20
Nov
Charades
When I was 11 I had a teacher at Green Acres called Mrs Thornhill. Mrs. Thornhill had some sort of malady and went away for a couple months. Or maybe Mr. Thornhill had the malady and Mrs. Thornhill had to be home to take care of him; as I recall from 7th or 8th grade Mississippi History, Mr. Thornhill was older than dirt and spent half the class sleeping sitting up on the edge of his desk. Anyway: Mrs. Thornhill went away for a couple months, leaving us with a substitute teacher. Before she left, she assigned us all to do one book report a week. A week into her absence, I noticed that the substitute wasn’t demanding any book reports from us kids, so I did the only sensible thing a kid could do, which was to not write any more of them.
Two months later, at the end of the school year, Mrs Thornhill returned and handed out our report cards. I remember getting all ‘E’s and ‘S+’s, except for her class, for which I received a ‘U.’ “How could this be?” I asked her. “Well, you didn’t do 8 book reports,” she told me. “Yes I did,” I lied to her; “I just didn’t turn them in to the substitute because she didn’t ask for them. I can bring them in tomorrow if you want.” Tomorrow was the last day of school. “Okay,” she said. “Bring them in tomorrow.”
That night I wrote 8 book reports. The next day Mrs. Thornhill changed my ‘U’ to an ‘E.’
The moral of this story, my friends, is that kids today are simply too lazy to properly get away with things that we knew how to get away with in days of yore. My kids would no sooner write 8 book reports in a night than they would stuff live electric eels down their pants.
I weep for the younger generation.
