Elfnoodles

I’ve decided to do the 8 Random Things. For some reason, most of the random things I thought of at first had to do with school, so I made that the theme. I am not going to “tag” anyone else to participate, so just do it if you like. As required in the rules, it begins with the rules.

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog

1. I had a English teacher in high school whose way of teaching composition required a certain number of complete, distinct rough drafts, generally 2 or 3, to be turned in along with each paper. I had been writing with a word processor for years at that point, and did not normally produce complete, separate drafts of papers. While I was working on something I would have one Word file with sections in various stages of completion, unless it was a particularly long paper, in which case I might do one complete rough draft before the final. She would absolutely not budge on her requirement about the multiple drafts, though, so I had to spend a lot of time faking them to make her happy. I was always marked down on them.

2. I had a psychology teacher in college – some of my readers will remember – who liked to make idiotic, unfounded assertions during his lectures and then strenuously avoid calling on the sea of hands waving to get him to call on them so that they could point this out. He also graded papers only on length or apparent length. AuntieM got great results by widening the margins and bumping up the font.

3. I had an orchestra director in grad school who was notorious for trying, quite unsuccessfully, to teach classes in English from his notes in Chinese. He also graded people on subjective questions such as “Which was Brahms’ best 3rd movement?” It didn’t matter how well they defended their choice – he considered his personal opinions absolute fact and graded on them accordingly. Fortunately, I only had him for orchestra, but that was bad enough.

4. My 6th-grade music teacher was something of an amateur parapsychologist and liked to spend the occasional class telling us hair-raising stories about his investigations of local hauntings, especially Fisher Hall. Fisher Hall is a doozy of a haunting – previously an insane asylum, Miami University made it into a dorm for a while and a student disappeared from there without a trace in 1953. The teacher told us firsthand about seances run amuck, mysterious lights, you name it. I went home hoping my parents would reassure me that it was a bunch of baloney… but they couldn’t, since as they explained to me, the part about the disappearance is absolutely true. Thinking about it still gives me the serious heebie jeebies, so on to number 5.

5. My 1st-grade teacher reputedly told my mother at one point that I was simply not very bright and she should not expect much of me. I would be lucky to graduate high school, she said. This same teacher also had a strange obsession with forcing us to fold our cafeteria pizza in half before eating it. She was certain this made us eat faster. At lunchtime when pizza was on the menu, she patrolled the tables to chastise students who had not folded their pizzas.

6. Through school, my worst subject was generally math. The inexplicable exception was 11th grade geometry, where I did extremely well, and in the same class as kids who are now engineers. Now that I’m older, I suspect that once I was pegged as a Girl Who Was Not Good at Math and treated accordingly, it was the reinforcement of this idea that held me down for years afterwards. That’s all conjecture, of course.

7. My favorite of the plays I was ever involved in was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This was the spring musical when I was a freshman in high school, and my high school’s performance of it was hysterically funny. Unfortunately, however, the local nursing home liked to buy block tickets to the high school musicals, and the stage version of Forum is so raunchy that these particular audience members took their walkers to the aisles and fled in droves. The principal got so many complaints that there were no more hysterically funny musicals after that. The following year we did Annie Get Your Gun with no cussing.

8. My worst school injury was in 7th grade gym class. It was a cold, rainy day in December – just a few days after my birthday in fact – and all of the students were crammed into the gym since none of the classes could go outside. I was playing “HORSE” basketball and someone playing real basketball the next basket over ran into me while chasing the ball. Since it happened so fast and both of my hands were on a basketball at the time, the force of the fall snapped my collarbone. That was also the only time I’ve taken a narcotic – I was prescribed codeine & tylenol. For weeks, I couldn’t even sit up or lie down in bed without help. When I finally got the green light for some physical activity, the gym teachers put me in ping pong class only for the rest of the year. Ever since then, being near a game of basketball has made me extremely nervous.