L-A-U-G-H

When-I-Was-A-Dummy-Wednesday

Once upon a time, I moved in the middle of third grade. We moved to a suburb of New Orleans, and I started at a new school, and my mom HATED my new teacher, Ms. Burg. She was the "gifted" teacher, which probably meant she was excited she had the better behaved kids and didn't have to work very hard. She taught by writing notes on the chalkboard, in cursive, in an outline format, and we copied it word-for-word into our composition notebooks. Other than that, we did silent work at our desks. I also remember one time she tried to put a grape in her mouth, and I saw her miss her mouth, and I was amazed. That wasn't the only time she missed the mark.

One time I was writing a story and asked my teacher how to spell the word "laugh." She told me she would not tell me, and handed me a dictionary to find the word. I looked up L-A-F and didn't find the word I needed. I asked the teacher again and she wouldn't help me. How could a third grade teacher be so heartless? My friend Vicky whispered to me that it's L-A-H-F, or something like that. I still couldn't find the word. I misspelled it in my project.

That afternoon I switched from my "gifted" teacher Ms. Burg to my regular teacher Ms. Fischer. I was not in gifted Math class, which is ironic since I later was a math major in college. I asked y regular teacher how to spell "laugh," and she wrote it on an index card and handed it to me, and told me to memorize it.

When I was a dummy, I couldn't spell the word "laugh."
When I was a dummy, I thought all grown-ups (even the mean ones) were infallible.