For all time
Now, we all know that it’s not the best feeling in the world to be called “stupid.” Especially when you know you’re not.
I remember back in 8th grade, I was Mr. Gilman’s teacher’s aide. He taught social studies and I got a good grade in his class so he “chose” me, or so he said. I knew that he actually wanted Josephine to be his teacher’s aide but she already agreed to be Mrs. Harris’ teacher’s aide, so I suppose I was the next best thing.
I was the aide for his ESL class, which had kids who didn’t speak English very well. Some of them were difficult to deal with. I was, and still am, not good with kids, and even though they were only a year my junior, they somehow were still able to piss me off.
One day in class, the kids had to do an assignment (I don’t remember what it was), and one of the kids wanted to know how to spell “jewelry.” Now, if you’re like Bush Junior, you like to add syllables to a word that didn’t exist in the original word, such as “nucular” as opposed to “nuclear.” So some people tend to pronounce “jewelery” instead of “jewelry.” I suppose the double consonants make it a bit hard. So this kid was like, “How do you spell ‘jew-ler-ree’?” So I wrote it out on the board for her. Then one of the other kids started saying how I had spelled it wrong because the way it was spelled wasn’t the way it was pronounced. (If you’re at all familiar with the English language, you know that there are plenty of words that don’t look the way they’re pronounced, but I suppose these kids did not know any better.) So Mr. Gilman, being the asshole that he was, decided to tell the kids that I was stupid and so that’s why I had spelled the word wrong. I had not spelled it wrong and I was not stupid! So I got really pissed off at him and this event has scarred me for life. I even had a nightmare about it recently. After more than ten years. Thanks, Mr. Gilman, thanks. I was never a bad speller before, but now I’m a more awesome speller.
