Ep35: Nick couldn’t write the essay; Evelyn couldn’t do the math.

Episode 35 is coming alive! Nick gets dragged to the front of the class and told—loudly, publicly, spiritually—that his essay is garbage and his future is bleak. So he does what any reasonable teen would do: recruits the smartest girl in school, rewrites the whole thing, and somehow makes it worse. 

Evelyn, meanwhile, was not a problem in high school...but math absolutely was. She thrived in the arts, but her relationship with math was hostile at best, and entire evenings were sacrificed at the kitchen table trying to make sense of something that simply refused to be understood. Add in some eerily calm teachers who could maneuver a classroom with one sentence, and others who absolutely should’ve retired mid-rant, and you’ve got the full educational experience between Canada and the United States.

=============

Want to get in touch with Nick & Evelyn? 

Email them at reversejackass@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's reverse.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Folks, welcome back to the reverse jackass podcasts. Folks, welcome back to the reverse jackass podcast. I'm Nick with me as always. This is Evelyn, the Canadian Blade. Evelyn, how the hell are you today?

SPEAKER_00 0:21

I'm really good. I'm really good. It's it's a Nick day, which means I'm in for a wild ride. Um, I've had adequate protein and nutrients today, so I think I'm ready. Like I'm just really excited to hear whatever, whatever direction we're going today.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Well, I love that. The direction we're going today is I'm gonna take us back to high school, and I'm going to tell you about my journey through 12th grade English. And I had a 12th grade English teacher uh who I liked very much, and she was kind of a character, and I think she was maybe like really wanted to be seen as kind of a character. And so that sets the stage for I had to write an essay, and I am not a good essay writer. I'm a good writer, I am not a good essay writer. I have always struggled with the five-paragraph forum. I've never been able to execute on these things. Their feedback means nothing to me. And so I just sort of settled for B minuses forever because that was the best I could do.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

And so it happened that one day I was in 12th grade and it was time to receive our papers back that we had turned back in. And my teacher called me up to the front of the classroom, where in front of the rest of the silent classroom, she said to me in a loud voice, which was the only one she possessed, Nick Bogner, this essay is terrible. You are going to go to college next year, and you are going to turn in an essay like this, and they are going to fail you. Oh. So with that little bump of hope, that little prognostication from my beloved teacher, I asked her quietly if I could rewrite it, and she said yes. And that is when I sprung a plan into place. Now, you young people out there who can just use AI to write your essays for you, and then you can fail that way with a minimum of effort, won't understand how important this was. But I had a friend who had taken her class last year named Kate. And Kate got A's all the time and was known for being every English teacher's favorite student and known for just crushing it. And when Kate would write an essay, it was, oh, Kate, this is so brilliant. You're such a genius, et cetera, which of course Kate lapped right up. And so I enlisted Kate and I spent hours at Kate's place, not doing what I wanted to do, which was to make out with Kate, although I would have been very open to that idea if it had come up. But what I was actually doing was working on the essay with her, and to her credit, she donated hours of her time to help me reformulate this entire paper. And it took hours. I finished it, I turned it in, and two days later, she called me up in front of the class and said, This paper is worse than the last one. Oh okay. Okay. Why did you do this? Why did you make these changes? And I said, foolishly, I showed my hand and said, Well, I had Kate help me, and she yelled, Why did you have Kate help you? As if I had said, Well, you know, I asked, I asked a random guy off the street. I asked a random pervert who showed me his penis on the street to help me with it. It was like, why? Like, you couldn't have a worse idea than to help Kate. Meanwhile, Kate's a straight A student. I don't know what the hell. She was so mad at me. Wow. And and she said, and she pointed out everything that Kate had added to the essay and said, This is terrible, this is terrible, this is terrible. And I went back and I finally got a C on it and I had to let it go.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

And then I went off to college and I did fine. It was fine. It was all fine. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Okay. So my question for you, Mrs. Flanagan. Wow. You of the chasing students out into the hallway. Yeah. You of the ask before closing. Ask before closing. You sound like kind of a hard ass. Okay. What was the formative experience in high school that taught you to be a hard ass? You're so you're assuming this came from my high school times. I'm assuming this came from some influence. If the answer is no, I was in grad school and a and a teacher called me up and told me I was gonna fail and asked me why I had Kate write the essay, or I was in grad school and I went to the cafeteria and a teacher screamed at me, or I was a guitar center and I didn't close my guitar case the right time. I I'm I'm open to there being other influences, but someone, Evelyn, I say this as a study of human behavior and psychology. Somebody taught you to be the woman who chases students into the cafeteria. Who was that person? This is a great question.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Thank you. This is a great question. And can I just say that teachers in the 90s were built different? Like, like you're telling me these stories about your teacher, and I have some, I'm sure everybody listening, all three and a half people listening right now, have in mind a teacher and a similar experience to this that happened well, well before the year 2000. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

