Funny Yet Accurate

There are lots of reasons I am becoming an elementary school teacher, but one reason is because I had such a mean 4th grade teacher. There are so many jobs that mean people can do, but teacher, especially the young, is no one of those jobs. Why people who are mean do that, I don't know.

So, I am all about being a super-nice teacher (just being nice is not enough.) I have already started planning the monthly birthday celebrations (also known as cupcake-fests) as well as the field trips to Chucky Cheese. Which is educational because skee-ball a life skill that everyone should master. Although, if we use my fourth grade teacher as the comparison, it really shouldn't be that hard to be nicer than she is.

I was in the fourth grade in 1985. For Christmas that year I got an AWESOME sweat shirt-leggings combo. The sweat shirt had some AWESOME geometric pattern on the front. Probably looked like a teenager from NYC had driven to Atlanta the night before with a few cans of neon-colored spray paint and marked the shirt with with his gang symbols. It was AWESOME, if I haven't already mentioned that part. To compliment the top, I also received HOT PINK ribbed leggings. Which were Double AWESOME. Basically I was ROCKIN the fourth grade on the day after Christmas break.

After having not been beaten down everyday for the past two weeks by my teacher, I was blindsided when I saw her. She said to me

Margaret, it looks like you are wearing long underwear.

I replied, saying

I'm not wearing any underwear.

And, then, she did the meanest thing a person could have done at that moment. She said

Class! (just to make sure that she got everyone's attention. If she had been smarter, she would have waited for the kids who were in the bathroom to come back, so she woukd have had a full house)

Margaret just told me she is not wearing any underwear.

Obviously, in fourth grader-like fashion they all rushed to my defense. Telling the teacher to go to hell and that she needed to stop being so mean to me. (At least this is what happens in my fantasy movie version where I take revenge and use her full name -- because the truth is a defense to any slander or libel suit....so they tell me...)

Well, fast forward about 20 years and, in fact, I was not wearing any underwear on the day that I fell and sprained my ankle (which almost cost me a million dollars, until my senses returned.) This is in spite of the fact that my mother just recently purchased some very nice underwear for me. But, I am out of practice of actually putting it on. Oh, I also forgot to mention. one other detail..I was wearing a skirt.

So, I told Raymond a few days ago that I was going to go and buy even more underwear and asked if that was that ok, financewise. Before recovering his shock that I actually wanted to go to the mall and pay someone money for something I don't consider "essential," he said that it would be fine. That I should splurge away. He did want to know from where I had gotten this new interest in underwear. I told him that on the day I sprained my ankle and was laying on the sidewalk next to a well traveled street in a major metropolitian city in America I realized that I wasn't wearing any underwear.

Raymond's response

"I know. I could see. We all could see."

Poor Raymond, he is the husband of the woman who got hit by the bus and wasn't even wearing dirty underwear. Light a candle for him, would you? He really is a living saint.

# posted by Margaret @ 7:12 PM