I teach English 101. My classroom is the first college experience most of my students ever have. On the first day of class, it’s a guarantee that someone will raise their hand to ask if they can go to the bathroom, and they will stare at me weirdly when I answer, “You’re free to take care of your needs whenever you need to.” One of my students a few years ago had been homeschooled on a remote island and had actually never been in a classroom before. Ever. They are still becoming.

I’m a divorced single mom of an adopted child. I have a nose ring and a potty mouth. I’m pretty standard, and out-of-date in the streets of Seattle, but when I walk into my classroom in the off-path San Juan Islands, I am a revolutionary.

What do I do with this group of seventeen and eighteen year-olds with no life experience who live in a place without a single traffic light? Why, scare them of course!

It’s not intentional. I’m not trying to ruin Santa Claus, but I do on a daily basis. Sex trafficking, abortion, racism, civil disobedience, gender roles, Arab Spring, economic disparity, LGBT rights, the education crisis, authoritative oppression, animal rights, and great myths of American history— I force them to talk about it all. This does have methodology. They have to practice articulating verbally what makes their blood pump before they can write about it, or write about anything at all.

They come to discussion hesitantly at first, their grade on the line, often introducing themselves by first presenting the views of their parents, and slowly, very slowly, they begin stating what they think about the world and their role in it. I’ve heard some of them drop comments so naïve and unintentionally oppressive, I’ve momentarily lost my own ability to speak. But each of them is starting to think critically, and that’s the entire point of education.

There is one theme that shuts them down completely. Or should I say “kingdom.” Disney. You cannot fuck with Disney.

My current class is mostly young women and a handful of young men. The idea that there could be something to reject in the presentation and marketing of young women within the Disney mega merchandising factory is just not something they will accept. They refuse to even discuss it.

What angers me most is that these girls may grow up to retain the idea that their ultimate life achievement of happy will not be possible without a man at least six inches taller to make it happen for her. And this needs to occur while she still has a waistline. Even more dangerous, these young women may believe that this is permanent. That “ever after” exists, that life somehow reaches a stasis after a handsome guy with family money kisses you, and with a swirl of his cape, shuts down the mean, ugly posse that’s been plotting behind your back. It’s a set-up. What happens six months after the fairy tale wedding? Won’t all of life from then on seem so—anticlimactic? It’s as if they cannot see their life beyond their “big day.”

Thing is, you make happy. You engineer happy. You fucking carve it out of alabaster with your fingernails and a butter knife in the black, wet dungeon you’re stuck in if you have to. And happy moves around on us throughout life. We catch it, get used to its presence, and then it vanishes one morning when we weren’t looking. The only thing to do, the only thing that proves we are brave and heroic and possess power, is to get out the butter knife and start carving again.

I want to tell them this—my young women. I want to take each one of them on a long walk on a beach and give them their real education. Because I love them. I don’t want them to go through what I know they’ll have to in order to learn what they need to. It’s gonna hurt. They are so new and skinless. They still believe happy is a place they’ll get to by escort instead of the place you build yourself out of all-nighters and three jobs and a bad landlord and a broken refrigerator. I can’t take them on that walk, so I scare them. Scare them like an evil fairy godmother. Every day.

Jennifer Brennock is currently at work on Real, a memoir about infertility, adoption, and The Velveteen Rabbit. Her novel, Not Jewish, is forthcoming from Pink Fish Press of Seattle. More of her nonfiction can be found in Shark Reef, The Pitkin Review, Line Zero, and the anthology Becoming: What Makes a Woman. Jennifer likes typewriters and men who use the word “magistrate.”