Season 2, Episode 15 - Hot for Teacher

Original Airdate - January 10th, 2003

JT refuses to pay attention in Ms. Hatzilakos’s science class. He’d much rather make jokes and make his fellow students laugh, even if Toby, Emma and Manny are all annoyed. Hatzilakos intervenes, putting JT on guinea pig duty. Before and after school for the whole week. JT doesn’t mind. He’s down for some alone time with Degrassi’s hottest teacher.

He shows up the next morning and tries to be flirty, but Hatzilakos is, of course, all business. He drops his pen to make her pick it up and she’s like, oh that’s not mine. Stupid teenaged boy.

She introduces JT to the trio of guinea pigs - Jasper, Bismark, and Isabella. Isabella and JT take to each other quickly, even if he says she’s fat. Hatzilakos is surprised. JT has a way with animals, and she wants to encourage it.

Sean and Toby push JT for information about guinea pig duty. It’s time to talk nicknames. Sometimes, she’s Ms. HOTzilakos. I approve of this. It’s elegant. Sometimes she’s Miss Hot Sauce. I hate this. It’s a slant rhyme at best and I demand better from Degrassi’s young perverts.

JT brags about how hot and heavy things were with Ms. Hatzilakos until Simpson shuts him up. At lunch, the girls thinks he’s being so stupid. This is framed as “she’s too old for you” which is true, but the fact that she’s his teacher is not mentioned. Wild after everything Emma put Liberty through last year.

Sean is a little surprised when Hatzilakos pulls JT out of the hall into her classroom. She wants to show him that she’s figured out why Isabella is so chunky. She’s pregnant. JT is fascinated and says he’s going to do research about her special needs. Emma sees him in the Media Immersion lab and helps him spell “guinea,” pleasantly surprised he’s showing some maturity.

The boys are less supportive. When Armstrong pulls Hatzilakos out of class, Sean makes a joke about them having an affair and JT shuts him down. Sean and Toby make fun of JT being the new teacher’s pet. JT grabs a couple balloons they’re meant to be using for an experiment, shoves them in his shirt, and does an impression of his teacher. She walks in, sees it, and is clearly very hurt.

The next day, JT sees Hatzilakos having a break in the zen garden and approaches her. He apologizes, but her response is curt. She’s mad. She thinks JT has really great potential and a strong mind, but he wastes it being the class clown. She doesn’t want to participate or be the target of that. She sends him away.

JT heads to the science room after school to check on the guinea pigs and finds the door locked. Worse, Isabella has gotten out of her cage. He chases Hatzilakos down and they rush to the classroom to try to catch her. After a couple mishaps, Isabella runs through an open vent into the space underneath one of the experiment benches.

JT isn’t that worried. She wants a dark, safe space to have her babies, but Hatzilakos explains that the janitor goes a little heavy on rat poison. She is not safe down there. Hatzilakos tells JT to head home, but he refuses to leave until Isabella is safe. He remembers reading that guinea pigs like dim lights and soft music. He turns the lights down and puts on a track, while trying some of his observational comedy out on Hatzilakos.

She says he’s funny, and says that whils she thinks he should do whatever he wants after graduation, he should just make sure he finishes school well. He asks if she ever wanted to do anything else, like be a model, but she’s not amused. She says that she is really passionate about teaching, which is why JT’s jokes about her appearance were so hurtful. But all is forgiven, because JT’s plan works and Isabella comes on and gets safely back in her cage.

The next day, Sean and Toby push JT for information about his evening in the science lab with Ms. Hotzilakos. JT makes jokes, but quickly pivots. It was magical because Isabella had her babies! The boys aren’t amused, but JT sure is.

Meanwhile in Grade 9, Spinner smells. Bad. So bad that even Armstrong notices. Ellie is the only one brave enough to tell him. Spinner confronts Jimmy. How long has he smelled like this? Why didn’t Jimmy tell him? Spinner makes them agree to be fully honest going forward.

In English class, Ashley reads a story and Jimmy clearly doesn’t like it. Kwan asks for comments, and Jimmy lies. But Spinner pushes him. Honesty, right? Jimmy admits he thought the story was trying to hard and getting in its own way. Ashley is pissed at Jimmy and Jimmy is pissed at Spinner.

