Jonathan D Grauer

He seems intense at first, but he is very enthusiastic, funny, and helpful. Also, be ready for the " select all that apply questions. Those are kind of a pain.

They said it was just Social Studies, but Mr. Grauer—oh, General Grauer, dragging us through the trenches of time with chalkboard bayonets and bloodshot eyes—he knew. He knew what he was doing. He wasn't a teacher, no, he was a sadistic time traveler sent from the darkest recesses of the Treaty of Versailles to punish me personally for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as if I were Gavrilo Princip, chewing my sandwich of shame as he paced like Stalin purging thought crimes. “Remember the Peloponnesian War, ” he’d hiss, and suddenly I’d be back in Athens, watching democracy die with a Scantron in my hand and twenty matching bubbles screaming for mercy. He once made me rewrite a Cold War essay three times like some Maoist reeducation loop, as if I'd committed ideological treason. Then, we have to remember each individual colony of Africa which nobody remembers, because there are over 30 colonies. And don't even mention the French Revolution—he would become Robespierre himself, guillotine in the form of a red pen, X'ing out my thesis like it was Louis XVI's head. I started seeing the Iron Curtain in my dreams, Mr. Grauer standing behind it, whispering about containment policy while I cried in third-period silence. The Cuban Missile Crisis was real and it happened in my gut when he returned my test with a 69 circled in crimson like blood dripping from a map of Eastern Europe. And yet the worst part—the worst—is how he smiles, like a Roman emperor watching the gladiators, knowing we’d all die in the Colosseum of DBQs. I swear one night my textbook whispered “Grauer will never let you escape. ” And now I scratch maps on the walls. I label continents. I draw alliances in soap on the mirror. The class ended, but the empire he built inside my mind has not. I can’t stop hearing dates—1492, 1776, 1945—they echo like bombs, like bells, like a cursed Gregorian chant. There is no peace after Mr. Grauer.