Stories from School

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_ServusDomini

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A friend of mine once described me as “one of those annoying people who never studies but still the teacher likes them more and they have better grades than you.”
Now I’m just curious: what kind of student are/were you? Any stories from school?
 
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I feel bad, I usually didn’t study, but I got good grades anyways. It might be because I had a good memory.
 
I generally could get by with minimal studying because of my memory.

In 5th grade, though, I got too cocky. I assumed that—without even cracking the book open at all—I could ace a test on the “explorers” whereby we had to match 20 famous explorers with the place they explored. I don’t know why I expected that the knowledge would just automatically be infused into my brain. I got a D on that test.

I learned a valuable lesson, though. I do have to read through the material at least once if it hasn’t been gone through in class. 😆
 
I was not the best of students, which isn’t surprising given that my first reading lesson went so badly. I didn’t understand that the word at the bottom of the page related to the picture, so as the book was called Janet and John, I assumed the first word on page one was John. The teacher said “no it is Janet”, pointed to the next word and I obliging said “Janet”. I got told crossly “You have a brother called John”, followed by a hefty slap. My older brothers who got scholarships to a private all boys school and never tired of telling me I was thick because I didn’t get a scholarship. My mother admitted many years later, that I did get offered a scholarship but it was to an all girls Catholic school some distance away and my mother knew I would never settle in an all girls school.
 
In 7th and 8th grade I was in charge of the milk distribution during lunch. One day it started snowing heavily in the mid morning. By noon we had a couple inches, and school was let out. In the process of locking up the milk stores, I managed to lose sisters keys. I must have spent an hour looking for them, all while more snow was coming down.

Guardian Angel to the rescue. In one of the passes walking through my path looking, looking, looking, I slipped in the snow, and fell. When I started to get back up, there, buried in the snow I fell in, we’re sisters keys. Whew. Disaster averted.

Thank you angel.
 
I do not enjoy talking about grades or studies or what kind of student I was. Please feel free to imagine something amusing.

Instead I will talk about how our school didn’t have a cafeteria - we went home for lunch - except for one day a year when they had Hot Dog Day as a fundraiser for the athletic program, and we all got to pay a couple dollars, go sit at tables in the auditorium, have 1 or 2 hot dogs, an orange drink, and a cupcake for dessert probably baked by some sports team mom. That was a lot of fun. I learned that the cupcake wrappers had lots of cake stuck to them and tasted like chocolate if you chewed them, so to amuse my classmates I would eat two or three of them in front of a horrified group of boys going Ugggggh.
 
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Also, I think I told this story before, but at my all-girls’ high school we had a “Gong Show” assembly once. I played Chuck Barris and the first act was a group of my classmates dancing and acting out Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” as the record played. I thought and still think it was about the funniest thing I ever saw. (Yeah, I know, I’m going to hell.) We had about a million insider jokes acted out at assembly skits - I remember another time when they put a nun’s veil on the health department skeleton, put it in a wheelchair and shoved it onstage claiming it was the oldest ever teacher at the school. Good times. The teachers usually weren’t so amused.
 
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I wasn’t the best student in my flock but I have coop knowledge and that matters more

BokbokBAWK
 
When I was really young, I was the problem child. Something happened by fourth grade, though, and I ended up getting the “Most Christian” award somehow. :confused:

Most of what I remember from school, though, was college, since I spent middle school and high school being homeschooled. I was a bit ahead of everyone at general education classes. When I switched to computer science, I was ahead of most people for a few semesters, but I started getting a little lazy by junior year and fell behind a bit. It didn’t help that standardized tests frequently had me at the 50th percentile in math but 90+ percentile in reading and writing, which made me question the wisdom of going into a math-heavy major. And then I had a bit of a breakdown in my last semester, but I won’t go into that. Basically, my self-esteem was about as destroyed as it could be coming out of college, only helped by securing a job before graduation.

Things started getting better once I graduated, though. I retained more than I thought I did and was able to recall it better when not under the constant stress and exhaustion of school. Some work experience in, and I realized I really wasn’t as bad as I thought at it.
 
Excepting senior year of high school and the first semester of college, I’ve gotten decent grades.

But in high school English classes, I only finished about half of the books we had to read. And of the ones I finished, about half were finished later than they were supposed to be.
My favorite moment from all that was that with a book where I never even cracked open the first page, I was able to contribute to the discussion. How? A year earlier with a standardized testing prep, one of the readings had been an analysis of a scene from the book so as people talked about it that memory was jogged and I regurgitated the little I knew.
 
I remember Sister Simeon using my head as a chalk board eraser…that about covers it.

Nah I have good memories from school even Sister Simeon and truth be told I deserved it lol. For the most part I had good teachers but I was an underachiever school wise. Too much into sports and girls I guess.

My parents taught me how to read before first grade so one day in 1st grade Sister asked me to read…(see spot run, etc.) So I did and she asked me ‘who taught you how to read so well?’ I thought it was a trick question so I said you did Sister lol. She always kidded me about that later on.
 
mVitus said:
But in high school English classes, I only finished about half of the books we had to read. And of the ones I finished, about half were finished later than they were supposed to be.
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Starting senior year of high school, I started slacking on reading books to their completion, too. I still got a 5 on my AP English test, though. In college, I would frequently write papers on books I didn’t actually read. And this was before things like Wikipedia where I would have at least been able to look up plot points online. I’d basically skim through and pull quotes every so often and build my paper around it—also incorporating things the teacher said in class. I did this in one of my history classes and the teacher actually wrote “You paper shows a serious command of the text.” That made me feel a bit guilty. 😳

Oddly enough, though, I always did better on the math portion on standardized tests. But then I didn’t take any math in college save one statistics class.
 
This reminds me of an incident in high school. I had a huge crush on a girl in my homeroom class. One day in winter, there was a fire drill and we all went outside in the snowy, slushy weather. On the way back into the building, I was chatting with her and (I suppose) flirting in my awkward, nerdy, teenage way. As soon as we stepped into the building and my wet shoes met the waxed floor, my feet flew out from under me in spectacular fashion.

For some reason, though, I wasn’t really that embarrassed. I guess I figured that at least she wouldn’t soon forget me. 😆
 
Joe_5859 said:
As soon as we stepped into the building and my wet shoes met the waxed floor, my feet flew out from under me in spectacular fashion.

For some reason, though, I wasn’t really that embarrassed. I guess I figured that at least she wouldn’t soon forget me. 😆
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Well, according to Hitch, being a bit of klutz is the key to getting the woman everyone wants to marry.
 
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