your post about the certificate on ‘irony’ made me start thinking about “oh no, what if Rose was a middle-aged english professor and Dave was the new twenty-something teacher’s aide and he put things like that up to mess with her and also the students,” which turned into “Dave would be the worst english teacher ever, the only thing he could be worse at is a sports coach,” and then it basically devolved into “I wonder how hard Rose would hit that,” (the answer is a lot). Apologies everywhere.

paratactician:

Rose would destroy that. Very little of that would be left standing other than a few stumps of walls and the charred bones of a tree.

But man, I actually feel Dave wouldn’t be that bad as a teacher? He’d probably be the worst of the four kids, but I don’t think he’d be a disaster. He’d be the laid-back, cool teacher who everyone loves even though no-one’s totally sure how he still has a job (answer: the headmistress is one Dr R. Lalonde, MA, B.Ed, and her office has a very capacious sofa and is comprehensively soundproofed). I know in Herobound he taught Music, but I sort of see him as History. He’d be really good at making it memorable: once you’ve had Mr Strider talking about the French Revolution or ancient Rome for thirty minutes, you don’t forget it. It’s almost like he was there. He spends a lot of time sitting at the front of the room with his feet on his desk delivering long, rambling lectures which turn out to be weirdly relevant. His marking is sketchy as fuck – he just puts a big scrawly red tick at the end of your work if you didn’t screw up too badly, and if you did screw up you just get a ‘wtf’. (Meanwhile Dr Harley over in Biology has a bewilderingly complex system of coloured ink stamps with smiley flowers and suns and slogans like WOW! and SUPER COOL! and A BIG IMPROVEMENT!)