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Lazy or ingenious?
Jan. 24th, 2006 11:48 pmWhen I was in elementary school I went to an in-school tutor, as did a number of people in my grade. This was just for kids that didn't take to reading as fast as some of the others. On my report card they repeatedly would say that I made great eye contact and always seemed intent to listen. The truth is, I remember I would stare at Mrs. Fredrick's lips or eyes as she spoke to me and zone out, I was not being attentive.
In 1st grade reading class I remember Mrs. Grube teaching us that proper sentences did not start with the word "because", I had a lot of trouble with this rule, I didn't see why that was so bad. She had a hard time breaking me of it. I remember her specifically handing a paper back and telling me to try starting it with something else, so I wrote "Well, because...". I didn't understand why this hadn't solved everything.
In 9th grade biology class we were convinced our teacher was just giving us all +5 on our lab worksheets and never even looked at them. My friend dared me to fill one out completely with joke answers and see what happened. I am not the type to usually do such things, but one week I had forgotten to do my worksheet, so it was either get a zero for not handing it in, or take the dare finally and maybe get +5. The worksheet was on genetics and I remember I wrote that the hybrid cross was the cross Jesus died for our sins on, and explained genes were alien babies...I got a +5.
In 2nd grade my parents were called into the principles office because of a picture I drew, not because it was bad, but because she thought it was so good. See, we had taken a field trip to "Hawk Mountain" which was a wildlife preserve where there were lots of hawks and things. All the chaperones were given binoculars for us to use to spot the hawks as they flew over. When we got back to school we were asked to write thank you notes to the people at Hawk Mountain and include pictures. I drew a picture of the sky with some far off hawks in it but didn't feel like scribbling in all the blue and green background so instead I made the picture through the lenses of the binoculars we had used, therefore all I had to fill in was the circles. The principle of the school thought it was so ingenious to have shown it through the binoculars...really, I was being lazy, and was recalling all the Miami Vice episodes I had watched with my father.
In 7th grade I was taking a test on ancient history, namely, Mesopotamia and the Phoenicians. One of the questions was "Name 3 inventions the Phoenicians gave us that we still use today". I could only think of two of them and was racking my brain and finally wrote down, and I was being sincere, sadly...Phoenician Blinds. My history teacher gave me half credit because it made him laugh so hard.
I attended a summer day camp one year (I believe it was after 2nd or 3rd grade). We were all told to draw a mother animal with babies for "arts and crafts". I drew a big pink pig and then was bored with it and really didn't want to have to draw a big ol' litter of piglets....so, I drew 3 piglets all sitting down from the back, so I didn't have to draw faces or legs, just little pink butts with tails and ears sticking up. I hated that damn picture, thought it was dumb. A few weeks later my father asked me where it was because he adored the thing, thought it was so clever and it was literally crumpled up into a ball in the corner of my bedroom...so now this wrinkled "I'm too lazy to draw the whole thing" picture has been framed and hanging in his office for clients and everyone to see for close to 20 years.
In 11th and 12th grade English I remember most of the class wasn't reading the assigned novels. My brother had old cliff notes for some of them, and I read them instead. I answered all the questions in class and looked really smart, despite having never opened the book. I then did things like this again in college, except completely blindly, without cliff notes, just by listening to the discussion and giving answers that related to what others had said "yes, but i was puzzled by why her character would think her husband would do that"..."Good observation, Anne!"...ahh, thanks. I don't even own this book yet.
In 6th grade we had to do at least one-page long journal entries every week, but we could write on anything we wanted, it was just an exercise in being creative and speaking our thoughts. I had nothing to say one week and my brother and father were obsessed with the show Twin Peaks at the time (they used to buy boxes of donuts for the season premieres and our dog got named Cooper, yeah), so I wrote a page that simply said "Who killed Laura Palmer?" and then proceeded to fill the page with "Maybe it was the log lady. Maybe it was her father, maybe it was...". Yeah.
(cross-posted to MySpace)
In 1st grade reading class I remember Mrs. Grube teaching us that proper sentences did not start with the word "because", I had a lot of trouble with this rule, I didn't see why that was so bad. She had a hard time breaking me of it. I remember her specifically handing a paper back and telling me to try starting it with something else, so I wrote "Well, because...". I didn't understand why this hadn't solved everything.
In 9th grade biology class we were convinced our teacher was just giving us all +5 on our lab worksheets and never even looked at them. My friend dared me to fill one out completely with joke answers and see what happened. I am not the type to usually do such things, but one week I had forgotten to do my worksheet, so it was either get a zero for not handing it in, or take the dare finally and maybe get +5. The worksheet was on genetics and I remember I wrote that the hybrid cross was the cross Jesus died for our sins on, and explained genes were alien babies...I got a +5.
In 2nd grade my parents were called into the principles office because of a picture I drew, not because it was bad, but because she thought it was so good. See, we had taken a field trip to "Hawk Mountain" which was a wildlife preserve where there were lots of hawks and things. All the chaperones were given binoculars for us to use to spot the hawks as they flew over. When we got back to school we were asked to write thank you notes to the people at Hawk Mountain and include pictures. I drew a picture of the sky with some far off hawks in it but didn't feel like scribbling in all the blue and green background so instead I made the picture through the lenses of the binoculars we had used, therefore all I had to fill in was the circles. The principle of the school thought it was so ingenious to have shown it through the binoculars...really, I was being lazy, and was recalling all the Miami Vice episodes I had watched with my father.
In 7th grade I was taking a test on ancient history, namely, Mesopotamia and the Phoenicians. One of the questions was "Name 3 inventions the Phoenicians gave us that we still use today". I could only think of two of them and was racking my brain and finally wrote down, and I was being sincere, sadly...Phoenician Blinds. My history teacher gave me half credit because it made him laugh so hard.
I attended a summer day camp one year (I believe it was after 2nd or 3rd grade). We were all told to draw a mother animal with babies for "arts and crafts". I drew a big pink pig and then was bored with it and really didn't want to have to draw a big ol' litter of piglets....so, I drew 3 piglets all sitting down from the back, so I didn't have to draw faces or legs, just little pink butts with tails and ears sticking up. I hated that damn picture, thought it was dumb. A few weeks later my father asked me where it was because he adored the thing, thought it was so clever and it was literally crumpled up into a ball in the corner of my bedroom...so now this wrinkled "I'm too lazy to draw the whole thing" picture has been framed and hanging in his office for clients and everyone to see for close to 20 years.
In 11th and 12th grade English I remember most of the class wasn't reading the assigned novels. My brother had old cliff notes for some of them, and I read them instead. I answered all the questions in class and looked really smart, despite having never opened the book. I then did things like this again in college, except completely blindly, without cliff notes, just by listening to the discussion and giving answers that related to what others had said "yes, but i was puzzled by why her character would think her husband would do that"..."Good observation, Anne!"...ahh, thanks. I don't even own this book yet.
In 6th grade we had to do at least one-page long journal entries every week, but we could write on anything we wanted, it was just an exercise in being creative and speaking our thoughts. I had nothing to say one week and my brother and father were obsessed with the show Twin Peaks at the time (they used to buy boxes of donuts for the season premieres and our dog got named Cooper, yeah), so I wrote a page that simply said "Who killed Laura Palmer?" and then proceeded to fill the page with "Maybe it was the log lady. Maybe it was her father, maybe it was...". Yeah.
(cross-posted to MySpace)
