The Goat

In middle school I had an Earth science teacher named Mr. Cavanaugh. One my co-workers at the bike shop had been suspended by him 10 years prior for leaving the Rolling Stones album Goat Head Soup on his lectern, and one of my classmates was suspended for making "BAA" noises during class. Mr. Cavanaugh looked like a goat and, based on his reactions to people pointing this out, it would seem that he was sensitive to the comparison. Shaving his pointed goatee and chinstrap would have gone a long way to making him look less like a goat, but I can only assume that at some point in his teaching career he'd decided that shaving his facial hair to look less goat-like would have been backing down, and once he made that decision he could never go back on it. He also used to let students run their own urine through a water filter and then drink it for extra credit, and now that I know a little bit about microns and filtering, that was not a good idea. Today that's something you'd read about in the Huffington Post. And you can be certain that the inventive editor would put a side-by-side photo of the teacher's mugshot next to a goat.