I’m a bit circumspect here, in the sense that I sometimes worry who might find their way to my blog and what their opinion might mean to me. This has especially been true in the last year when I had begun to look for a new job. I’m settled in now though, the folks at the new job seem to like me well enough, and I don’t anticipate looking for another job for at least several years. A recent acquaintance who made her way her observed that she couldn’t really sense much of me on the site. I’m going to try and do something about that by starting to tell stories about myself that will hopefully be more interesting to folks who come here looking for more than the tech stuff that makes up a large part of what I post.
So, I’ll start with one from my high school years. I had that troubled adolescence common to kids of my generation – by the time I got to high school I was battling with my parents for control, and one of the ways I fought was by screwing up in school. I had been a bright young kid, enrolled in the ‘gifted and talented’ programs and awarded a series of summer scholarships to academic programs, and my father in particular had taken a lot of pride in this. So of course, what better way to lash out than to begin to fail. By the time I was in 10th grade I had fallen into the ‘troubled kid’ category, and aside from the AP English and History tracks I had been booted out of the high end academic courses. Of all the courses I had to take, I hated the sciences the most. I would later come to loathe chemistry even more, but in 10th grade it was Biology. It was a 1st period class, and as it happened one of the schools more notorious potheads was coming to my bus stop most mornings. Draw your own conclusions and then imagine how little attention I was paying to critter anatomy every morning.
Our mid-term was to be almost exclusively on creature physiology. The classroom had various stations arranged throughout it, at each station was placed a creature in some stage of dissection, and in that creature’s exposed organs were pinned a series of numbered flags. The task was to make one’s way to each station, note the flag number, and identify the organ the flag was piercing. We were given a few minutes at each station.
By the second or third station I knew I was screwed – there was no way I was going to pass this test. By the 4th or 5th station a plan had occurred to me. As I sat at each of the successive stations, I watched the room carefully and then plucked the pins from the organs they had been in and placed them in other organs.
The end result of course was that no one passed the test, much to my joy. The following class period we all had to sit in silence, the teacher’s theory being that the guilty party would fess up, which I did not. We had to retake the exam the following week, and second time around I managed to prepare myself such that I passed.
I finally admitted I was the guilty party to my friend Patrick, who was in the class with me, that I was the one who had done it as we sat down over a beer reminiscing this summer and the story came up. We both had a laugh over it. To this day, while I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’d do such a thing, mostly I get a good belly laugh out of it. It’s a great example of my impish sense of humor I think.
I should mention that the teacher did try and exact a measure of revenge on me. While she had no proof, somehow she eventually concluded that it was me who had done it. By the end of the semester I had begun to worry about the regents exam in Biology, and I was failing the course. My friend’s mother was a Bio instructor, and she took her son and I under her wing and tutored us for about 2 weeks. I got a 93 on the regents exam, the highest score at the school that year. My teacher was convinced I had cheated and had me brought before the (dean? I forget what the person’s title was, it wasn’t the principle) and attempted to have my results rejected. But I had my friend’s mom (our tutor) speak on my behalf, and plus I had also done well on my other regents exams so the (dean?) concluded I hadn’t cheated. The best part was that with my regents exam score factored in I didn’t fail the course. That’s the good news, the bad being that it meant next I had to take chemistry, which I just completely loathed – it ended up being the first course I actually failed. All things considered, I would have been better off taking biology again.