Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults). Michael N. Marcus
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Before I was old enough to have a real job, I worked Saturdays in the toy department of my father’s store. Once, I was telling an attractive woman about a toy and could not avoid noticing her breasts. I said that the toy was made by “Playtex” (the bra brand) instead of “Playskool” (the toy brand).
ADOLESCENT MALE SECRET REVEALED
Chapter 16
Not the phonophonopheneloscope
The S.O.B. caught one unfortunate girl chewing gum in school and commanded her to wear the sticky wad on her nose.
Before a much-needed winter vacation in 1959 or 1960, Dolan gave us an assignment to write reports on the phonophonopheneloscope, due on the first school day in January.
About 140 miserable children missed sledding, skating and family trips, and spent their vacations pestering librarians with consistently negative results.
Back at school after New Years, Dolan announced, “I’m sorry kids. I made a mistake. It’s not the phonophoNopheneloscope, it’s the phonophoTopheneloscope.”
We wanted to lynch the bastard!
One student, it must be noted, surmised Dolan’s error and reported on the proper device.
Phyllis later skipped a grade, earned a PhD degree at Harvard, and became a professor at Yale.
Chapter 17
Irreparable typing, irremediable reading, and an offer I couldn’t refuse
Inherent to the decision-making process was exposure to basic training in three directions.
To try out a life in house-building, factory-working or car-fixing, we (boys only, of course) had brief courses in mechanical drawing, printing and woodworking. Our white-collar life sample was a short “Language Exploratory” course in an arbitrarily selected foreign language. After studying Spanish, French or Latin for five months, we were supposed to know if we wanted to go to college. For the other five months of the school year, all eighth-graders had typing class, to prepare for a career in an office or beauty salon or maybe the military. It was confusing.
I had started sort-of typing around age ten, on a very old Remington with sticky keys that my father had brought home from his office. Like most beginners, I began with the basic index-finger hunt-and-peck method, and had advanced to pretty quick two-fingered typing when I was given my very own Royal portable at age 13.
By the time we started “Business Exploratory” (a.k.a. typing), I was a very fast six-fingered typist. I didn’t always use the same fingers for the same keys, and had no idea where the “home position” was or why it existed, but I typed well, and seldom peeked at the keys.
My teacher (a nice lady whose name is lost to history) was faced with a major dilemma. Even though I did everything the wrong way, on the first day of class I was already typing faster and more accurately than my class was expected to type after five months of instruction.
To make it worse, the teacher knew that if she tried to force me to type correctly, I would inevitably type more slowly, make more errors and maybe sprain a wrist. Maybe even two wrists.
Since she recognized that I was heading for college, not a career in business or hairdressing, and would probably never need to touch a keyboard after eighth grade (HAH!), my enlightened teacher gave me an easy “A,” and let me sit and read a book propped up on the typewriter until the course ended.
Four years later, in my senior year in high school, I was again misplaced. But unfortunately this time the teacher was not nearly so enlightened.
Despite my superstar reading status, in September of 1963 I inexplicably found myself in a special education remedial reading class surrounded by kids who could be charitably described as “slow learners.”
Less charitably, their intellectual superiors called these classmates “hoods,” “JDs” and “greasers.”
This class made the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter seem like Rhodes Scholars. They probably traveled to school on the half-sized, yellow school bus and even in high school they had their mittens clipped to their jacket sleeves.
I knew there was a mistake, and as soon as the teacher came in, I went to his desk to attempt to arrange for my prompt exit. But, before I could speak, the teacher held up his hand between his face and mine, and commanded me to “shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.”
Our relationship got worse after that.
The first classroom assignment was intended to assess our degree of reading retardation. The reading teacher distributed neatly printed pages, bearing four simple paragraphs with short words printed in large type.
It looked more like an eye chart than literature.
We were instructed to read the paragraphs, and then turn over the paper and answer the questions on the back of the page. Once we started writing our answers on the back, we were not supposed to turn the page over again to the front.
The stories were only slightly more complex than the “Oh, Sally, see Dick” adventures we read in first grade. I finished the assignment in approximately 14 seconds and then noticed that my classmates were laboriously sounding out each syl-la-ble.
The teacher noticed I had stopped reading, and said, “What’s the matter, dumbass? Too tough for you?”
I meekly said that I had finished the test but he refused to believe me. Eventually, he looked at my paper and saw that I had answered the questions, and answered them all correctly.
At this point, most of the kids had flipped over their papers, and were trying to copy answers from each other.
Seeing their overt and clumsy cheating led our teacher to the only logical conclusion: I must have stolen a teacher’s copy of the test and copied the answers onto my paper.
I was escorted to the principal’s office, and then I eventually got to see my guidance counselor, and she uncovered a scheduling error. I was given three free periods a week to swim or hang around the library, and someone else got a chance to “shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.”
Most days, my major academic accomplishment when Mrs. Samson asked me a question was to reply with the Hebrew equivalent of “I don’t know.” I had a lot of practice saying that particular phrase. I said it better than anyone else.