During my Sophomore and Junior years of high school, I had the BEST English teacher. Mr. West was strange and rebellious. He played Pink Floyd for us on vinyl, had us write insults about each other on slips of paper and seal them in a jar he hung from the ceiling to “loom over” us for an entire semester.
But the best thing about Mr. West was the fact that he went out of his way to scare the hell out of us.When we read Moby Dick, he came to class for that entire unit wearing one white shoe, limping, and yelling at us like Captain Ahab.
The insults in a jar event was intended to teach us that we shouldn’t want to spread rumors about each other after we read The Crucible. (That one didn’t work though. They may have “loomed,” but we were still 15)
Then there was the time that we read Julius Caesar when Mr. West started telling us to “Beware the Ides of March.”
It wasn’t until we got to the part in the play when the soothsayer warns Caesar of his own impending death courtesy of his BFF, Brutus on March 15th (a.k.a. the Ides of March) that we really started to get nervous.
As it turns out, the “bewaring” was just that we spent weeks being afraid of nothing, but it was admittedly pretty effective for the week leading up to the breathless moment when the bell rang and nothing happened on March 15th.
Happy Ides of March were yesterday Friday everyone! I hope you bewore (? Bewared?) them.
Image from here.
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