d tell a joke that would fly right over the rest of the heads in the class, he’d look over to me for confirmation that I got it, which I like to think I always did.  That mischievous spark was wonderful to witness, and it was like inside jokes built for two.  So I write this big ol’ note of gratitude to let him know how important he was to me, and to my future.  The next morning, I arrived early, went into the office where all the teacher’s individual mailboxes were kept, and shoved this plain white envelope all the way to the back of the box so that it didn’t get lost.

Here’s where I’ll give you some real advice that might just come in handy one day.  It might be important to YOU to let someone know how much they mean to you, how much they influence you, how much you admire them or look up to them – but that’s where you’ve gotta leave it.  You’ve done your part, and anything that comes after that is probably well out of your control.  In this particular case, I left Mr. Olding the letter that morning, and I waited for a response that never came.  It didn’t even take more than a couple of classes to realize how much of an error in judgement I made in looking up to this guy.  Rather than encourage me or help push me to the next level, he saw me as a clownish kid that was about to impinge on a vocation that he had elevated past God-like status – and to have someone like me trying to pursue the kind of greatness he’d already felt like he’d achieved was an insult to his profession.  The distance between us was practically instantaneous.  I went from being called on for answers, to not even being looked at in the eye if I gave him one, and all the previous fun it seemed like we were having together in class literally disappeared in what felt like the blink of an eye.  I became just another student in Mr. Olding’s class, and it felt like he put a lot of genuine effort into making sure I became uninspired.  I did eventually end up finding the courage to ask him if he got my letter one day, to which he responded with something short like, “Yep, I did.  Are you sure that being a teacher is something you really want to be?  You should probably have about a dozen other jobs before you decide that teaching is right for you.”  Once again he pushed me far away when that was actually the perfect time to encourage me forward.

While he stomped on my confidence and started to ignore me, I was still lucky enough to be gifted with skills that couldn’t be ignored when it came to my English and Literature classes.  When it came time to write a new piece for the upcoming speech-writing competition, I pulled out all the stops so that he’d know what a massive mistake he’d made in underestimating me.  I wrote a speech about my brother, who has been permanently handicapped my entire life, rendering him to be my little brother for as long as we’ll both live.  I continue to grow old – he doesn’t.  At least not at the rate the rest of us do.  I might have put about forty-six years of mileage on this brain of mine at the time of writing this, but my brother has only made it to about somewhere between eight and ten, even though he’s only two years younger than me physically.  To make things even more impossible for him growing up, he developed epilepsy when we were teenagers.  With no ability to control his body or break his falls when he had seizures like most people would be able to do, one of the first things he did was knock his two front teeth out.  It was heartbreaking to those that knew him and the circumstances of our family – we’d never be in a position where we could afford to fix the poor kid’s face, and unfortunately that’s still the case to this very day.  I wrote about all of these things with a raw honesty I hadn’t tapped into as a writer yet, and came up with what I felt like was my strongest speech to-date.  I’d practice it for hours like it was going to win me an Oscar.  I didn’t just want this to be my best performance – I NEEDED it to be.  And so it was.  I might have been a perennial slacker by the core of the word’s very definition, but anytime I’ve ever set my mind to anything I want to do in life, I know I’m more than capable of achieving any goals that I have set.

I can still remember going up to the podium that day.  I remember unfolding the three or four pages of the speech I’d written, and I remember delivering the living daylights outta that thing.  Halfway through it, I could visibly see the impact my words were having on other people in the class, and by the time I was finished, there wasn’t a dry eye among my peers sitting in front of me.  We were all sad, inspired, and in awe of the beauty that my brother possesses.  A true innocent in every sense of the word.  He will always be my hero, and though I might be his older brother, I’ll spend my entire lifetime looking up to him.  It’s the kind of relationship that feels so beyond words, you know?  Like I could tell someone every single detail about who my brother is, and that’d never be enough to accurately describe what the kid means to me.  Yet for this tiny fragment of time, I was able to achieve that.  I could see on everybody’s face staring back at me that they understood exactly how amazing my little brother was, and it meant everything to have that kind of connection with the audience.  The fact that his humble story was able to resonate with so many others and make them FEEL something they couldn’t supress, was amazing.

