Monday, October 11, 2004
Rewarding Bad Behaviour
Vanessa Thomas, who recently removed her blog again (much to my chagrin), has complained that my blog no longer features the hilarious anecdotes that it allegedly once did. With that in mind, here's another story about the epic struggle waged between myself and Tex-Bitch, my grade eleven English teacher.
We'd just read Beowulf. We were assigned the task of writing a paper comparing and contrasting Beowulf to another Anglo-Saxon hero of our choosing. I didn't know of any other Anglo-Saxon heroes, and I was far too busy (mostly thinking of ways to make her life miserable) to do any research into one, so I decided to invent one: the legendary Larynx Carboxyl (we were covering the larynx in Biology, and Carboxylic acids in Chemistry at the time).
Anyway, I wrote my paper, and it was good. I mean really good. I talked about pathos, even, despite not being entirely clear on its meaning. Perhaps it was pride in this work that caused me to volunteer to read it in front of the class, which was, in hindsight, a mistake, because it made people in my class laugh.
Oh, this made Tex-Bitch happy. She smiled her frog-like Texan smile, and asked to speak to me after class.
"Did you really think you could get away with this?" she asked, "I mean, how dumb do you think I am?"
Unusually (for me), I recognized that this was one of those so-called "rhetorical questions", which shouldn't be answered, and certainly not honestly. I remained silent.
"Who is that, anyway?" she followed up, "a football player or something?"
"Yes," I said seriously, "he was a running back for the Ottawa Rough Riders in the early eighties."
"Well, don't mess with me again, Steve."
I spent the rest of the year messing with her.
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Vanessa Thomas, who recently removed her blog again (much to my chagrin), has complained that my blog no longer features the hilarious anecdotes that it allegedly once did. With that in mind, here's another story about the epic struggle waged between myself and Tex-Bitch, my grade eleven English teacher.
We'd just read Beowulf. We were assigned the task of writing a paper comparing and contrasting Beowulf to another Anglo-Saxon hero of our choosing. I didn't know of any other Anglo-Saxon heroes, and I was far too busy (mostly thinking of ways to make her life miserable) to do any research into one, so I decided to invent one: the legendary Larynx Carboxyl (we were covering the larynx in Biology, and Carboxylic acids in Chemistry at the time).
Anyway, I wrote my paper, and it was good. I mean really good. I talked about pathos, even, despite not being entirely clear on its meaning. Perhaps it was pride in this work that caused me to volunteer to read it in front of the class, which was, in hindsight, a mistake, because it made people in my class laugh.
Oh, this made Tex-Bitch happy. She smiled her frog-like Texan smile, and asked to speak to me after class.
"Did you really think you could get away with this?" she asked, "I mean, how dumb do you think I am?"
Unusually (for me), I recognized that this was one of those so-called "rhetorical questions", which shouldn't be answered, and certainly not honestly. I remained silent.
"Who is that, anyway?" she followed up, "a football player or something?"
"Yes," I said seriously, "he was a running back for the Ottawa Rough Riders in the early eighties."
"Well, don't mess with me again, Steve."
I spent the rest of the year messing with her.
