The Body on the Table

By B.A.D. TCHR

Because I Had to Pee is the more immediately accessible of the two books. The absurdity announces itself in the title, but the incident is not the subject. The subject is what happens when an institution converts an event into an administrative narrative and then treats that narrative as authoritative.

The timeline still matters, as does the tension between what happened, what was documented, and what was later asserted. Teachers—and anyone who works inside a personnel system—should recognize how language, conference dynamics, and written determinations can drift from lived experience. There is something peculiar about watching people removed from your classroom describe an event you personally experienced in terms you barely recognize.

That is one of the dangers of due process: seemingly neutral procedures can surround something inconsequential and make it considerably larger.

It is not lost on me that some readers may wonder whether I interpreted motives too strongly or whether another perspective would alter the picture I have framed. That is inevitable. By publishing these books, I invite criticism. But the more useful question is not merely, “What happened to this teacher?” It is, “What happens when a system creates a durable version of an event that the person at its center does not recognize as the whole truth?”

That is why the books belong beside one another.

Because I Had to Pee gives the experience. Nothing Major Happened examines the record it produced.

The first book is the body.

The second is the autopsy.

Neither book is really about a dismounted fire extinguisher, pubescent horseplay, or an obligatory conference with administrators. They are about who gets to define a one-off event once the institution begins documenting, interpreting, and preserving it as fact.

The people who ran this process may never answer the question that still hangs over this senseless scenario: Was this merely procedural, or had the process become personal?

I cannot answer that definitively. I can only show what happened, what was written, what was omitted, and what followed.

You may come for the story. You may stay for what they made you notice.

I have anticipated another criticism: “He’s angry.” Of course I was angry. The more interesting question is whether anger invalidates evidence.

Some may also ask how I can be both the author and the examiner. Is that not a conflict of interest? Perhaps. But not in the way some might think.

There is no plea for sympathy in these books. I examine records that were provided to me after I refused to sign the documents. They became part of my personnel history anyway—first by email attachment, then by physical copies placed in my mailbox.

So if my examination is considered too close to the body, consider this: Does proximity disqualify the examiner when the evidence remains available for inspection?

My anger does not alter what they wrote. My recollection does not manufacture what they omitted. My authorship does not prevent a reader from placing the record beside my account and deciding whether my analysis survives contact with both. You cannot fault the coroner’s report for not being the body when the body is on the table beside it.

I wrote while remembering how the entire thing began and how it played out—in their conference room, on my laptop, and inside a notebook I bought from Family Dollar. I was not emotionally detached from any of it. I never claimed to be. My prose remained measured while everything inside me raged.

That does not erase the record.

If that still feels too close, too angry, or too personal, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a fuck.

Then there are the things I still cannot reconcile.

The discipline administrator was absent from the due-process conference and, according to what I was told, did not need to be. His absence matters because he was part of the reporting chain surrounding the original incident. Then came the grade-level administrator’s statement: “Now, I’m scared.”

I documented that sentence in my February 26 email to the administrators involved. No one denied it. No one corrected the record. No one accused me of fabricating it.

Thirty-four days later, the next notice retained statements attributed to me before and after that exchange while omitting the sentence itself—the line I say precipitated my response.

That is the issue. Not whether somebody liked me, thought I was angry, or felt offended by my tone. The issue is what the written record chose to preserve.

Memory might fail. A written statement does not disappear on its own.

Once my February 26 email existed, preserving the surrounding statements while omitting the sentence I had identified as the pivot of the exchange became, on its face, a conscious editorial decision. I cannot claim to know why that decision was made. I can show that it was made.

That changes meaning.

Call it omission, framing, selective documentation—whatever term makes the language easier to swallow. The consequence is the same: remove a critical fact and a record can retain its outward shape while ceasing to represent the whole accurately.

If my words mattered enough to document, then the words surrounding them mattered too. You cannot cut the middle out of an exchange and present what remains as though its meaning survived untouched.

That is precisely why Nothing Major Happened exists.

The record became their truth.

I put the body on the table.