Though my peers were reaching for the Kleenex that day, there were still two of the driest eyeballs I’d ever seen in my life staring back at me in the classroom.  It was like they were trying to bore into my psyche & will me to fail, and when they couldn’t make that happen, it only seemed to make them even angrier.  I tried not to glance at Mr. Olding too much at all as I delivered my final high school speech in grade twelve, because he looked so bitter and disappointed in every word I was saying, despite how my speech seemed to be making a profound emotional impact on the face of every kid sitting in front of me.  If I looked over at his scowling face for too long, I could feel a tenth of a second come off of the way that I intended to deliver my words to the people listening, and that was time I knew I couldn’t afford.  So I chose to stop looking for his approval that day, because what in the hell would I need it for anyhow?  I don’t think I remember getting a standing ovation for my speech…I don’t think that kids in high school would even think to do a standing ovation anyway, would they?  All I know is that just about every single one of my classmates came up to me that day to thank me for sharing my brother’s true story so openly.

When it was just about time for the bell to ring and we had to pack up our shit to head off to lunch or the next class, Mr. Olding summoned me to his desk & told me that I now had to meet him in his office after school.  I’ve already told you I wasn’t a scholar by any means, but it didn’t take one to know that I was in trouble for something I’d done based on the angry way he was looking at me with such disdain.  I shook my head in understanding & left his classroom, knowing I was going to catch shit that afternoon.

As the clock ticked closer to doom with each passing second in my final class for the day and the bell eventually signaled the freedom we’d yearn for from the moment we sat down in the morning, I went to my locker, put my books away, and headed upstairs to Mr. Olding’s office to find out what he wanted.  I could see him through the small window on the side by the door, knocked gently, and he waved me in.

For the calm and controlled guy he’d always been in front of the class, Mr. Olding immediately jumped to an eleven and continued to escalate from there once I got behind closed doors.  With a seething type of anger that felt totally unjustified to me, he asked through gritted teeth, “who did I write that speech for?”  It seemed like such a strange question to me.  Still does.  Maybe I haven’t learned anything at all.

Who did I write the speech for?  I mean, the obvious answer was that I didn’t just go and do things for no reason.  I had an assignment, I wanted to pass high school, and so I complied – it’s really that simple on so many levels.  His question hit me like a punch in the gut though, and it felt like I had the wind completely knocked out of me when he asked it.  I could have easily given him the easy answer, but I don’t have that in me – all I have is the honest answer…my truth, as I see it…that’s all I’ve ever had.  So that’s exactly what I gave him – the truth.  “I wrote that speech for me,” I said coldly and staring right at him.  The words hung in the air like wisps of smoke and I braced myself, ready for them to be swatted away by a man that I had solely looked up to what seemed like only mere weeks before this day came.

“That’s exactly what I thought,” he said angrily, “and that’s not what this assignment was about.”  He made a gesture towards the door in a dismissive, get the fuck outta here kind of way, and I took the hint.  Ultimately, I think he was referring to the fact that I’d written more of a monologue than what a person might consider to be a typical speech, and he was upset that I’d found a way to circumvent the intentions of his assignment to help increase my chances of winning the speech competition.  He wasn’t wrong in that regard, but at the same time, tell me how a monologue is that fundamentally different from a great speech?  You’d have to put them both under a microscope in order to separate their DNA.

I didn’t leave his office that day with my head down or feeling like I had done something wrong, fuck no.  I left his office with an extra bounce in my step, knowing that I was right and that I was onto something significant with how my words could affect people on an emotional level.  I left his office with the true realization that Mr. Olding wasn’t some hero to be worshipped, but instead a small, petty man that had legitimate fears a punk like me could somehow do damage to his esteemed profession were I to join it.  I left his office knowing that he didn’t feel like I could ever be able to earn the right to share the same space as him on a professional level, and that if I even dared to try, he’d immediately move to quash it and put me back in the same place where he & every teacher I ever had tried to tell me that I belonged.