If I was positive that the two teachers involved in this story had retired, I could tell you an amazing story about that teacher and the teacher next door to her. I'll look, maybe for a future episode, I'll look up to see if they've retired. And if so, then I'll tell you the.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Oh, that would be good. Well, I love a good, I love a good follow-up episode. I love a good follow-up. Oh man, I have a few, I have a few thoughts on this, actually. My first experience with seeing a teacher who was a hard ass was when I was in teachers college. When I went to teachers college, it was a one-year program. I think it's now two. And you leave with a backup.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Oh guys, these one-year teachers were starting to notice some cracks.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Yeah, they're they're not good. They're not good. Um we need you know what we need to do? Double down. That's what we need to do. We need twice as much education. They need more classes on the history of the education system in Is that what they taught you? Oh, yeah, learn the history of the education system. Yeah, for sure. And do you want to know about the history of the education system? I can't tell you anything because I don't remember because it's irrelevant to me when I'm standing in front of grade nine guitar students.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

All the broad shoulders on which you stood for your career mean nothing to you, Evelyn. I know. It's disgusting.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

I know. Look, the one thing I do remember was a prof yelling at us saying, Don't touch kids. I personally did not need to be taught or reminded of that fact. But there have been people along my career that have and did not did not heed that advice.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

But it's important to remember that those people would not be deterred by that message. Those people, those people heard that guy yell and went, eh, he doesn't mean me. Right. When I was in psychotherapy school, I will always remember this. I've quoted this many times. We had the the thing where the ethics class, and one of the things they talked about is the obvious don't have a romantic or sexual relationship with your clients. And the actual rule, the law of it is you can't have a romantic or sexual relationship with your client for at least two years after the termination of therapy. And you cannot terminate therapy in order to have a romantic relationship. So you can't say, Oh, we're really feeling this. Let's pause it, wait two years and then have a relationship, right? So but for all intents and purposes, you're never gonna hear a therapist that has an affair with their client, even if it's, yeah, we just met a five years later and not think that's fucking weird. Because it's fucking weird, right? And so Kathy Wexler is explaining this to everybody, and one of my colleagues raised her hand and said, But what if you marry the person? And I thought, this person was unable to wrap their mind around the fact that when somebody walks into your office as a therapy client, that means they're never gonna be a romantic partner for you. Like, I don't know if she was worried about never getting married, I don't know what it was, but in her mind it was like, well, there's no like absolute no here, right? And it's like, no, the moment somebody walks through that door, they're literally off the list for the rest of your life. Yep. Yeah. Can you make peace with that since there's 39 million people in the state of California?

SPEAKER_00 7:56

That person could not. They could not fathom. They were like, there must be a spectrum between booty calls and marriage. And I want to find out where that thin little line is.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Don't have a booty call with your clients, but for God's sakes, if they're marriage material, if they're if they're tall, then you know. Anyway, I digress. Lock it in. Tell me about your 90s teacher hard ass experience. Or did you not get in trouble? Is that where the story's gonna go that you were just great all the time and that you didn't get in trouble?

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Because I would believe Oh, I didn't get in trouble in high school.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Okay. No A's or whatever they what are they giving in Canada?

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Numbers. Like it's it's numerical.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

So like a hundred or out of a thousand, or what is it?

SPEAKER_00 8:37

It's out of yeah, it's out of a hundred. It's out of a hundred. So I got so just for an example, I got all in the arts it would be nineties, maybe, and then in the maths, that was in the low 50s, my friend. Like, I'm not even kidding. Yeah, 50s a pass. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Oh, it was bad. It was bad. And and dad and I'd be sitting at the kitchen table, burning that midnight oil, working through every stinking equation. And it really wasn't because I didn't try, it was because, like that story. I think you told me a story once it was your physics teacher.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Quiz.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Physics quiz, and you tried and you failed. And I got a zero. You got a zero. So you like really failed. On a quiz I took, yes. Yeah. So it's the same, it's not that again, it was just for not for trying. It's just because I I really could not understand.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Um you know the silver lining to that, Evelyn, is that if for somebody with that demonstrably low awareness of numbers, it's possible that you never knew how poorly you were doing in math. Is that maybe what what your dad was doing with you was just trying to explain to you using visuals like just how bad a thing is how bad I am?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

The joke in the family is Ev's not doing math. Like if the if math needs to be done in the family, yeah, like if we need to do if we if someone's thrown an equation or something out there and like quick, just figure out this percentage, it's an unspoken rule that I'm off the hook for that. No, the expectations are non-existent that I'm gonna jump in there.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

