If there is a creature stranger than a headmaster, I'd sure like to meet it. Maybe it's just the schools I went to, but they always seem to be men obsessed with the concepts of honor, dignity and achievement. And I understand that as a head of a school that maybe abstract nouns are exactly the sort of thing you should be obsessed with, but the problem is that headmasters always like to use themselves as an example...a fact which teenagers inevitably exploit the shit out of.
Today I'm not even going to get into my elementary school headmasters in any detail. I simply don't have time to analyze the ex-military man who paddled children or the stiff man who sounded so much like those newfangled talking handheld dictionary computers of the early 90's that we used to type in words, press "SAY" and scare our teacher into thinking he had stealthily popped in for an inspection. No, I won't talk about these two men, although I'd briefly like to ask what the hell the Board of Trustees was thinking when they decided to hire someone who is about as expressive as a dalek that daleks find boring to run a school for children 11 and under.
No, probably the worst offender of overemphasizing his own personal dignitas and gravitas* was my high school headmaster. (*I use Latin here because this man was so proud of his own achievements that he would probably insist that mere English was not lofty enough to describe him.) He came from the South--but not the fun and welcoming redneck South where everyone's fat and covered in mud and riding around in tractors.. I mean the Vanderbilt South, the South where women wear pearls and men go to high schools called academies with funny names that come from aristocratic estates in England. At assemblies, rather than wearing a college football shirt with some sort of hog on it and approaching the microphone with a hearty, "HEY, Y'ALL!" that need not be amplified, this guy would come forward with the rigidity of a man with a spiky stick up his ass who feared that the slightest slouch would get the spikes to puncture crucial organs, a practice which he had clearly picked up from some southern military academy most likely named Pemberley Academy. And also like a rich southerner, he would always wear light suits. Even when he dressed down in khaki pants his blazer would always be a light tan. I've noticed this is a rich southern thing. Well, that and an Arab thing.
Apart from occasional announcements at assembly, no one really interacted with this guy. Sure, we'd pass by his office every day and sometimes sneak a peek through his ivy-covered windows to see what he was up to, but he wasn't exactly the sort of person you could drop in on. So sacred was this man's personal space that we were not even allowed near the hallway where his office entrance was. So far removed was this guy from his own students that the only reason he knew someone's name was if they got into trouble--and when I say serious trouble I don't mean the time when Danny was a little lippy to Ms. Frank or the time I tried to run away from Ms. Evans, who was trying to give me detention for giving her a sarcastic slow clap, and ended up jumping up on cabinets in the science lab, breaking door knobs, knocking over beakers in the process and generally leaving destruction in my wake.
No, I mean serious trouble. For example, one of the few people I know who was granted a private audience with this man, who clearly thought he was some sort of sadhu in a suit whose solitude could not be disturbed, was a girl who got caught snorting cocaine (pure cocaine...this was, after all, a private school) in the girls bathroom.
And what words of wisdom did our fearless leader have for this girl who had clearly hit rock bottom at the age of 16? Did he have a heartfelt talk about his rock bottom moments at that age that were eventually overcome as he grew older, so don't give up hope? Did he threaten her with the punishment of mandatory rehab?
Years of (theoretically) working with children, and what words did my headmaster have for this troubled teen to inspire her to get her life back in order?
"This is my thesis."
[Our headmaster had what was, to me, effectively a speech impediment, because the only sentences I remember him uttering always started with "This is..." Like the time at assembly when he held up a bag of pot he had found on campus and announced in a stern voice, "THIS. IS NOT. OREGANO." But anyway, let's return to this one story]
Yes, our headmaster felt that the best way to get this girl to kick her dreadful heroin habit was to show her his college thesis on some aspect of European history. Don't ask me why. Well-written European history can't inspire me to exercise or even get up in the morning, so I'm not entirely sure how some then-22 y.o.'s theories on Hitler's homosexuality or Charlemagne's fondness for grapes or whatever could be expected to free a teenager from a drug struggle clearly more suited for a gritty independent film than a posh, private high school. I mean, that's a lot of pressure to put on a college thesis, because if his thesis was anything like my own then it's probably just a several-page excuse to talk about random crap he likes. I guess in his case his thesis would be about his thesis.
Apparently the headmaster went on this whole talk about what an achievement writing a thesis was, and how accomplished it made him feel. What really fascinates me about this story is just how convinced he was that his own personal example of what he considered honor and achievement would guide this girl. I'm not saying that headmasters shouldn't be good, honorable examples for children to follow, it's just laughable that a man thought his own personal example was so inspiring that showing his college thesis to a teenager who was probably high on several kinds of hard drugs and alcohol at the time would somehow turn her life around.
This is where the exploitation that I was talking about earlier comes in. Because you can bet that news of our headmaster's retardedly misguided and arrogant gesture spread around the school, and the headmaster was mercilessly mocked. You see, it turns out it wasn't just this one girl who he tried to inspire with his thesis, but rather anyone who got into serious trouble. You got into a violent fight? Out comes the thesis. You plagiarized a paper? Oh, here's the thesis again. Drunk in class? Aaaaand here it is again.
But, being a hermit, I bet he never found out that we all thought he was a rich southern idiot in tan linen suits. That's probably the best solution. No matter what you say teenagers will inevitably make fun of you, so you might as well just ride out the storm in your ivy-covered office.
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