Bad school memory- from light to heavy

Lost_in_translat
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:41:01 +0000

Great stories ! Keep ‘em coming. I’ve a horrid one and a funny one. When I was in first grade, at the beginning of December, we had to make little lambs out of paper, which were then placed on the right side of the wall. On the left was a paper replica of Christ in the manger. Each time we were good, we were moved a few inches towards the manger, each time we were naughty or gave wrong answers, we were moved back. Well, this was my first year of speaking French, and most of my answers must have been pretty weird, so when Xmas came around, there were 20 or do little lambs clustered around the crèche, and one which had now moved so far back that it as on the opposite wall. The principal came in and said: “And who is the wicked lamb who will never see baby Jesus and will go to hell?” She made me stand on a chair and all the other kids ran around me chanting “She’ll go to hell, she’ll go to hell!” I think my agnosticism dates from that day!
On the much lighter side, I am now myself a teacher, and on a hot summer day, in the middle of my first class, I ripped my jeans on the sharp edge of the blackboard where the chalk is kept. Just at the level of my butt. No sweater or coat to cover my very unsexy underpants. You can imagine the state of utter joy in the classroom, and my own acute shame. After an hour, I managed to dash into the secretary’s office and staple my jeans back together, but the story had leaked around the school, and the rest of the day was sheer horror. But very funny retrospectively.