My English Teacher Is a Mad Scientist

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

The class groaned in one, long voice – a chorus of complainers who had painstakingly practiced for years.

“I haven’t even gotten to the story yet!” The teacher at the front of the room set the book down on the nearest desk. As if embarrassed, the pages fanned away from the heckled text.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t gonna be a good one,” a student said.

“We said we wanted a scary story, Mr. C.!”

Mr. C. crossed his arms. While at school, it seemed as if annoyance lived on his face, and this conversation wasn’t helping it move out anytime soon.

“And what, may I ask, makes it ‘not scary’?” Mr. C. asked.

“Because of how it started. Nothing scary starts with ‘it was a dark and stormy night.’ Not anymore, at least.”

“That might’ve scared you back in 2002,” another grinned. Mr. C. felt his arms go tighter as if he was trying to hold it all together. “But we don’t scare so easily.”

“We’ve seen some scary stuff, Mr. C. This elementary school story ain’t gonna do anything.”

“Oh, you’ve seen some scary stuff?” Mr. C. scoffed. He almost finished it with a rambling list of terrifying things he’d seen – most of them playing out on television during his most formative years – but he kept his composure. Unraveling his arms, he ironed down his shirt. “Okay, since you don’t want to hear a story, I guess we’ll just have to do some real work instead.”

Another very impressive collective groan sounded through the room.

His classes had been moving to this awful pattern of complain, whine, stall, distract, and complain some more for a few years now. He could have blamed the pandemic, video games, parents, or a number of other things, but truly, he had no idea what the cause was. Maybe it was everything. Maybe it was nothing at all.

What if this was just the way kids were, and he was the one changing? Turning from a cool, hip, young teacher to a middle-aged grinch who complained about ‘kids these days'? Perhaps he was just as annoying to his teachers back in the day with stupid made up words and an awful taste in music.

He blinked. No, that couldn't be right. His taste in music had always been great.

After a rough day of being called ‘unc’ and lacking ‘aura’ and ‘rizz’ (was that a bad thing?), he packed up his papers and other work he’d ignore at home and shuffled out of the building. At least he didn’t teach math. The numbers six and seven came up a lot less in English class, much to his relief.

Teaching was not for the faint of heart. He knew that going into the job, but back then he’d been all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to volunteer to start a new after-school club in his free time. Now – 17 years later – he was really starting to feel it. Not just the hours, but all the things those kids said that skipped their brains and came out of their mouths. And he knew they didn’t mean half of it. They were twelve-year-olds, for Christ’s sake. Most days he could rationalize that and handle the eye rolls and the attitude, but for some reason, tonight was different. For some reason, he couldn’t shake the growing frustration about one tiny, insignificant scratch to his ego that had grown to a festering sore.

What the hell did they mean – “It was a dark and stormy night” wasn’t scary anymore?

*

At the start of his career, Mr. C. walked out of college with his degree in secondary education with a concentration in science. He had dreams of teaching advanced biology courses to high school students who wanted to be there. Maybe take a few years to get his masters, progress to a doctorate, and start teaching at a small college. It all felt within his reach.

But he was eager – too eager – and took the first job he could get, teaching 7th and 8th grade science. For the first few years, it went great. He learned just as much from the kids as they learned from him, and he was able to tweak and change his lessons until they had been perfected. He was rewarded with praise from both his administration, fellow teachers, and parents, and it felt like being at the top of his game.

That’s when he should have quit.

But comfort breeds contentment and contentment burns bright and fast, leaving behind only resentment and the hole he had dug for himself.

Maybe the kids were right. Maybe it didn’t have to be a dark and stormy night for things to get scary.

But this was real life, and he couldn’t shake the injustice of it all. They had forced him into an English classroom. Guilt tripped him by claiming short staffing and the fact that no one wanted to teach anymore, and they only needed him until they could find someone permanent. That had been six months ago, and he was uncomfortably dragging his students through stories by authors he had long since forgotten existed.

