The last time Safety Pin Michael showed up for Intensified Chemistry with Ms B, he brought a dildo with him.
I didn’t know, at the time, what a dildo was; I was fifteen and hadn’t yet figured out how to use AOL to learn about sex things. But you didn't need to be able to identify a sex toy in order to understand what Safety Pin Michael did was… Noteworthy.
My period for Intensified Chem started a little before 11am. Our school had just switched to block scheduling that year, so where we once would’ve met for fifty minutes every day, we now attended each class for 100 minutes every other day on a rotating schedule. I couldn't decide if this was a good thing in the case of chem. On the one hand, I hated it, so being spared a daily dose was welcome. On the other hand, I hated it, so having to survive an hour and a half of it multiple times a week was dire. I felt stupid in that class, having never been a confident math student, and having a notoriously hard time respecting teachers who were bad at teaching. Which Ms B was. She wore wedge heels and a white lab coat every day, swanning about the room with her very very dyed hair flapping behind her like a straw cape. None of this had any bearing on the quality of her instruction, mind you, but her appearance has been firmly preserved in my cranial amber because of how frustrating she was as an instructor. All she did was repeat the same material, in the same way, over and over again. She never offered different approaches, taught straight out of the textbook. For most of us learners this was an academic death sentence.
As we all filed in and sat down on the day in question, Safety Pin Michael assumed his regular, slumped-down position. Spine curved forward with feet hooked in the book basket under the desk in front of him, his undone lime green suspenders dangled towards the floor and his enormous black pants (covered with safety pins) made his legs look like they were as broad as telephone poles. While we were all getting settled, Ms B was futzing around at her desk on the far side of the room, waiting for the bell to ring to signal the start of the period. Safety Pin Michael, a few seats up and one row over from me, was well out of our teacher’s sightline. He looked over, observed this, and scooched slightly upright. Freeing his left arm from where it had been crossed over his chest, he reached down and dug in one of the many pockets lining his big pants. Then, he pulled out a long, rubber-looking purple something with a handle and brought it to his lips. His right arm was still crossed over his stomach, so now, as he lifted his prize up, he used that crossed arm to steady the other, cupping his left elbow in his right palm. Sticking the dildo in his mouth, he snapped his mouth closed and started sucking.
It took a minute for Ms B to notice what was going on, once the bell rang and class got started. And then, being a teacher, she promptly pretended to not notice what was going on. Or at least, tried. I think she lasted about five minutes, stammer intensifying and blush rising, before finally turning from her little lecture spot in front of the blackboard and snapping, “Michael. Put that away.”
“What?” he asked, sliding the dildo out of his mouth for a moment while widening his eyes with innocence.
“You know what!” Ms B hissed.
“I don’t,” Safety Pin Michael informed her. Then, he basically unhinged his jaw and shoved the whole thing into the back of his throat.
For about thirty seconds, Ms B tried to return to a state of pretending ignorance, turning her back on our half of the room and speaking to everyone else about isotopes. Her fury, however, was too great. Spinning back suddenly, she whipped her arm up, lab coat sleeve flapping, and pointed toward the door. “Out,” she whispered-screamed. “Get. Out.”
Safety Pin Michael barely paused. Parking the dildo in his mouth and biting down, he freed up his hands to grab his backpack. Then, he swung up out of his seat and disappeared into the hallway.
I never saw him in class again.
I’ve spent a goodly amount of time in the last few days trying to find Safety Pin Michael on the internet. But nothing has come of it. It looks like he didn’t graduate from the high school where I attended class with him, so I don't even know what his last name is— the only other identifiers I have for him are that he was tall, had green hair and a lot of acne and skin the color of milk, wore big, dark clothes threaded with safety pins, and owned a lot of chain-themed jewelry. And I don't know about where you went to high school, but where I went, these characteristics were not unique to any one person. So all I have to go on, really, is his first name, his appearance, his dildo, and his disappearance from Intensified Chemistry with Ms B.
But that’s sufficient, apparently, to keep my brain busy; I think about Safety Pin Michael all the time.
Here's the thing: neither Safety Pin Michael nor I were doing well in Ms B’s class. I don’t know exactly what his grades were, but given he wasn’t showing up regularly and did his work even less regularly (plus the whole getting-thrown-out-and-never-returning thing), it’s fair to assume he didn’t skate through with straight As. I didn’t either; I still don't know how I passed that class, honestly. It was probably a pity thing, in exchange for how many cram sheets I made and test retakes I opted for. But really, there was no helping it; none of the material made sense to me, and the way it was being taught only made it worse. Early that school year, I just could not understand what Ms B wanted me to understand one day during lab. She made a face that I have never forgotten: impatience, bewilderment, boredom. No matter how many different ways I asked her my question, she answered in the same way, staring at me and waiting for me to magically “get it.” I didn’t. A classmate eventually helped me, after Ms B had given up; I felt her dismissal deep in my bones. Also, deep in my bones, was my loss of all desire to even try to perform in her class.
