My shop teacher is Ratman. Not his given name, of course, except in the sense that junior high kids have given that name to him, behind his back, for a small eternity.
Strictly speaking, Ratman doesn’t teach “shop.” In keeping with the educational nomenclature of the times, Shop is now called Tech. But it’s still shop. His classroom is a dank garage, where the temperature drops 10 degrees from the rest of the school, and the walls are lined with aluminum shelves holding old, busted tools covered in a thick layer of sawdust and metal shavings.
Shop class requires repeated use of drill presses and bandsaws and other things that can kill you if used incorrectly. Ratman constantly warns about the danger surrounding his students at the top of his lungs, in a window-rattling howl that suggests he is not so much warning against harm as he is actively attempting to cause it.
He was dubbed Ratman due to a confluence of unfortunate physical characteristics. First, he is tiny. Four feet tall, if that. He is just tall enough to not be a midget. He also has a long, pointy, rodent-like nose, and a pair of beady eyes made even smaller by a pair of coke-bottle glasses. He owns a shrill, piercing voice that can cut through steel. He also has one leg that is shorter than the other. His pace is evened out by a shoe with a block of wood. It hits the ground with vicious CLUNK as he patrols his classroom.
A man of such description should have thought twice about choosing teaching as his vocation. He especially should have run screaming from teaching at the junior high school level. That he didn’t is either a reflection of a serious lack of perception or a byproduct of his unique personality. I’m inclined to side with the latter interpretation, because Ratman is a complete bastard. It’s hard to say if he was a bastard to begin with or if he was made a bastard by years of teaching bastard high school kids. The why’s don’t really matter to me, because regardless of the reason, he is a bastard and I must deal with him.
Much like a religious cult’s compound, Ratman’s class possesses an air rife with the constant threat of recrimination. Ratman is fond if descending on you with no warning and shrieking “WHATTA YOU DOIN?” directly into your ear. This seems counterproductive to his stated aim of teaching safe workroom practices, but his philosophy is “Do as I scream, not as I do.”
