#buttons as the band director is based solely off of his 'pure tone' sounding sort of like a woodwind

[ragingstillness]

OFMD High School Teachers AU

This came to me in a vision. 

Stede’s family have been benefactors of the school for years. It’s technically a private school, but lower income students can get in on scholarships. Stede’s just continuing the tradition of giving money to the school and slapping his last name on things. 

Because of the rich families funneling money into the school, they essentially get to choose the principal with all their influence on the school board, which is how Chauncey Badminton ended up the principal of a high school. 

Stede remembers his own high school days as a classmate of Chauncey’s all too clearly so he’s quite afraid of the upcoming ribbon cutting ceremony for the new library he paid for. He doesn’t want to be back in that oppressive atmosphere, surrounded by snobby kids looking down on each other. He’s especially worried about sending Alma there but Mary convinces him to give it a try. 

He remains concerned until Alma comes home from her first day beaming and reveals the worst kept secret in the school: the principal has zero control over the curriculum. The teachers have all banded together collectively to smile and nod at whatever Chauncey says but teach however they want. But because they teach in styles that are comfortable to them and on subjects they’re passionate about they get high test scores and Chauncey is none the wiser. The kids are also mostly nice according to Alma as the teachers have a zero tolerance policy for elitism. 

Alma especially raves about her physics teacher, a man named, ironically, Edward Teach. She said after he introduced himself he gave them all three minutes to make as many jokes about his last name as they could, heard them all, then gave them several of his own. 

Alma described the rest of the class as chaotic to say the least. Apparently Mr. Teach was a savant of some kind, specializing in fluid dynamics, but was also easily distracted and excitable. Like he set up a fascinating demonstration involving fire and a balloon because someone mentioned liking the balloons he had arrayed in a cabinet in all colors of the rainbow but then almost forgot to put his hair up in a hair-tie before leaning close to the flame. And he was absolutely covered in tattoos. 

Stede is relieved and attends the ribbon cutting ceremony no problem. He doesn’t meet many of the teachers, mostly just other benefactors and Chauncey, unpleasant as always, but the students roaming the halls seem happy. 

Alma continued to come home every day with new stories of the eccentric geniuses who teach at Queen Anne Academy. 

Like the sex ed teacher, Mr. Spriggs, who’s always a little too happy to talk about his boyfriend rather than the lesson at hand but never refuses to answer a question no matter how awkward and explains everything without technical terms but with an ease to his manner that suggests he’s very comfortable and invites the students to be as well. 

Or the home economics teachers, Mr. Feeney and Mr. Roach. Mr. Feeney taught sewing and wasn’t allowed to teach cooking due to, according to rumor, being a pyromaniac. Thus, he taught alongside Mr. Roach who was an excellent cook but a little too comfortable with sharp objects and therefore forbidden to teach sewing. It was an arrangement that worked well for both of them. 

Or the history teacher, Mr. Boodhari, who taught history without a textbook, instead directing students to consult websites like the 1619 project and other trusted sources of modern historical scholarship that refused to deny the mistakes of the past or leave certain groups of people out of history entirely. 

According to Alma, Mr. Spriggs was dating Mr. Pete, no one knew whether that was his first or last name, the football coach. Mr. Pete was an average coach by all accounts but he threw fantastic bonding nights for the team, encouraging the kids to be actual friends as well as teammates. 

Mr. Ivan and Mr. Fang were the gym teachers. Mr. Ivan taught calisthenics and Mr. Fang taught weights. They were marked as unusual not for their personalities but for their propensity to work out in all black and for the belt that Mr. Fang fastened around his head like a sweat band. 

The language teacher had an actual name but everyone just called him Mr. Swede because he had a very thick Swedish accent when speaking English. However, that accent completely disappeared when he was speaking any other language to the point where he sounded like a native speaker. Alma was in awe of him and Stede saw Louis get excited hearing about him too. 

One day Alma came home particularly excited to tell Stede and Mary about the arts teachers. Apparently, they were infamous even among the colorful characters in the school for being completely insane. Aside from Mr. Frenchie the orchestra director, who was a lovely man who only stood out as being a bit of a klutz and for nearly dropping his lute about four times each class period. 

Then there was Mx. Jimenez, the dance instructor and dance team coach. Mx. Jimenez was knowledgable about every type of dance that could be thought of, but when demonstrating for the students always preferred Persian knife dances, Scottish sword dances, and Chinese sword dances. With live blades. 

The band director, Mr. Buttons, was even more eccentric. He had a pet bird he claimed was an emotional support animal and that went with him everywhere. The extra unusual part of that was that his bird was not a dove or a parakeet but a seagull that Mr. Buttons seemed to communicate with. Although Mr. Buttons did play all the band instruments he preferred to tune up the band before each practice by making disconcertingly precise drawn out tones with his own voice. 

The craziest of them all was Mr. Hands, the choir director, who everyone just called Izzy. Alma summed him up neatly when she came home from her first practice: great voice, terrible personality. After meeting him at a parent teacher conference, Mary declared him to be a short angry little man. Apparently he was the only one who openly clashed with Chauncey, instead of agreeing to whatever he was saying and going behind his back later. Izzy was openly confrontational and dismissive of Chauncey but he’d been at the school so long he had tenure and Chauncey couldn’t fire him no matter how hard he tried. 

After her fifth practice, Alma had witnessed one of Chauncey and Izzy’s infamous confrontations and she declared at dinner that the day Chauncey finally snaps and punches Izzy will be the best day of Izzy’s life because finally he’ll have an excuse to lay Chauncey out like a fresh corpse. Izzy may be small but he had an air about him that made it very clear he didn’t grow up in a mansion being pampered but was more likely to have been part of a motorcycle gang and unafraid to fight dirty. 

Izzy was prone to tirades against Chauncey, posh society in general, and any administrators who got in his way but he was completely different around the kids. Like a gay, punk, Gordon Ramsey, Alma had said. Stede had nearly choked on a mouthful of pasta primavera. Izzy had a soft spot for shy queer kids, and was fully willing to go off on anyone, parent, teacher, passerby, who tried to insult his kids for their sexualities. 

Stede was quietly relieved to learn that most every teacher at the school was queer in some way because he had been outed by someone he trusted in his childhood and Chauncey had tormented him over it. Apparently Chauncey had found out about Izzy during his first year as principal and tried to fire Izzy for “promoting an amoral lifestyle.” That night Chauncey’s office door was removed from its hinges. No obvious damage, no one on the security cameras, no signs of forced entry, the door was just there one day and then it wasn’t. The next day the door had been replaced...by a curtain of rainbow worm-on-a-strings. There had to have been hundreds of them, so tightly packed that it almost looked like a solid door. That one Chauncey tried to pin on Izzy but Izzy was slippery and denied any knowledge of it. The message had been sent anyway. 

Stede himself identified as bisexual but although he was attracted to women, the way his marriage to Mary had been arranged meant that neither of them had ever developed romantic feelings for each other. It was the rare woman that caught his eye anyway. He and Mary were now comfortably divorced but still lived in the same house and coparented their children. Personally, Stede had his suspicions about Alma’s sexuality and he was happy to hear that she’d have a support structure when she wasn’t at home. Even if that support structure was made up of very bizarre people. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of similarity to Stede’s colleagues, he finds himself totally fascinated by them and comes up with excuse after excuse to go to the school and observe. This is where the story really kicks off, with Ed’s class doing the egg drop parachute challenge off the roof of the school and Ed accidentally dropping an egg, no parachute at all, onto Stede’s head as he walks past. Meet cute or meet ugly? You decide.