Trouble in School: part 6

In repeating what I said before, I declare that there is no need to make this opening a repeated, redundant, restating, saying again of the prior first four in this series, but, like in many of my oral speaking activities, I still feel obligated to fill space with something. If silence were golden, I’d be broke!

My inattention or indifference set my junior high math grades. I liked math and it was relatively easy for me, but I had a habit of just not turning in papers or just not doing homework. I felt that there was no reason to do analytical reasoning as applied to story problems or put answers on a worksheet when there is a good fiction book to read. Good quiz scores and a final test saved my C for the year.

I fully expected to be in the algebra class when I entered my freshman year. Then I shot myself in the foot! Well, my mouth was not fully connected to the marginally developed commonsense part of my brain, so my mouth shot me in the foot.

I don’t remember the details, but in a conversation with my math teacher, in response to something he said, I called him Morris instead of Mr. Hislastname. Morris is my middle name, but no one called me John in those days.

It shouldn’t be hard to imagination to know how that went over with him. I’m sure it may have been different if it was a one-on-one, but there was a small group of other students there.

His reply was something like, “Benson, I think you need to get to know Mr. J.H. Principal a little better. Mr. J.H. Principal introduced me to Mr. Custodian, and he introduced me to a two-foot-wide floor mop. He demonstrated how to use it with a four-food wide mop, but I dry mopped the girls’ and boys’ gyms after school with the narrow one.

That, however, wasn’t the real impact of my inability to control my mouth. I was not allowed to take first year algebra and was told by the scheduling counselor that Mr. Hislastname considered me too immature for that level of mathematics.

So I segwayed into high school a year behind the four-year college entry sequence in math.