How To: Not Completely Ruin Your Life (#Wattys2015)

High School Shenanigans - Part 2

Year 9, new year, new teacher. For my first lesson I turned up late (you know what they say, good first impressions) I got to the door and let out a big sigh as I flung it open....hang on a second, she's not close to retirement, she's got no obvious facial disasters and that jaw line can save lives (hallelujah!). Miss Applegate (or Applefence as I cleverly called her) had this awkward fun energy which was strangely endearing, whenever she spoke you listened because you wanted to hear what crazy shit she'd come out with next, she'd done it, she'd reinvented my love for English! 2 Years with that crazy son of a bitch it all was looking up, that was until she told us she would be leaving before our last year and wouldn't be there for our exams. She'd just got a job as head of drama department at another school and was peacing the fuck out too, half of me was extremely happy for her and the other half wanted to rip her hair out at the root...I later decided this wouldn't look good on my files.

Before Applefence headed for freedom she introduced us to our new teacher, all we knew is she was a female from south Africa (the irony). She sat in on one of our lessons and was placed on the table next to me, I decided to give her the breakdown of the class

Here you'll find the basic bitches, they haven't listened all year and probably won't study for the exams

Here you'll find the boys, they're a lost cause, they just don't know it yet

And here I am, I'm all you need to concentrate on

As we settled in for our last year I noticed that the new teacher was unable to pronounce my name with her accent, brilliant, I was engaged already! I was no longer Beth, I had become Bith a name with considerably less personalised keyring options. The first lesson wasn't a disaster but wasn't particularly memorably either.

The first time I saw the light on the horizon was about a week later, me and my friend were in media studies and had to hand in some English coursework, we were bored out of our brains in media because we had a substitute teacher so decided it'd be the perfect time to finish early and hand in our work. When we got to English we saw she was teaching a small class of year 7's (first year of high school in the UK) naturally I walked in shouting "AYOOO" as if she'd just dropped the hottest mixtape of all time and decided to ask her what her name was. Her first name. Dundundaaahhh! She let us talk to her on a first name basis, this bitch was breaking every rule imaginable to a student. From that day on it was always "ayyy sheena!" (she spells it differently but that's because she's wrong) sheena started getting all sarcastic and ironic in class, I had created a monster, a monster who let me skip sports and chill in her classroom but a monster none the less.

So the moral to this chapter is....THERE IS NO MORAL GODDAMNIT! My last two years of high school I had amazing teachers who understood that I wasn't rude I was a fucking genius who couldn't be tamed and that my friends is why I'm writing this right now.