GAFFES GALORE

When I taught school I was known as the teacher most likely to make faux paus in the classroom. And the fact that I taught mostly 8th graders whose hormones were dancing around the room made a slip of the tongue twice as likely. My family was used to my blunders and could testify (if asked, but they never were) that that’s just the way I am, these wonderful unintentional phrases just pour forth out of my mouth.

Two instances come to mind: once I asked the class to write down the adjectives in each sentence and the only 2 in one question were “long” and “hard.” Another time we were planning a celebration and I said that I would bring the doughnuts, except I pronounced the “g” because at home we sometimes make a game of ignoring silent letters in words. Both of these brought snickers and snide remarks.

But the granddaddy of them all occurred after I had been teaching only a couple of years. I was teaching American history to a class of 8th graders and we were studying early twentieth century Presidents. Every time I would mention Theodore Roosevelt’s “Walk softly and carry a big stick,” the boys in the back of the room would look at each other and giggle knowingly. Later on in my career I would have said something like, “OK, OK, let’s quit acting like 8th graders and try to learn” and that would have diffused it. But in this case, I just ignored them.

We finished the chapter and the review for the test and I was about to wrap it up. As I was walking toward the door to pick up the daily announcements to read to them, I said, “OK, remember that Taft was the one with the dollar diplomacy foreign policy, Wilson had the idealistic policy, and Roosevelt was the one with the big stick,” (except that for some strange reason I didn’t say stick, I will leave it to your imagination as to what I really said).

Two things occurred that day: the announcements never got read, and Roosevelt’s foreign policy was forever stamped into nineteen 8th graders’ minds.