When I left high school classroom teaching, I thought I was closing the door on that chapter of my life. Then the stories came flooding out through my fingers: stories of teachers, students, and classrooms.
In some ways, this makes sense. Classrooms are thrilling places: full of dynamism and human drama. Young people are learning, growing, struggling, forming new relationships and new visions of themselves and the world, all the time. Epic battles are being waged; fears are being conquered.
Yet, I was surprised to find myself revisiting my teaching experience via the twisted mirrors of science fiction and horror. In the stories I’ve been writing, teachers are haunted by virtual reality tigers, astronauts recall their art teachers in orbit around Jupiter, and a vulnerable student meets a dark ending.
The story about that student, “Rickey,” was originally published in the online horror magazine The Dread Machine. The title character is not human but rather a Muppet-esque “puppet” 9th grader who pushes back on the policies of a public high school that prides itself on its acceptance and progressiveness. While I don’t want to give away the whole story here, the adults tasked with supporting and protecting Rickey are the same ones who lead him into danger.
I loved my time teaching, though I despised many of the conditions teachers work under—long hours, low pay, budget cuts, and conflicting demands coupled with high pressure. I cared deeply about my colleagues and students. I believed in the work we were doing. Yet, what poured forth from my imagination were strange and horrific stories.
Horror stories, in my experience, are a way to upend overused narratives. The unease of the uncanny comes from a mix of the frightening and inexplicable with that which is, in the words of Sigmund Freud, “known of old and long familiar.” In the familiar story, popularized in movies and books, teachers are saviors, “fixing” or even “civilizing” problematic students. When that narrative is challenged, the effect can be horror.
In my story “Rickey,” readers are led to a false sense of hope because they assume an ending to the familiar tale of a committed teacher and a difficult student. She will finally reach him! She can save him! She does not.
Moreover, she is the danger. She doesn’t realize the harm she is causing in time to prevent it.
If I could open a portal and whisper to my past high school teacher self, I would tell her to slow down and ... lean into her discomfort and doubt.
Writing that horror story, I was grappling with the idea that Muppet-like beings, for me, are the embodiment of what adults often say school is for: love of learning, enthusiasm, positivity, joy, curiosity, and kindness. But an actual Muppet in your class would be akin to a nightmare for many teachers. Why? Because they cause havoc as they follow that curiosity, wherever it leads them. Because they won’t sit still and quiet down. Because the curriculum and our traditional, top-down schooling system isn’t actually built for that kind of student: It pushes them down or out.
The uncanny prompts us to see even ourselves as unfamiliar—a stranger, someone we don’t recognize. Writing “Rickey” as a horror story let me embrace a more critical mindset about myself as a teacher in order to dive right into the fears that had been always lurking under the surface. Writing “Rickey” let me ask if, despite good intentions, I was failing to protect my students. Even harming them. Killing their curiosity for the convenience of my lesson plan?
Teachers can easily slip into the role of enforcer and limiter. I know I did, too often. This is a theme I find myself returning to again and again in fiction: how those entrusted with protecting children can end up harming them, even with the best intentions. How easy it is to start defending the traditions we ought to dismantle, to prioritize order over imagination and voice, to silence students.
Sure, I’d read up on critical pedagogy in my teacher education program. I’d analyzed scholarly texts on (white) privilege and the sometimes shameful history of schooling, but it wasn’t till writing horror stories that I could more fully see the terrible power I had.
The nice thing about writing fiction—especially weird, fabulist fiction—is that I don’t have to have the solution. I don’t know the answer; I don’t know which steps to take to transform our school system into one that is truly more student-centered.
But as a writer, I do have to scratch under the surface of buzzwords to get to messy, essential stuff. And horror is one of the tools in my toolkit.
Horror jolts readers out of accepting our familiar stories and systems as the only or best options. Horror highlights the vast difference between what we want schools to be and what they are currently incentivized and restricted into being. Fear shakes us out of our routines. Stop! It yells. People are getting ground up in the gears! Something has to change.
I might not have answers, but writing horror has given me new appreciation for my confusion and my questions. I hold tight to my doubts now, in my (college-level) classroom. If I could open a portal and whisper to my past high school teacher self, I would tell her to slow down and listen to those fears more often: to lean into her discomfort and doubt.
I hope we can find more collective room for talking about not just our hopes for education but also our deep-seated fears—the big ones, about what we might become if we lose track of our humanity. Only by facing our own monstrous potential can we start to challenge it.