She’d given up on me, and I wanted her to know that I knew that she had. But I was such a “good" kid, I wanted so badly to be “good,” it would’ve never occurred to me to do something so wildly inappropriate as bringing a dildo to class (my parents would’ve shipped me to Jupiter if I did, anyways). Looking back now, I kind of wish I had, though. Had done something beyond what I ended up doing, which was to just vibe in mental absentia in that classroom for the rest of the year. Of course, Ms B did not deserve, alternatively, to be confronted by a fed-up teenager wielding a sex toy, much less to have the student refuse to respect her request to put said sex toy away. It was a violation on eighty-five different levels (and though they shouldn’t, teachers have to field wild shit like this all the time). Safety Pin Michael’s behavior was unconscionable, no teacher deserves that, and I acknowledge it. But the further I get away from that day and what he did, the more I wonder about why he did it. About how students don't necessarily get heard, trapped inside the bananas apparatus that is Western K-12 schooling as they are. About how they get erased instead.
The dildo wasn’t just an attack on Ms B, was it? I, obviously, have no means of finding out. But over the years, I have found that day to read more and more like a cumulative “fuck you,” fueled by hard experiences with many teachers, schools and administrators over several years, as opposed to a one-off with one science teacher. This raises questions for me: what had happened previously, for Safety Pin Michael to get to that point? How had American schools failed him, redrawn his future and joys and interior life so violently, that flirting with expulsion was worth it? He never came back to class, and that was okay, apparently; whether he got kicked out of the school or just floated the halls for those 100 minutes, it was acceptable.
Thousands of children get written off by school every year. In fact, there’s a movement in the academic and educational worlds to replace the term “drop-out rates” with “push-out rates,” and I think we all need to embrace it, because that’s what it is. For as long as organized schooling has existed, people have played billiards with kids’ lives in ways that steal futures from them; kids are “bad” or kids “don’t listen.” Kids “don't fit the culture of our school” or kids “don't have what it takes.” Maybe you’ve got ADHD, maybe your parents are fighting a lot at home, maybe you can't do your homework because you have to watch your sibling each night or commute for two hours each way. Maybe you know your teacher doesn't like you, or you're targeted because you’re an energetic young Black boy who loves to speak up in class, or you’re poor and attacked by your classmates for it. Maybe you’re hungry. Maybe you need to learn math with manipulative objects instead of by note-taking. Maybe all the books you've read in literature class are about lives you have never imagined yourself living, and so you stop trying to read them.
There are so many ways for students to get tagged as problematic, and almost none of them are in those students' control. They are alienated by a very busted system, and subsequently punished for it (pushed out of school, funneled into classes leveled well below their academic capacities, or relocated to under-funded alternative programs). And for many, this is where the school-to-prison pipeline systems in the U.S. and Canada begin. Young people (particularly Black and Indigenous young people) get written off by a system that is ostensibly designed to serve them. Because, in the end, it's not for them. It’s for grooming them to be what Western society will, or won't, accept, and being pressured into living in accordance with that ruling. And it often falls to teachers, people who are trying to bridge the impossible chasm between what children need and what the Western education apparatus wants students to be, to determine whether kids get a future or not. To stretch their limits as teachers and humans as far as possible, hoping to save everyone but knowing they can’t, and often getting backed into inhumane corners where they are forded to make inhumane decisions. It’s not fair to anyone. But it’s also pretty much the only game in town. How else are you going to provide your child with the education they are required to get in order to one day secure employment that pays their bills?
Ms B was well past her limits I imagine, with not just Safety Pin Michael but teaching in general, the day that that kid pulled out that dildo. He, meanwhile, was seemingly at a limit of his own, and demonstrated how significant that extreme was through an act of sexual harassment. Nothing was good about that altercation, but nothing good came of it, either; we never saw Safety Pin Michael again, or discussed what had happened. And I think that, in the end, is what I'll never get over. Why I keep thinking about him, fifteen years on; something (someTHINGS) had to change, but nothing did. All we saw was the removal of the “bad” kid. And so the wheel kept turning, scooping up the “good” ones and crushing the rest in the name of learning. Or something like that.