Erasing the Music Teacher

I have one memory from the second grade. That’s it; a single memory. And that was of getting into trouble for hitting a teacher with a chalk eraser. Now, before you go siding with the teacher against a mischievous youth, you have to hear the whole story.

Mr. Barckholtz was our music teacher. He was also a bully and physically abusive. But this was in the ‘80s, and back then teachers had supreme power to do whatever they wanted. He would never have gotten away with his antics nowadays. Anyway, he used to torture his students for his own amusement. He picked up my friend and threw him in a trash can for getting an answer wrong, or made up cruel nicknames for kids based on their name…things like that.

One day, when I walked up to the front of the room to turn in my quiz, he grabbed my arm and twisted it painfully behind my back. He asked me something, which I got wrong, so he held me like that, while he asked the wide-eyed, stunned class the same question. When nobody volunteered an answer, he refused to let me go. As I stood there humiliated and in pain, I searched for a solution.

There resting on a tray in front of me was a chalk eraser, full of chalk. Without thinking, I grabbed the eraser, twisted out of his grip, and whacked him in the head with it. He had a rectangular mark in his hair, and a cloud of white particles floated around him. At first he was just stunned, but all too quickly he became furious. He sent me to sit in the ledge outside the classroom and wait for my punishment.

While I sat there half in terror for the unfair punishment to come and half in mirth at the absurdity of the situation, my home room teacher Mrs. Commodo came walking up and asked me why I was sitting there. I relayed the entire story to her, and she told me that I shouldn’t have disrespected a teacher no matter what he did to me.

So, I ultimately got sent to the principal’s office, and nothing happened to him. When my mom found out, she was furious and demanded a meeting with the principal. She tore him a new one for letting that teacher do that to children. It must have had some effect, because Mr. Barckholtz never touched another student. But he also never missed an opportunity to take out his anger on me. And unfortunately, a few years later, he became my eighth grade homeroom teacher. So, he had a lot more opportunities to harass me after that.

The most ironic thing is that I only had a run-in with one other teacher at that school. The woman who made me pee in my pants in kindergarten, who later became my third grade teacher. And that woman was Mrs. Barckholtz, his wife. Nastiness must have run in the family.