Seventh grade science was a most memorable class.<\/p>\n
It was Miss Miller’s first year to teach.\u00a0 She was an odd-looking little teacher, quiet and unsure of herself.\u00a0 Our class had far too many rabble-rousers to make it enjoyable for her.\u00a0 Miss Miller had no idea how to keep order and the energetic boys took full advantage, running the class as if they were in charge.\u00a0 Some of them were always in the restroom, missing the teaching as much as possible.\u00a0 Miss Miller never seemed to catch on to the fact that they didn’t really need to go<\/i>.<\/p>\n
A few of the girls were wild, as well. \u00a0Rhonda brought chocolate chip cookies to class one day and made a point of telling the female half of the class not to eat any.\u00a0 Turns out, she had used chocolate Ex-Lax in her batter resulting in the boys having, for once, legitimate reason to run to the restroom.<\/p>\n
The day we played Gossip<\/i> in class was the day all hell broke loose.\u00a0 As part of a science lesson, Miss Miller asked that we play the game in order to see how easily words could be misunderstood and transformed.\u00a0 My parents had taught me that gossip was not a good thing and that it was hurtful to the person being discussed.\u00a0 Could a game by that name be any better?<\/p>\n
Pam was the first to gossip, by whispering something to another student.\u00a0 Those same words were repeated, one student to another, until the person at the end of the line said the words aloud.\u00a0 The idea was to see if what came out at the end was the same as what was started at the beginning.<\/p>\n
I should explain something, however.\u00a0 Pam was a very sweet girl, but she had an unusual way of talking whereby she drew out or over-pronounced certain sounds, especially the letter r<\/i>.\u00a0 It’s hard to explain, but she simply did not talk like anyone else in the class, so the boys made fun of her.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
Pam’s sentence got passed around the room, going through all those boys.\u00a0 There was no way to tell who was responsible for what came out at the end, but when it got to the last student, Cindi, she stood up and said, Pam is a whore.<\/i><\/p>\n
Some of us, Cindi and me included, had never heard the word whore<\/i> before.\u00a0 Pam understood it, however, as did the boys.<\/p>\n
“Cindi, I hate you!\u00a0 I’ll never speak to you again!” she shouted and ran out the door while most of the class erupted into laughter.<\/p>\n
Miss Miller stood at the front of the classroom, wringing her hands. \u00a0Cindi was crying, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on.<\/p>\n
It took Miss Miller thirty minutes to get Pam back in class, with the room in an uproar the entire time.\u00a0 When everyone finally quieted down, we learned that what Pam had actually said was, Math is hard<\/i>.\u00a0 Because of the way she pronounced the letter r<\/i>, the word hard <\/i>probably did sound more like the word whore.<\/i><\/p>\n
But still\u2026.<\/p>\n
Miss Miller changed careers because of my class, which is just as well.\u00a0 I don’t remember any of the science that she taught.<\/p>\n
On second thought, though, maybe I learned a far more important lesson from her: \u00a0all gossip should be avoided\u2014even if it’s just a game by that name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seventh grade science was a most memorable class. It was Miss Miller’s first year to teach.\u00a0 She was an odd-looking little teacher, quiet and unsure of herself.\u00a0 Our class had far too many rabble-rousers to make it enjoyable for her.\u00a0 Miss Miller had no idea how to keep order and the energetic boys took full […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}