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The Daily Post — Daily Prompt

Land of Confusion:  Which subject in school did you find impossible to master? Did math give you hives? Did English make you scream? Do tell!

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I LOVE the title of this prompt. The one subject in school I couldn’t get under my belt was in my sophomore year, and that WHOLE year felt like I was living in the Land of Confusion. I knew how it was going to be when I got assigned to a locker with Lesley Ingram who just happened to be a senior guy! He was a really lovely person, but he and I both knew that was NEVER going to work. A real gentlemen, he took leave of the locker and moved in with a friend, so I had the whole place to myself that year.

Unfortunately that locker was in the farthest building from where the bus dropped me off every morning. Fortunately my homeroom class was right by my locker. And that’s the class that was the issue. Chemistry. OML!!! I had NO idea how dumb I was until I took chemistry. I should have gotten a clue when I didn’t do well in Algebra 2 but did ok in Geometry. Must have been something “spatial” about it all. But chemistry really threw me.

This will be a short piece because I bombed the first three terms of the class. D, D, and D+. The plus was because I finally started going in after school for some help. Grant Hawkes, the chem teacher, bent over backward, forward, up, down, and sideways to help me get a passing grade out of that class. (He was likely the first dragonfly I ever met…) Twice a week for half an hour after school he worked with me.

pipetteThe last term was BARELY any better. Another D+. It was all just going over my head. So he made me a deal. If I could pass the final he’d give me a C in the class so I wouldn’t have to take it over again. Wasn’t such a long shot. It was an experiment. If you got it right, the liquid in the pipette turned this color, if not, it turned something else.

Showing up for class that day scared the beejeebers out of me. I thought I was literally going to pass out waiting for the junk in the tube to turn a color. And it did. The right one! And I got a C in the class thanks to a teacher who KNEW I’d never seek any kind of educational opportunities in the sciences! 😀 To which he probably breathed a hearty “Thank God!” As for me, I was just relieved I didn’t blow anything up that year!