Danehy

Feb. 18, 2017

Dear Grandpa:

Our assignment in class today is to write a letter to somebody famous or important, so, naturally, I chose you. I mean, there aren’t many kids who can say that they attend a school named for one of their relatives. I like it here at the Al Melvin Secular Charter School, home of the Fighting Old White Guys. (Our principal wants to call our sports teams the FOWG-ies, but I don’t think it will catch on.)

I’m using some software that cleans up my grammar, punctuation, spelling and syntax … wow, I don’t know what those words mean, but the computer printed them, so they must be right.

Anyway, the school is nice, and it’s really close to the nuclear waste dump where Dad works, so he can drop me off in the morning. One of the cool things is that we don’t need electric lights in the classrooms, because the glow coming off the walls makes everything nice and bright. A couple of do-gooders complained, but some Republican woman from Phoenix sent us a letter saying that everything is safe. When a reporter asked her why she didn’t come in person, she mumbled something about still being in her childbearing years, whatever that means. I guess it’s that famous Republican sense of humor that you talk about all the time.

A really funny thing happened in English class yesterday. One of the vocabulary words was “socialist.” Some kid who hadn’t studied tried to use his phone to look it up really quickly, but the phone told him that socialism has something to do with economics and government. I didn’t even have to study, because I’ve listened to you over the years, and I know that a socialist is:

A. an evil person who wants to destroy America;

B. a dumb Democrat who’s being used by evil people who want to destroy America, or:

C. a black president.

It’s been kind of a boring school year; we’ve only had two shootings so far. One teacher is so lame that she had to get off three shots before she even hit the kid. And it was the wrong kid. Some creepy guy who sits next to me in Bible class has shown up twice this semester without his gun. He swears that he keeps forgetting it, but I’m not so sure. I think maybe he’s a socialist. I may have to shoot him.

Oh, yeah, we’re not supposed to call it “Bible class.” The socialists on the courts keep making a fuss about it, like anybody could ever get hurt by being forced to read the Bible at school. Last year, some kid asked if we could also read the Quran to see if there was anything good in that book. But how could there be, right?

I remember when you told me about the time when you and Uncle Frank Antenori were fighting the War on Literacy. You not only had to take on the evil socialist teachers’ unions, but also the courts. You told me that the Legislature had to use money that would have been wasted on the public schools anyway to hire a company to come up with phrases that would get stuff past the courts.

(We had a teacher here last year who called you “Winston Smith.” He was only here for a couple of days, because some parent knew what Winston Smith meant. They came and took the teacher out of the classroom in the middle of the period. It was way cool.)

Anyway, the Bible class is officially known as Solid Dairy Products From a Town in Israel, but we all know that it really means Cheeses of Nazareth. There’s that wicked Republican sense of humor again.

I do have to say that it’s kind of weird around here with the teacher situation. After you and Uncle Frank made it OK for adults to hate teachers as much as kids do, we now have different kinds of “teachers.” The principal used to say that we had a “transient teacher population,” but then a couple turned out to be actual transients, so he had to change that. Every now and then, we get an old person who used to be a real teacher back in the day (before you guys put them in their place and rolled back their salaries), but the only reason they’re still in the classroom is so they don’t have to work at Walmart as a greeter.

We’ve had four different math teachers in the past six weeks. One left because a job opened up at Subway. Another voluntarily turned himself in when they did an immigration sweep at the waste site. He looked at the classroom walls and said something like, “At least the cartels aren’t radioactive.” Yeah, like radiation is a bad thing.

The third one left to become a greeter. The guy we have now is cool. He says that he’s qualified to be a math teacher because he plays the lottery a lot. And by “a lot,” I think he means too much, because he keeps asking when payday is.

Well, I have to go now. Bye, Grandpa.

Your Grandson,

Edgar

P.S. They’re putting up a banner in front of our school. It says: “Arizona’s Schools. The Best Schools in All of Arizona.”

This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2012.