That feels like a cruel joke for the whole family.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Oh no, it's wonderful. It's wonderful. You like yeah, because like I'm the oldest daughter, so like the expect there's enough expectations on me already as it is. So if I get to just if I get to just skip out on one, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna take it. I don't care if it's insulting or not. So I didn't have an experience where, you know, I had a teacher absolutely ream me out or anything like that. And I really don't remember if I heard any teachers do that, you know. I'm thinking back now, elementary school, high school. I can't remember any teachers absolutely losing their mind in any one in my one of my classes. It probably wasn't until I started teaching that I was noticing the behavior of colleagues because you're trying to find your identity, you're trying to find your teaching style, and you're trying to really find what feels good, and you're trying to find, you know, how to bring your authentic self to the classroom while still have control over everything and still keep like there's it's a whole melange. So I can think of a couple teachers that absolutely lost their minds and you could hear them down the hall just just losing it on their class. And and I learned that I didn't want to have that kind of edge to me. Like, if Mrs. Flanagan is raising her voice, I want everyone poo in their pants because she never does that, right? So so if she's losing her mind, if Mrs. Flanagan has a bit of an eruption once a year, then we're gonna know that it means business because she's not a yeller. Okay. So I had a couple of colleagues that influenced me to maybe do the opposite of this yelling approach. And they had an approach that I loved, uh, and I don't really know how to explain it, other than I'll give you, I'll give you some examples. You know, if a kid is absolutely losing their mind, they just maintained the eye contact and stared. It was neutral, it was unreactive, it was almost unresponsive to an extent. Like dead facing, kind of dead facing and very calm. Like we're just calmly walking to the intercom, and then we calmly to the poor secretary that answers the intercom. We buzz the office, and in front of the whole class, we calmly regurgitate the exact wording of what the student has said to us. Wow. Right? We say it and we say, so-and-so will be coming down to the office shortly, as they just called me a beep, beep beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Right? And did you do it in Morse like that? No, I will, I I hadn't, I hadn't learned Morse code yet. And they're like, inevitably, they would be like, Oh, okay. And I would just I would say thank you. If if there could be an administrator there to greet them, that would be much appreciated. And then I would end the intercom and then I would say, Okay, Scott, they're waiting for you in the office. You probably should head down there now. Maybe the hard ass part came from an incredible sense of self-control. And I and I saw it in these people and I really admired that because I thought that was so effective. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

The pressure and the emphasis on maintaining your cool. This is why I couldn't be a teacher because I'd want to rile those kids up.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

So I don't I don't feel like I answered your question though. I don't feel like it was really a like what taught me how to be a badass. It was more the examples of seeing what I really didn't want to be like, and then tapping into the dry, the wit and the sarcasm that I really love anyway, a bit of an edge. It's still kind of tongue-in-cheek because when we needed to have real conversations, like the teachers who are yelling and screaming in front of everybody aren't having the real conversations with kids, right? They're not having the conversations that are like, hey, Nick, you know what? This essay that you turned in is actually not that great. Can you just walk me through, like, tell me, did you get some help on it? Who'd you ask for help? Again, we're not having these conversations. It's it's going right to, I have a standard in my mind of what this essay should look like. And then I'm just going to announce to everybody that this is a piece of garbage, and I just need you all to know that I'm in control and I will not stand for this.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Why don't you just establish a pea corner in the classroom? Because that would be an easier way to assert your dominance without humiliating anybody other than yourself. Not you, the teacher.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

I mean, yeah, you know, she made a lot of choices. I think a lot of people wouldn't have made. Okay, so then bonus question before we close out today. What was the number one, aside from something truly upsetting and not funny, like uh like sexual perpetration? What was the teacher that you saw and said, I don't want to be like that? Oh, I'm gonna tell you right now.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

I have I like you finished this one right to the mind. Right to the mind. It was the last day of school, uh, so end of June for us. And well, it was the last day of classes. So the way it would work is that we would have um say the last day of class, and then after that would be five days of exams. And so the first day of exams is like period one exams. So everyone who has an exam period one goes to their period one class, writes an exam for a few hours, and then leaves next day, period two. But the day before exam starts is just a regular school day. So we would have just the normal four classes, two classes, lunch, two more classes. Usually on that day, you can sure you can do review, you can do, you know, you'll see everything from teachers having a normal in-class day, like open your textbooks, here's what we're doing. It's the last day of class before summer, and we're not relenting to everything from like people are having potlucks, you're smelling meatballs in the crock pot, someone's bringing in a sushi platter, like kids are bringing in sharma platters, like you're just feasting and you're enjoying that time being together. I was always a little bit, a little bit closer to that end because I wanted, I always thought we need to leave on a high note. We need to leave on a high note. It's the end of June, we're all tired, we're dying for the summer.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

