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was just about Coach Ramone thinking Shakespearean characters were a bunch of pussies.
    Working in a private school gave teachers more autonomy, so they weren’t censored as much. Each week in English we had vocabulary words that we had to memorize and then be tested on. One week, the word chastity was one of the vocabulary words. In teaching this term, Mr. Ramone said, “Chastity, as in Chastity Bono, the daughter of Sonny and Cher. Of course, she’s the biggest dyke on the planet.” All these years later, I still remember the hate that was being taught at Saint John’s. Regardless of one’s opinion on homosexuality, I have worked with many lesbians, and part of working and living in today’s world is treating all people with respect. This tenet was not part of the curriculum at Saint John’s.
    During the school year, I would see Mr. Ramone go up to a student, grab him by his throat, and say, “Don’t mess with me. I’ll screw you, and ask anybody I’ve screwed before—you don’t want to get screwed by me.” When one student asked a question and said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” Mr. Ramone replied, “Well, whoever told you that was lying to you.”
    For math, I had Mr. Robertson. On the first day of class, he had the students fill out cards with information such as their name and phone number and their favorite movie. My favorite movie growing up was Christina Applegate’s Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead , but since I was an extremely insecure teen, I lied and said Independence Day or something like that. When one of the other students said Showgirls with Elizabeth Berkeley, the teacher’s response was, “You just like looking at those big ol’ hooters.”
    If there is one teacher that anybody who went to Saint John’s remembers best, it would have to be Mr. Fuller, the global studies teacher. Mr. Fuller had been teaching at Saint John’s since the early 1980s, and his thick Long Island accent was evident in words like “Incers” instead of “Incas.” No student ever had Mr. Fuller who didn’t receive detention. If you showed up without doing your homework or it was of poor quality, you got an automatic detention. Mr. Fuller also assigned detention for students who didn’t have their books covered or if they failed a test; he even once put somebody in detention for not putting periods at the end of his sentences. Paul, Anthony’s son, had Mr. Fuller three years earlier for global studies and told me that at the end of the school year, Mr. Fuller asked if there was anybody who didn’t get detention. Two kids raised their hands. He gave them detention for not receiving detention.
    The first day of class, Mr. Fuller slammed the door and made everyone take out a piece of paper and a pencil and write down the rules. The first rule was that there would be a test every day. Not only was Mr. Fuller’s main duty to teach global studies; he also tried to teach all of his students the importance of being honest. He would always say, “Global studies will come and go, but honesty will always stay.” Whenever he assumed that students had cheated or lied about doing their homework, he would say, “You’re a liar and a cheat. Get out!” Once he told his students that in the ideal world, on the first day of class he would assign a large amount of homework, then the next day if somebody hadn’t completed the assignment he would, quote, “Shoot him.” Another time he told the class, “I think you should know by now not to mess with me.”
    There were very few students who did. If anybody ever tried to be comical, he would always yell, “Clown, clown, clown!” In other classes, many of the students whose parents didn’t pay enough attention to them tried to be rude and obnoxious in an attempt to make everybody laugh. This never happened in Mr. Fuller’s class—although Mr. Fuller was himself kind of a comedian. The difference was that whenever he made a joke, all of