Geometry was a bad idea!

I have burned up brain cells remembering my sophomore year in high school! I looked through my yearbook to find that I was in the band, FHA, FTA and pep club. Rather bland and boring. I remember that I joined FTA because one day a year, FTA members got to go spend the entire day in an elementary school, helping out a teacher. I have never wanted to be a teacher. But I did want to miss a day of school. So I paid my dues, went to meetings and got to spend a day in a second grade classroom. That experience made me even more certain that I was not called to be an elementary school teacher.

I did a very silly thing as a sophomore and I suffered for it all year long. I signed up for geometry. Geometry was not required to graduate. Math is not something in which I have ever done particularly well. To be quite frank, I stink at math. I don’t like it, either. Why I signed up for it, I will never know. I only know that I suffered. All. Year. Long.

Mrs. Charlene Mitchell was the geometry teacher in our school. She seemed ancient when I had geometry in 1972-73. She had already gained almost mythical status in the lore of Kennett High School. I wish I could say that she taught me geometry, but she did not. She told me to listen to my book, it would talk to me. Mine was mute. I never heard it say a word. And if it could have talked, it would have said, “Run away! Run away!”

To make it worse, I had first period geometry. Oh, how I wanted to be sick every morning! I was lost from the moment I walked in the door, and lost when I walked out of it for the last time.

Mrs. Mitchell sat at her desk with her eyes closed. I’m not kidding. It’s a fact. When I had the misfortune to be called to the board to work a problem and she had to come do it for me, because I never once got it right, she would stand beside me and work the entire thing WITH HER EYES CLOSED. Really! You can ask anyone who ever had her.

We had homework every night. I copied the problems every night. I wrote things down…doesn’t geometry have theorems or something? I remember I had one of those metal thingies that has a sharp point and you can draw a circle. Aren’t angles involved in geometry? I was a terrible geometry student.

Which led me to doing something terribly wrong. And I got away with it. It involved my grade, report cards and playing the system. I managed to get a C the first 9 weeks. I imagine I got it because I copied the homework problems and scribbled something on the page every night and turned it in. I took the report card home and my mother signed it. I wasn’t scolded or anything, because nobody expected me to be a scholar, and especially not in geometry.

I should explain how our report cards worked at that time. You had a different card for each class. Your parents were to sign each one and the card was returned to the teacher who gave it to you. After Mother signed the first one, I turned it in. I was following the rules.

The second 9 weeks, I had been given a D. I’m sure I was probably failing, but I kept turning in homework papers with the problems copied from the book and some sort of nonsense scribbled beside each problem, as if I were trying to work the problem. And maybe I was. I had no clue as to what I was doing, but I turned in pages every day. I'm sure that the D was a gift and I deserved and had earned an F. I was just grateful for the D.

I did not give that report card to my Mother. While a C was tolerated, a D would not have been. I didn't try to forge her signature on the report card. In my mind that would have been really stupid and I would have been in BIG, BIG trouble if I’d done that.

When the report cards were to be turned in, I simply didn’t turn mine in. Mrs. Mitchell never seemed to notice that she hadn’t gotten one back, nor did she notice that she never again gave me a report card. My mother never noticed that there was a missing card in the stack and never inquired.

Today, I am confessing my sin and I imagine that when she reads this, Mother will find out that I actually got D’s in geometry. I know that I had D’s the rest of the year because I have a copy of my high school transcript.

To my knowledge, that is the worst thing I did as a teenager, and I never got caught. I know I never got caught, because Id still be grounded if I my deception had been noticed. I think I must have figured that was my only pass, and I’d be VERY stupid to do anything else I wasn’t supposed to do…because it would for sure catch up with me.

Dear Mother and Daddy,

I guess you know, if you didn’t already, that I didn’t do a bang-up job in geometry. I guess you also know that I wasn’t honest about it. I hadn’t thought about it for years, until I was in the high school buildings this summer. I hope that you can forgive me for that after all these years. It was wrong and I knew it then. I imagine that I lived in a personal hell the entire year for fear of being caught. If I was deliberately deceitful at any other time, I can’t recall it now. You certainly taught me to be better than that, and I certainly failed.

Thank you for all the life lessons you taught me. I hope that the ‘love you no matter what’ extends to confessions made 37 years later.

Love,

Mollianne

Golly…that was harder than I thought!