Our Republican Substitute Teacher

I’ll never forget the day that Mr. Wright came to teach our kindergarten class while Ms. Simpleton was out having surgery. The day before she left for the hospital she was teaching us how President Bush was giving tax cuts to the rich instead of ordinary Americans. That was during our math lesson.

When Mr. Wright came to our class, he taught us about taxes by using Oreo cookies. We had used Oreo cookies in class once before when Mrs. Simpleton was talking about Clarence Thomas. She said he was black on the outside and white on the inside. I didn’t really understand that. My mom told me it was a crude joke and not to repeat it.

“Okay kids, the first thing you have to understand about taxes is that rich people pay more taxes than anyone else in America. They also pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes than anyone else in America. So, let’s say that a rich person pays five cookies to the government in taxes, a middle class person pays one cookie, and a poor person pays half a cookie. When it comes time to cut taxes, would it make sense for everyone to get back a whole cookie?”

“That’s right, Johnnie,” said Mr. Wright. “The poor person doesn’t deserve a whole cookie because he never paid a whole cookie in taxes in the first place. And the middle class person wouldn’t be paying any taxes at all if he got back a whole cookie. So class, remember, Mrs. Simpleton doesn’t really want a fair tax system. She just wants to reap the rewards of government programs and services without having to pay for them.”

Then Johnnie raised his hand again and asked, “Are you a Republican, Mr. Wright?”

Mr. Wright wouldn’t answer that question. Instead, he told us a story that he once heard, which he said could be used to teach anyone to distinguish between a Democrat and a Republican within minutes of making their acquaintance. It went something like this:

“A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, ‘Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.’ The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, ‘You’re in a hot air balloon approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.’

‘Well,’ answered the balloonist, ‘everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.’

‘Well,’ said the man, ‘you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met but, somehow, it’s my fault.’”

We learned a lot from Mr. Wright that day. Before we went home, Mr. Wright said that he was going to come back the next day and teach us about school vouchers. But for some reason we never had Mr. Wright as a substitute teacher again. And Mrs. Simpleton stopped buying us Oreo cookies.

Thanks for sharing with us again the story of how HLL became your screen-name. It's a good one.

As for the substitute teacher story, this is an oldie but a goodie. It reminds me of a substitute teacher I had once when I was in the eight grade. Our regular teacher was out pregnant, so we got a supposedly long-term replacement from the County office.

He was an Irish fellow and sympathetic to the Republican cause, which was all the rage back in those days. He was also a devout Communist, and spent his entire first day regaling our captive class with the notion that the struggle in Ireland was a class struggle, and that if Communism were imposed on the Emerald Isle, the class divisions that caused people to fight would disappear and they would all live happily ever after singing some non-religious version of "Kum-bye-ya".

He started going on and on about bread coupons, and how if the state imposed a just mechanism for the distribution of bread, everybody would have all he needed. We started giving him a hard time about what would happen if somebody wanted rye bread, or pumpernickel, and how would the bread coupon system accomodate those needs?

Eventually we got him to admit that there would be a secondary trade in bread coupons, and that people would barter them for whatever kind of bread they wanted, with more desirable forms of bread commanding a higher price, and better bakers would wind up collecting more coupons, etc.

Then we got started on other things, like boots and clothes and automobiles. The teacher hypothesized that the state would issue ration cards for these items also, except for automobiles, of course, which would largely cease to exist. Since everybody needed these things, it would be a simple matter to distribute them equitably and everybody would be happy.

Which brought us to the question of hot water heaters. I had just taken a cold shower that morning (in the middle of winter) because my family's hot water heater was broken at the time, so the subject was near and dear to my heart. At that point, his finely constructed world view just broke down. To get a hot water heater, a person would have to trade his bread and ration coupons and buy the unit, and then barter with a plumber for installation, etc. Finally he had to admit that the ration coupons were nothing more than money with a picture of bread on them instead of a picture of the President, and that the whole mess would not work.

So our eighth grade class worked out in a day (the Sub's last day teaching, BTW) what it took the Soviet Union the better part of a century to discover. The teacher complained to the Principals Office about how incorrigible we all were, and the Principal fired him on the spot. I actually got a letter from the County office (which I still have stored away in the attic), apologizing for the behavior of the teacher. We got a place-filler after that who proceeded to teach us absolutely nothing for the rest of the year. But sometimes nothing is better than the wrong thing...

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