It wasn’t Shakespeare (thank God), but it wasn’t easy either. To him, a story had been exactly what was written on the page until he started looking at literary analysis through the lenses of theories and hypotheses that needed evidence. It got a little better after that.

Story time helped. The kids seemed to really like being read to even though they weren’t elementary students anymore. He figured they longed for their childhood days and read-alouds helped them go back to simpler times.

He could relate.

But this last story left the kids with extra work and him pissed off over the audacity to judge a book by its albeit very cliche beginning line.

“What am I going to do about it?” he said out loud to the tabby cat resting on his lap. He had been telling Delilah the whole story while stewing on his own life choices, and she was wondering how he was going to show them what was what. “I’m going to give them a little lesson in science.”

His cackling scared the poor little cat right off his lap.

*

The next day, Mr. C. went about his classes as usual. It was a Friday, so there was a quiz in his life science class and a test in physical science. English for his 7th graders was last period, and he had a break right before. The stars were aligning for his grand plan.

It took him almost his entire planning to set it up. There it stood in all its glory, outside on the blacktop where the kids had recess just an hour or so before. Sure, it was a bit crude and slanted, but he only had an amateur laboratory in his basement, and Delilah had been more of a hindrance than an assistant. She kept sitting on all the pieces he needed, and when it was almost finished, she started to use it as a cat tree. Cat hairs and science experiments didn’t usually mix.

At the sound of the bell, he skipped into the classroom, buzzing with excitement and a bit of electricity from being shocked a few moments before. But it was fine! All would be fine, and the kids were about to get one hell of a lesson.

“We’re going outside,” Mr. C. announced, “and when we come back, we’re going to do a bit of writing.”

The kids spoke excitedly to one another. An extra recess? They weren’t bringing out books or writing materials, so what could there possibly be to learn?

Mr. C. couldn’t stop grinning the whole way down the hall. He opened the back door and ushered them onto the blacktop. What they saw there made a small miracle happen – they stopped talking.

The silence was broken only by a low hum coming from the center of the blacktop. There, towering in front of them, was a Frankenstein’s monster made of chrome, gadgets, and…was that a microwave?

“Mr. C., did you try, like, making a Christmas tree or something?”

“Yeah, what is this?”

“This, students, is your lesson for the day. I’m going to show you just how scary a dark and stormy night can be.”

The same horrifying laughter came out as his mouth split open. It poured into the sky, and some of the students took hesitant steps back. One or two others snuck their phones out of their pockets. No matter what happened next, this would make a killing on TikTok.

Mr. C. whipped out a remote control. Still laughing maniacally, he pressed the obnoxiously large red button. The contraption hissed, buzzed, and beeped. What was maybe a satellite dish whirled around on the side of it. The ground rumbled, and for a moment, everything went still. The kids, Mr. C., the wind itself all seemed to hold their collective breaths.

And then, like a science fiction film brought to life, a beam of light shot into the sky and disappeared. The machine powered down, and everybody waited for what could possibly happen next.

“Here comes the best part!” Mr. C. rubbed his hands together.

The hairs on the students’ arms began to stand on end as the air grew thick with electricity. Above them, clouds multiplied and darkened until day turned to night as the sun was blocked out completely.

Lightning flashed in front of their faces. A crack of thunder made the whole class jump. A few kids screamed. Some clung to each other.

The heavens opened, and it poured down rain.

Soaked and extremely pleased with himself, Mr. C. looked triumphant. “Tell me again that this isn’t scary.”

The students filed quietly back into the school, down the hallway, and into the classroom. No one even stopped by the restroom to dry off. Mr. C., being the teacher he was, had towels waiting for them. They took them one by one, all mumbling a numb ‘thank you.’

“You think you’ll get fired for that, Mr. C.?” one brave soul inquired weakly.

“One can only hope, Trevor. One can only hope.”

For the rest of class, he had the students write their own scary stories. And every single one started with “It was a dark and stormy night.”