Most people can look back and find a teacher who was a guiding force for them in their lives. I had a number of great teachers: Dr. Hugh Page, who taught me humanities in college; Mr. Lloyd Harrich, who taught physic principles using a collection of toys not seen outside of Toys-R-Us; Dr. Thompson, who taught us to "unlearn" all of our writing blocks; Mr. Strobel, who managed to infuse us high-school senioritis sufferers with an interest in history, if only for an hour a day. Then there was Mrs. Ewing.

When I was in eighth grade, I wasn't quite the model student, but my grades were pretty good. I was in a number of advanced, challenging classes, and was maintaining pretty well. I had problems with math, something that has always plagued me, but otherwise everything else was okay. In elementary school, I'd been in GATE, the state of California's laughable excuse for encouraging growth in "gifted" students. There was talk, in fact, of skipping me a grade up in elementary school. Counselors discussed the course of action I should take in high school: a path which included advanced study courses. The first step along this path was to take the freshman health "challenge" exam. This would get me out of the required year-long class which dealt with simple chemistry and physical functions. I passed that test, and it has made all the difference.

I was the only freshman in my biology class--all the rest were sophomores who had taken health the year before. My teacher for this year-long class was Mrs. Ewing. Mrs. Ewing took very little crap, but I'd had her kind before. I kept my nose clean and did my work, and landed pretty much straight-A's. My table was some sort of freaky power-table: we constantly had the highest grades in all the class, both individually and as a group.

Apparently, Mrs. Ewing decided to dilute the mixture a bit, hoping that our success would rub off on the other students. She broke our table in half, with me and a kid named Charles Haws (Hawes?, fuckit, I can't remember) going over to share a lab table with the class clown, a guy named Rob. Rob's table had been a constant disruption to the class: he also took very little crap. Rob had a pickup which he had lifted up to a barely-legal height and smoked a lot of dope. This was my first experience with a true hesher. Rob would come to class baked at least once a week, and this was a 10:20 class.

Over time, Rob turned us to the Dark Side. We started making little cracks at Mrs. Ewing as well, and laughed at Rob's jokes. Mrs. Ewing quickly tired of our antics. I think that she was probably pretty close to retirement, and neither she or us wanted to be there any longer than we had to. My grades in the class started to drop off. At a period in most peoples lives where the seeds of rebellion are sewn, I was being attended to by a master gardener. I can't blame all of my eventual scholastic problems on Rob and Mrs. Ewing, but their eternal slacker-vs-teacher struggle fixed me with that "fuckit" attitude that all high school kids develop at one point.

I ended up getting a "C" in the class, down from a solid "A+" in the first quarter. I probably would have been able to pull it out if not for the next year. I'd managed to pass the class with gradually worsening grades. I entered my history classroom the next year to find a note written on the chalkboard redirecting us to another classroom. When I got there, to my chagrin, stood Mrs. Ewing. I somehow managed to once again end up sitting with the class clown--this time a wiseass by the name of James Roman.

My rep was now firmly set as a troublemaker. Mrs. Ewing would call on us when it was obvious that we didn't know the answer or the whole class was at a loss. We, of course, would make snide comments at her expense whenever possible. The struggle was once again on, with I and James in the lead roles. To further the situtation, our two closest neighbors were two girls who also had a shitty attitude towards Ewing, and would either join in the fray, or at least play Ed to our Johnny.

James and I became masters at defacing the walls in that building. They were already graphitti-laden, and we helped by adding lyrics and quotations. I developed an appreciation for punk music through an introduction to the Vandals on that very wall. He and I started chipping holes through the layers of paint, through to the original wallpaper below, and the soft, yielding sheetrock below. We had two holes going and hoped to tunnel through to the opposite side. Mrs. Ewing one day decided that we were the culprits for all the graffiti (although she never did catch us writing), and took us to task using cleansers on the wall while we should have been taking notes on world history. We, of course, complained loudly the entire time about the fumes.

That class was the end of whatever hopes I had of being a superior student. I got two back-to-back D's, the worst grades I would ever receive as a final grade. The attitude she helped set into motion was fostered by other teachers whose schedules primarily included getting out of there at 2:40. I thank those teachers, however. They taught me that people in authority aren't always right, that there is more to life than the daily grind, that the feeling you get when you do your best only to have it stomped on does go away in time, and that the person who you should try to impress is yourself.