i spent most of my berkeley high career in proximity to its upper echelon of teachers, thanks to a combination of my affinity for schooling and my bizarrely good fortune. my record wasn't perfect, though - my freshman year history teacher was a real piece of work, one of those incompetent creeps who manage to dig themselves into faculties and remain there despite rank incompetence and misbehavior, presumably due to some combination of luck and blackmail. apparently he was hired to "resuscitate" the berkeley high football program, but in the time i was there nobody really gave a shit about the football program - even my buddy who played on the team - so i'm guessing he suckered a bunch of people to get the gig. reporting about his career before and after berkeley high paints the man as a piece of garbage, and that sure squares with my experience of him at berkeley high.

at berkeley high, he taught world history, although i can't remember a single piece of history we learned, save the assignment where we had to interview a veteran. it came from martin's dumbass "support the troops" jingoism, but talking to a family friend about his world war ii service was a great experience, and i'm happy i did it. there. i'm done saying good things about joe martin. read on for bad things.

i don't remember much of the history class itself. one memory was the time he tried to convince us that george w. bush was a real smart guy because he went to yale. (your politics aside, "legacy ivy admission" is not exactly a sign of intellectual acumen.) another was the way he liked to wear loose basketball shorts and sit with his legs up on his desk, a habit that divided the class into "haves" and "have nots" on a purely geometrical basis. he had an odd, personal brand of racism, exemplified by our field trip to "chinaman town" (i have no idea what we did there) and the time he asked the one chinese-american girl in class, out of nowhere, if her family ate chinese food at home. (her deadpanned answer: "we just call it food.")

it was obvious that he shouldn't be in a classroom, but the school couldn't or wouldn't get rid of him entirely, so my sophomore or junior year they moved him into weight room coaching. this eventually became part of the rotating physical education curriculum, and girls taking the class started failing it intentionally because that was preferable to having joe martin put his hands on them to "coach" good form. he was also, at that time, the supervisor for "in-class suspension," which was what they called it when you forgot your p.e. uniform so couldn't do p.e. but they didn't want you to just run free instead. it had very low attendance, because there was nothing stopping us from simply leaving campus rather than reporting to do nothing while being alternately stared at and ignored by a blob of greasy racism.

but i was one of the few goody-two-shoes idiots who didn't simply cut class, and one day that i'd forgotten my uniform, as the period was drawing to a close, i got up and left a few minutes early. (the in-class suspension room was kind of far from the rest of campus, and leaving early meant i had more time to make out with my then-girlfriend during the passing period.)

the thing is: petty little kings like joe martin cannot stand to have their authority disrespected so egregiously by a sixteen-year-old leaving an empty classroom five minutes before a bell rings, so once the son of a bitch realized what had happened he got up and followed me across campus, yelling all the while. i ignored him until it became obvious that he wasn't going away, at which point i let him drag me into a vice principal's office for some implied terrible punishment or whatever. he didn't stick around to find out what actually happened to me - either he was just that lazy, or the vp successfully waved him off - but, as i expected, she had as little tolerance for his bullshit as i did, so she did nothing other than roll her eyes and send me to my next class, to which all this sound and fury had made me late. its teacher requested that i explain my tardy arrival, to which i responded: "i was...it was a mr. martin thing."

and since mr. martin's reputation among his fellow teachers matched his reputation among students and vice principals, mr. teel needed no further explanation. ah, yes, a mr. martin thing. have a seat. let's actually learn something.