I always loved English class because if you are clever enough you can
fake your way to an 'A'. Math class was always all bossy about what
was and was not a right answer. While in the more touchy feely world
of the liberal arts a good line of bull can be just as right an
answer as anyone had ever come up with and as long as it is clothed
in some nice jargon and baloney. The upshot of all this was that I
could take it easy in English class and read what I wanted and then
jam out a page or two report and tah-dah an easy 'A'. The problem was
that while I was not challenged by sophomore English I would get
bored and start disrupting the class and the teacher, who did like
me, would be really frustrated at wits end about how to control me in
the class. She finally discovered that if I was reading out loud I
couldn't be doing anything else. Starting with John Steinbeck's 'The
Pearl' and right on through 'The Chosen' by Mr. Silent 'C' - Chaim
Potok I read every day for thirty or forty minutes to the class. I
liked it, the teacher liked it because I was not ruining it for
anyone else and the other students liked that they were getting their
reading done for them. I made it through the semester and the teacher
invited me to be her T.A. For the next semester and she brought me
into the gifted and talented program. We stayed close through high school and I took a total of six classes from her so I must have redeemed myself.
