During the summer holidays, he ran the disastrous Okay To Cry Corral. His ability to perform such simple tasks as remembering his own students' names was come and go at best during the first season. His English assignments were often ill-disguised attempts to get his students to express personal pain or experiences, and he himself would often cry in class. O'Neill was gentle, soft spoken and ludicrously sensitive, very in touch with his emotions but incapable of controlling them. However, his grasp of the literature and their meaning seems suspect: in " Fair Enough", he asked the class why Tolstoy made War and Peace "so darn unpleasant" (and seemed thought-provoked when Daria joked it was so nobody would want a sequel). He is shown to be well aware of a vast swathe of classic and seminal literature, such as Canterbury Tales, War and Peace, Walden, The Dharma Bums, Breakfast of Champions, and Dante's Inferno, and uses them in his class. The Daria Diaries also have him teaching Drama (Dramatic Horizons) and present English and Language Arts as separate subjects. O'Neill primarily teaches English (at Lawndale it is called Language Arts) and also teaches an after-school course on Self Esteem, at which Daria Morgendorffer and Jane Lane meet. When it comes to violence and gore, he often shudders and writes it off as "icky." He has a "team player" mentality, that is often shown in episodes where there is a field trip and students and faculty travel on school buses. Despite constant attempts at helping people find their emotions, he shows signs of repression and cries often.Īs a teacher, he tries to get in touch with students by tapping into their emotions so that they can relate to whatever it is they are learning. He has a long-running romance with the science teacher, Ms. Timothy is always cheerful and sensitive, but usually forgets his students' names and is taken advantage of.