King Dork Read Free Page B

the next twenty minutes or so. This year, “Humanities” began with Foods of 13
    the World. The basic idea there is that someone brings in a different type of ethnic food every day. And the class celebrates cultural diversity by eating it. Day one was pineapple and ham, like they have in Hawaii! We were gifted and advanced, all right. And soon we would know how to have a
    snack in all fifty states.
    I suspected regular English was going to be a drag,
    though, and I wasn’t wrong. AP teachers tend to be younger, more enthusiastic, and in premeltdown mode. They are almost always committed members of the Catcher Cult, and easy to manipulate. The regular classes, on the other hand, are usually taught by elderly, bitter robots who gave up long ago and who are just biding their time praying for it all to be over. Getting in touch with your inner Holden is totally use-less if you wind up in a class taught by one of the bitter robots. You will not compute. Or if you do compute, the bitter robots will only hate you for it.
    I didn’t get into AP English because my tryout essay last
    year was too complex for the robots to grasp. So I ended up in regular, nonadvanced English, run by the ultimate bitter robot, Mr. Schtuppe.
    “I don’t give out As like popcorn,” said Mr. Schtuppe on
    that first day. “Neatness counts.
    “Cultivate the virtue of brevity,” he continued. “There will be no speaking out of turn. No shenanigans. No chewing
    gum: of any kind.
    “Shoes and shirts must be worn. There will be no shorts,
    bell-bottom trousers, or open-toed ladies’ footwear. No tube tops, halter tops, or sports attire. Rule number one, if the teacher is wrong see rule number two. Rule number two, ah . . .
    if you are tardy, the only excuse that will be accepted is a death in the family, and if that death is your own—mmmm, no, if you die, then that death is, ah, accepted as excusable, mmm . . .”
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    Mr. Schtuppe’s introductory lecture was not only morbid,
    but had a few glitches, as well.
    It is like his bald robot head contained a buggy chunk of
    code that selected random stuff from some collective pool of things teachers have said since around 1932, strung them together in no particular order in a new temporary text document, and fed this document through the speech simulator
    unit as is. And sometimes there was some corruption in the file, so you’d get things like “my way or the freeway.” And of course, all the girls in the class were in fact wearing halter tops, and practically every guy had on some kind of “sports attire.” You can’t have a dress code for just one class. It was nonsense. There must have been a time long ago, in the seventies, I’d guess, when he had been in a position to impose a dress code, and he kept it as part of the introductory speech because—who knows? Maybe he just liked saying “open-toed
    ladies’ footwear.”
    Mr. Schtuppe was still droning on about forbidden
    footwear when the bell rang. He stopped midsentence (he
    had just said “In case of ”) and sat down, staring at his desk with what appeared to be unseeing eyes as the kids filed out.
    I had a feeling that everyone in that room was thinking pretty much the same thing: it was going to be a long year.
    H IG H SC HO OL I S TH E P E NALTY F OR
    TRAN SG R E S S ION S YET TO B E S P EC I F I E D
    Despite the ominous beginning, the first day of school had been refreshingly uneventful and easy to take. So, after
    weighing our options, we decided to go back and do it all
    over again the following day.
    I had been curious about how Mr. Schtuppe would
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    launch day two of English for the Not Particularly Gifted, and I was pleased to note that he stood up at the beginning of the class period and simply resumed in midsentence where he
    had left off the day before.
    “Fire proceed to the exit in an orderly fashion,” he said.
    “No talking.” While part of me was a bit envious of the AP
    English students, who were at that moment