Trouble in School: part 4

Would it be redundant to say during my many years in the classroom, I got in trouble more than once? I slipped through the first semester of elementary school seventh grade in Holmes City, MN, without any trouble I can remember and entered second semester of junior high seventh grade in Alexandria, MN.

I remember other things about that second half of seventh grade, but nothing about trouble in school.

I was nearly fourteen when I entered eighth grade where the strong majority of my ‘peers’ were thirteen.

My first eighth grade English teacher was at least 90 or even 100 years old in our minds – probably late 40s or early 50s in real life. I already had a seventh-grade record of being not just a poor speller, but an ‘extremely poor’ speller. My nearly illegible handwriting was one of the problems, but not a real excuse. My natural left-handedness was long gone, and I can rationalize now that I may have done better if printing had been allowed.

Thursday was the traditional spelling test day. And we got the list of twenty-five words for the next week on Friday. Words were written in cursive on a side of the room blackboard and were to be copied during silent reading time. I often wondered why she wouldn’t give us a ditto machine copy to study.

One week I made a firm decision to elevate my grade and copied the words very carefully. I’d not worked with others to study spelling words before, but I did for that set of 25. As was my common plight, I had trouble repeating spellings orally, ¹That is still a problem for me today. but for that list I could write them clearly enough to be read by the peers with whom I studied.

Mrs. X spoke the words, we wrote, we exchanged papers, she spelled the words, we marked the errors, and computed scores. Papers didn’t go back to us, so we were in suspense until the next day when she gave our papers back.

The classmate who checked mine gave me a thumbs up after the test, so I knew I’d done well. The next day when the teacher said, “Benson, see me after class,” I expected a congratulations for my effort. She was the only non-PE teacher who used my last name. I never heard her call others by their last name, and she never called me Morris.

Instead of congratulating me, she said something like, “I don’t know how you got all of the words right. I always watch for cheaters. You’ll do a retake after school.”

It didn’t sound like an option!

She stood only a few feet away from me and gave the words in a different order. My score was 25/25 again. She told me she’d not accept my doing so well and told me she believed I’d found a way to cheat right in front of her. She gave me a 76% – the minimum passing grade.

I know now I shouldn’t have, but I gave up studying for spelling tests and maintained my still low but not failing class average with other activities. I didn’t realize at the time, but my not getting good spelling test scores again confirmed her hard held suspicions that I really had cheated.

Later in the year I got a lifelong positive punishment from her.

PS: I am still a poor spiller.