The author in the 5th grade. Notice the strong resemblance to Melissa Gilbert from Little House on the Prairie. Knowing your shit is super important, especially when you have to give an oral report in front of your science teacher and classmates. And when I say knowing your shit, I mean it literally.
Okay, so it's the 6th grade and I was the new kid at Gulf Breeze Middle School. The photo above is me in the 5th grade. Now add braces, acne, longer, stringier hair, a unibrow, and unfortunately, the same dress, something my mother never let me forget, and you'll have a good idea of what I looked like in the 6th grade. I was definitely not on the cool kids list.
Mr. V., my science teacher, loved for us to give oral reports. It saved him from actually having to teach anything. As usual, I picked some animal to study--a ring-tailed lemur, I think. I remember looking up the lemur in a bunch of books at home and the word "feces" kept coming up. I had no idea what feces was.
So I asked my parents. They told me to look it up. I didn't.
MAJOR mistake.
So now it's my turn to give an oral report. I get up in front of the class and start regaling them with all of my newfound knowledge about the ring-tailed lemur and expound on the animal's "feck-ish."
Mr. V. stops me in the middle of my report. "What are you saying? What is feck-ish?"
Oh, boy. Busted.
"I don't know," I say.
"Come here and let me see your report."
Mr. V. always liked to sit in the back of the class between the two prettiest girls during oral reports, which is pretty creepy in retrospect. I handed him my report. He looked it over.
"Fee-cees," he says. "You pronounce it as fee-cees. It means do-do."
The entire class burst out in brays of laughter to my mortal embarrassment. I wanted to shrink to the size of a flea and disappear.
Mr. V. says, "Next time, look up any words you don't know." He doesn't say it kindly. More laughter from the class. If I'd had any cool points, they'd just been taken away.
So the moral of this lesson is always know your different kinds of shit: do-do, poop, crap, feces, poo, poo-poo, ka-ka, crapola, excrement, etc. And for god's sake, know how to pronounce your shit. Never get caught not knowing your shit.
Thank you, and goodnight.
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