The next day, Jimmy is still mad at Spinner for getting in the way of his rekindling relationship with Ashley, but Ashley comes up and changes his mind. She really needed to hear that feedback and she made her story better. She thanks Jimmy, and Jimmy is all in on the honesty. Spinner tells him, honestly, that it’s a really bad idea for him and Ashley to get back together.

Jimmy makes a list of honest feedback for Spinner which starts a huge fight. They agree that maybe being brutally honest is a bad idea. Like when Ms. Kwan has ink stained lips from biting into a pen, they decide it’s better to not tell her and let her embarrass herself. Good lesson, boys!

I love rodents so much. They’re my favorite guys. I feel deeply for the little freak mammals of the wild world. And I know exactly why.

They were my earliest pets. My family loves animals but didn’t have many pets, at first. There were many cat allergies, and a dog was more than my large, busy family could handle when I was young. Hamsters, rats, and eventually guinea pigs were the compromise.

My first hamster was inherited from my classroom and I fell so in love. They’re just so cute. Unfortunately, hamsters are assholes. They’re allowed to be assholes, all animals are, but this does make them mediocre pets.

I loved my little hamster baby dearly, but he did not love me back. I was the enemy. I brought food, but also attention. No matter how many times he bit me, I would not stop picking him up. When he died, I got a small tailless rat that looked like a hamster but had a much better personality. I loved Ron. I loved that while he was an asshole to everyone else, he liked me.

COOL RODENT BREAK

This little freak is a mountain beaver. They are not beavers and they live in all forests, not just mountains. They make really complicated tunnel networks and have a unique jaw that’s not found in other rodents, but was common in a lot of extinct species. I love them

After Ron met a tragic end that I will not discuss here to protect our mood, we pivoted to guinea pigs. Guinea pigs are incredible pets. They’re sweet. They don’t really like each other, but they like cuddles and play, and they’re big enough that when playing outside of a cage, it’s much harder for them to end up somewhere you can’t reach them.

They require quite a bit of space and they smell like dirt. I wish I had four right now. Sometimes their hearts explode and they die suddenly, which happened to my first guinea pig. Just a warning.

I think it’s definitely possible that my early and dramatic relationship with these fuzzy buddies is why I love them. But I haven’t had a rodent as a pet in decades, and my love endures. There must be another reason.

COOL RODENT BREAK

Rakali or Australian water rats are a legend on the rise, recently voted Australia’s most underrated animal. They have freaky weird tails that help them swim. They actually are kind of beaver like.

They’re also very smart and kill a lot of invasive species. They eat poisonous toads by flipping them over and cutting them open so they can get to their organs without chewing through poison glands. They’re pretty big. I love them.

I often use words like freak and weirdo to talk about rodents. They are weird little things. While I think they’re all extremely cute, I know people find their tales and teeth and weird little toes very unsettling.

I have always been fond of unsettling animals. There’s something inspiring to me about pests and menaces who manage to survive and endure. The proliferation of rats in New York City, despite all efforts to remove them, is downright inspiring to me.

When we first moved to Alabama, there was a lot of undeveloped and farm land around my house. I used to love going into fields looking for cool rats and their little burrows. Little survivors who knew how to make it work.

COOL RODENT BREAK

This is the Indian giant squirrel, and it’s important to me that people know there are big ole multicolored squirrels in the world. They come in so many weird colors and are well worth the image search. I love them.

Rodents are also incredibly smart. In particular, they have really good memory and problem solving skills. They’re adaptable. When they encounter problems, they remember what went wrong and find a way to do better to reach their goal next time. It’s why rodents are so great for experiments.

It is why the rats will always win the war for the cities. They are experts at figuring out how to survive. They find themselves in unfamiliar places, places they may not be suited for, and through skepticism, observation, and change, find a way to flourish.

In recent years, I have come to understand that I’m neurodivergent. It’s kind of weird that it took so long. All of my siblings have been diagnosed. But I slipped through the cracks.

You’d think the weird rat kid would have stood out as a prime candidate, but I hid myself. I found tricks to let my strange brain slip under the radar. I noticed when it felt like everyone around me was behaving differently than me, and while I could never blend in, I could find a way to survive. I was obviously different, occasionally unwanted, but not so much to be fully othered. I kept my rat fascination to myself.

The point is I think I’m something of a rodent myself.