I left his office confident, knowing that whatever he was missing inside him, was something that I had.

As much as we might like it to happen, justice doesn’t always come overnight.  It can be so damn slow to catch up sometimes, that you might even forget how much you needed it by the time it actually arrives.  There was a girl in my school that was absolutely obsessed with Mr. Olding…the kind that would stay after class for another fifteen minutes to ask a few more questions and gaze lovingly into his eyes for just a little longer.  The kind that would make sure they were involved in every aspect of his class so that they could get his attention at all hours of a day.  Basically a Lisa Simpson, only less animated, and real.  Back when Mr. Olding and I were still getting along, long before my horrible admission of looking up to him for guidance as a STUDENT…we’d share rolled eyes whenever this kid would ask another question just for her voice to be included in the conversation, and we’d chuckle about it in our private exchange.  Sometimes justice comes in forms you’d never expect.  The girl was never going to be able to marry Mr. Olding on account of their age difference, so she did the next best thing and married his kid instead, years after we graduated.  Now he gets to answer her fawning questions all day, every day.  Lucky guy.

Like so many teachers we have in life, he faded into irrelevance pretty damn quickly.  Even in the times I went back to visit my old school, or when I’d see a teacher at random & catch up with them for a minute or two, Mr. Olding was never a part of the conversation anymore, and to be truthful, he doesn’t deserve the extra oxygen I’m giving him here today either.  Hell, I was even at the last concert by the Odds and I didn’t see the guy anywhere in the crowd, so maybe even his mixtapes were bullshit attempts at making some kind of real connection with his students…just more shiny fake veneers on a toothless personality.  As I sit here in my own office now, still using the one precious skill that I had before I ever even stepped foot in his classrooms, I have to wonder about whether or not he taught me anything other than to be extremely cautious of your heroes and to question everyone you think you look up to, because chances are, they’re nothing like the people you’d think they would be.  To think that with the slightest bit of encouragement, my whole life would have gone in a completely different direction…I mean, it’s weird.  I’m thankful for it now, obviously – I love what I do here at sleepingbagstudios.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t had a million days along the way where I didn’t wish I had walked a more traditional line when it comes to employment.  I ain’t driving a Mercedes…I rent the place I live in…I’m still working on how to actually be an adult, like I have any hope in hell of learning how to do that correctly by the time I die.

What I don’t do, is punch down.  Mr. Olding might not have intended that to be his most important lesson, but that’s my takeaway.  If we’re lucky enough in life, we get the opportunity to inspire someone else…and the ripple effect from that one action, can obviously carry to shores a million miles removed from where we stand in the greatest of ways.  Maybe you help create the next Muhammed Ali from something you did or said…maybe how fast you ran inspired the next Usain Bolt…maybe you wrote a piece so stylistically slick that you unknowingly formed the next Vonnegut or Thompson, so on & so on.  Just remember that your words and the way you interact with people can have an equally brutalizing effect too.  Clearly I’ve still got a little mental trauma being carried from Mr. Olding’s lack of care, empathy & sincerity, but I like to think that because his example of how to live life was so damn crappy, that I at least finally knew what I didn’t want to be…which was anything like him at all.  Fuck Mr. Olding!

Choose kindness dear readers, dear friends.  One way or the other, you’re likely inspiring someone, for better or for worse.  I don’t know about you, but I know which side of the fence that I want to be on.

The assholes we SHOULD fear are always found above us…so if you take anything away from this story, it’s that you should always punch UP, because the people beside and below you are the ones that will be there to hold you steady, while those that feel above you will do everything they can to hold you down.

Do not let them – you’re so much more special than they will ever let you know.

Thanks for reading.  Love to you all.

– Jer @ SBS