I only cheated in school one time. I swear. I wasn’t ever really tempted to cheat.
Except for that one day. Math was never a good subject for me. Math just doesn’t make sense to me. The only think I know for sure about math is that it makes me feel stupid.
At lunch that day, I was relishing the last 30 minutes before Geometry. Geometry gave me a stomachache. Well, so did lunch, but that was a different kind of stomachache.
One of my classmates came up to me and said, “Hey there’s a quiz in Geometry today.”
What?!?
Wait, that doesn’t express what I felt.
WHAT$*&@^#@?!?
Pure panic. He whispered, “I have the answers if you want them.”
Oh.
Well, then. Goodbye to the D average I was carrying. This was an emergency, because I understood nothing of what we were doing at the time.
Armed with 5 answers in my brain, I marched into 6th hour Geometry, and as predicted, Mr. Thornton announced the “surprise” quiz.
You have to understand something about Mr. Thornton. He had been teaching about fifty years by that time, and thoroughly enjoyed his role as the eccentric curmudgeon of the faculty. He said things like, “You’ll find me like the thorns on a rose bush, just before a ton of bricks falls on your head.” I assume he was joking about that, but it was a pretty accurate reflection of what I felt. It’s also one of about three things I understood that year.
I sat in the last seat, second row from the door. I tried to put some numbers on the quiz paper, numbers that I hoped related to the answer I wrote for each problem.
And then it happened.
Mr. Thornton was walking around the room quietly, and he leaned over to me and whispered, “They gave you the wrong answers” and walked on.
To Be Continued...