Perks

Being a career teacher means you’ll never get rich, you’ll never have stock options, you’ll never have an office with a view and you’ll never be famous (unless you get blown up in a space shuttle). But, oh boy, does this job ever have its perks.

How many times a day do you laugh – I mean belly laugh – while you’re at your job? That’s what I thought.

But if you have the right attitude in this job, you get to laugh multiple times every day. Just yesterday a kid I used to have walked by me in the hall with a freshly shaved head. I stopped him and asked him what was up with the new ‘do. He replied glumly, “I lost a bet with my mother.”

I asked him, “What did you bet?”

He looked at me with big sad droopy eyes and said, “I bet her that she couldn’t outsmoke me, and the bitch was done with a carton of cigarettes before mine was even half gone.” I still don’t know whether I was roaring at the bet itself, the fact that she “won” or that she went ahead and collected on the bet by actually shaving her kid’s head. I just know I’m gonna see her waving a bottle of Jack Daniels and brandishing a pair of clippers some day on Cops.

What other perks have I enjoyed in my almost 20 years on this job?

I’ve learned about the best free porn sites you can find on the Internet.

I get to sample all the cool new candies that come out before most adults have even heard of them. Some people get off on watching bootleg movies before they’re for sale. I relish the memory of my first bite of a Take Five bar before you could find them in most 7-11's.

I learned how to make the most ingenious bong out of a Pepsi bottle and a salt shaker lid from a kid who probably couldn’t spell most of the words in this sentence. If he were forced to stand in front of the room and do an oral report on an assigned topic, he’d refuse to budge from his seat and gladly take the F so as to avoid the crushing embarrassment of being unable to communicate about a topic he couldn’t care less about. But if I would have let him demonstrate how to construct that bong in front of the room, why, he’d have blown the curve for the whole class.

Then there was the time many years ago when little miss cutie-pie hot stuff Tina unexpectedly showed up at my apartment door one lonely February Friday night around 8:30. Oh, stop dialing 911 right now, you little Dudley Dorights. She had graduated a full 20 months prior to that, so it was all good. Very good.

I’ve gotten hundreds of free drinks. Let me run into former students at a bar, and I can pretty much put my wallet away, because former students love to buy drinks for their former teacher, especially if the teacher treated them like human beings when they were in school.

I’ve had former students help me move. I’ve gotten free tickets to luxury boxes at NHL games. I’ve gotten major discounts for body work on my car and a new pair of cleats for the baseball league I used to play in.

I’ve been turned on to new bands and gotten tired of them before Rolling Stone even thought about writing their first reviews for these cutting edge, up-and-coming new bands.

But my favorite perk moment, even better than that Tina visit (well, barely), was the time I was sitting at a local bar one May night and I ran into a former student who was thrilled to buy me beer after beer after beer. The conversation eventually turned to drugs, and he said he and his friends used to be absolutely certain that I got high. I told him I used to, but that I’d gotten away from it. He then told me that, should I ever feel the need to reacquaint myself with ol’ Herb, he could help me out in that department. He was a full-fledged dealer now and damn proud of how good he was at it. I turned him down but thanked him for the offer and congratulated him on his new line of work.

Well, I guess we taught this kid something when he was in school, because this young man was quite the budding salesman. After he left, I stayed at the bar for one more drink. He returned about two minutes later to say goodbye again and to shake my hand. When he did, he left a tight little baggie in my palm and told me he was giving me a free sample of his product in case I changed my mind. Told me it was the good stuff. Oh man, was it ever.

Free weed ... conjugal visits ... painful laughs ... and summers off. Now, if only I could find an ex-student to let me rant and rave on his website every other week instead of having to suck up to this dirty old illiterate hobo I'm beholden to.

Ned Bitters teaches high school and dreams of one day seeing one of his former students on stage at a strip club. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.