And nothing says high note like a sushi plate that's been sitting out in the June heat in a classroom since first period. It's like fifth period now.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

There's a gentle shen on the sashimi. The right Scott have a happy summer, Scott. If you make it home in time, leave your little snail trail on the sidewalk. So I shared a classroom with a teacher one year, and this was in the afternoon. So she had the classroom period three, I was in there period four, I was teaching English, she was in there teaching some kind of business class, and I had a whole bunch of things. I had gone to Costco, I had gotten cups, I had gotten beverages, I had bags of chips, I had stuff, and I always had like a review game to play, like online. Like kids are using their phones as like buzzers and stuff. Like we still had the educational component, but we were chow hounding while we were doing it. So I go in, I ask this teacher, could I put stuff into this classroom before um before the end of the period, just so I don't have to, I have a lot of stuff to bring down. She was like, no problem. Great. So I sneak in probably 15 minutes till the end of the period, and I have this big, a couple big bags and boxes, and I just open the door and I'm like, sorry, excuse me, I'm just gonna come in. And I just put them behind the door. And this class was a grade 11 class that she was teaching. My class was a grade 11 English class. So there was a doubling up of some of the students. And I walked in, it was very noticeable. First of all, all of her students were sitting as far back as they could. Like all the seats at the front were empty, and it was like watching a cat at the Humane Society that just got rescued, right? Cowering. And these were some, like these were probably college workplace level students. So we're not talking university bound, we're not talking like super keen academic, I'm ready for exams. We're talking, you need to be grateful I'm here, kind of deal. And this teacher was losing her mind on this class the last day of class. Like the last day before kids see you again for the exam. She is like, You are all so lazy. And if I'm surprised if any of you pass, like she's just going on. And I'm just like, excuse me, I'm just gonna put this big bag of chips and this big thing of pop right behind, you know, in the back. Sorry, soda behind the and and I I remember, you're welcome. Some of the kids looked at me from the back and the look on their faces, one kid just kind of like waved his hand, and the look on their faces was like, if you could just save us, like it was it was like panic, like they're trying to get me to like read their face. And she was just leaning in, tearing into this whole class. And these were not rough kids at all. They were just kids that probably had heard way too much of this in their lives anyway. So she was losing their mind. I come in next period, and some of the kids just stayed there because it was the same, they were in the same room with me. And I said, Well, I was thinking if we just could start off class today with me tearing an absolute strip off of every single one of you, happy summer! And we had a great time. But I remember being like, I can't believe she's ending the school year like this. Like, what a what a and oh, and she retired. So that was her last class teaching ever. No, but that was her like, see you later, my educational career. That was her last class. She was saving for that. She was saving for that. It was pent up, like the biggest pimple you could ever imagine. A second.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

And I guarantee you, she went home and had that speech 15 more times than every time she went, Oh, I could have done that better. Okay, let's start over.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah, let's start screaming at the car on our way home. So I knew I knew in that moment I never, regardless of what subject I was teaching, because that was an English class, like I said, I would never ever do that. There's a time to celebrate. You gotta leave, you gotta leave people feeling good at the end of something like that. Like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

If you hate everybody and you're retiring, I think that there's I think there's room to go out in a bang, but you have to go out in a bang looking cool. You can't go out in a bang looking out of control and burned out. You have to, you have to go. I mean, I don't know, maybe this is a little Machiavellian to me, but like if you're if you're gonna last thing at school is gonna be you losing your shit at everybody, that's gonna be the thing that goes down in history. If you go out, if you go out with something that you've really carefully planned and that is controlled, then it's like a fireworks display. We put uh in the United States, we do those when we have a big celebration, like for Independence Day.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Um, I don't know if you all use fireworks, but I was like, are you are you fireworks playing to me right now? I am I am, I just you know, I don't know how you all yeah do certain things. So yeah, that's good. Well, we I mean we don't feel the need to set everything on fire up here.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

That cuts deep. All right, well, listen, I I love nothing more than a big cold bucket of water to the face to end one of our episodes. We've moved, I feel, one step closer today to international understanding between the US and Canada. And for that, Evelyn, I thank you. Folks, thank you, all three of you, for listening to the Reverse Jackass podcast. I'm Nick with Hi Grandma. Evelyn the Canadian. My grandmas are dead, and you knew that. Evelyn the Canadian, Blake Flanagan, have a wonderful week.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

Some neighbors are besties.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Others quarrel bitterly. Stuck together through geography. One of us has nukes, and the other has tokes.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

It's American Canadian diplomacy. It's reverse.