The Future President of the Coolest Planet We Will Ever Discover

My students have given me some pretty cool stuff. Some of it was just sweet - signs, cards, candy - and some has been a bit more... creative. After going on a rant about kids stealing all my pens and pencils, and threatening to fail anyone who didn't give back a borrowed writing utensil, one girl brought me a new supply. One student who liked to make fun of the fact that I drive a beetle gave me a stolen VW hood ornament. A pair of girls in a class I student-taught made me the most incredibly bizarre card I've ever seen, and attached locks of their hair inside. It was weird.

One kid even bought me a bottle of everclear on a hunting trip to West Virginia. I figured "Hey, it would be irresponsible of me to leave a bottle of liquor with a 17 year old, so really, I have to take this from him."

I've only had a year and a half of classroom experience, and I've already amassed so much goofy shit that I'm not entirely sure what to do with it all. I'm thinking of getting a steamer trunk: If I'm going to be doing this for 30 years, it looks like I'm going to need a lot of room for all these mementos.

I love all of the crazy, funny, strange, and nice things kids have given me, but one surpasses them all.

In my first student-teaching placement, I had two classes that were a lot of fun to work with, and one that was full of demonspawn clearly engineered by evil scientists to destroy the hopes of would-be teachers like Piggy's brain upon the rocks in Lord of the Flies. Out of this hellaciously awful experience, however, came the most wonderful and hilarious artifact of my teaching career. Not so much given to me as confiscated by me, this glorious picture



was drawn by the ringleader of all d-bags in this class. On the day I found this, I had noticed him rather intently staring at me, but clearly not paying attention to what I was saying. I figured as long as he was quiet and not disturbing the rest of the class, then that's a pretty good day out of this kid. It was when he got up in the middle of my lecture to walk across the room to give the picture to another kid that I decided that I needed to see what this was all about. When I grabbed the picture off of student #2's desk, I immediately started laughing - I couldn't help it. I mean, honestly, it's a pretty good likeness. The kid is quite talented.

My beard was in its infancy then, and the shadow he drew got it just right. He nailed the spiky thing that my hair does when it's a little bit too long to lay flat, but not quite long enough to curl yet. The glasses look just like mine. He even added the textbook's built-in bookmark ribbon hanging over the edge of the lectern.

Perhaps I should be offended by the caricature's pink pants, girth, and horns. After all, those pants are red, not pink. I'm a large dude, but not that large. And my horns are nowhere NEAR that tall.

Actually, I think it's the horns that really make the picture.

I was so enthralled and amused by this drawing that I showed all of my friends as soon as I could. I hung it on the fridge in my apartment. I scanned it so I could make it my profile picture. Everybody I showed seemed to enjoy the picture. When my friend Shawn saw it, he said I looked like the future president of the coolest planet we will ever discover. Other friends started calling me Mr. Willis, a shout out to the fact that that class deliberately "forgot" my name every day. People still make references to the drawing, or ask if I still have it.

"Of course I still have it," I say. "It's the coolest thing a kid has ever given me."

If you'll excuse me, I think I'm off to get this thing framed.