| January 10, 2003 - Mr. Cassidy, Horror of Crapperton |
| Dear Friends, I've had a request from one of my Readers to write a little bit more about CRAPPERTON, the town where I went to junior high and high school. No story of CRAPPERTON would be complete without a section on one of my teachers, Mr. Cassidy. I would say that Mr. Cassidy was in his 50's when I had him for a World Civ. class when I was 14. I'm not really certain how he got the position he had, but I was privately told by one of the other teachers that Mr. Cassidy had a teaching certificate for life, because he became a teacher during World War II when there was a shortage of them. Ever since then he had been moved from one classroom to another as his pupils began realizing that they were smarter than he was. May I give you an example Dear Friends? His favorite classroom activity was to show film strips so that he never really ever had to teach. In fact, he always appointed one of the students to read the film strip aloud so that he could take a little nappy-poo at his desk. Anyway, one fine day it was JOHNNYLEEN's turn to read the film strip, which dealt with the Renaissance or Art or something along those lines. So I read aloud, "Michaelangelo designed the tomb of Pope Julius II." Mr. Cassidy immediately piped up, "Now pay attention, class. They're talking about Julius Caesar here." It took a while for me to prove to him that Julius Caesar and Pope Julius II were two entirely DIFFERENT people separated in time by several CENTURIES! How's that for dumb? Or perhaps my lilting voice roused him from some private reverie he was having in the darkened classroom? A few months later, Mr. Cassidy came to class a bit despondent and told us that his dog had died. "Yep," he said, "I was just about to go up the steps into my trailer when Tillie bounded up the steps beside me and suddenly dropped dead." I snickered, leaned over to one of my classmates and said, "I wonder now who'll grade his tests." Ah, yes, even as a mere sprite, JOHNNYLEEN had quite a way with words. Well, Dear Friends, that was just the beginning of all sorts of problems in Mr. Cassidy's class. Our last week before the semester ended practically turned into a brawl between two girls in the class. One of them objected to something that was on our exam saying that no mention had been made of it in class and also there had been no information about it in our textbook. Mr. Cassidy kept saying emphatically that the item was in the textbook, although JOHNNYLEEN had it on good authority that Mr. Cassidy never made up his own exams, but used mass-produced ones that often were from different textbooks than the ones used in class. So the other girl (the BROWNNOSER) said, "Lydia, if Mr. Cassidy says it's in our textbook, then it's in there!" To which Lydia replied, "Then where is it? Mr. Cassidy, where does it appear in the textbook? Show me!" And then BROWNNOSER primly said, "At least I have respect for my elders." And then Lydia said, "Yeah, well, I have respect for my elders who wrote this textbook, and that question from the exam isn't in there!" The next year I went off to the high school so I never saw Mr. Cassidy again. However, I heard that he was then assigned to teach 7th graders, who also proved to be smarter than he was. Just a little aside, my English teacher told me that Mr. Cassidy couldn't read the pronunciation key in a dictionary. Every time he wanted to know the pronunciation of a word, he'd look it up, point to the pronunciation, and ask her, "Mrs. Smith, how would you pronounce this word?" She told me she was always tempted to say, "I don't know, Mr. Cassidy. How would you pronounce it?" I do know from personal experience that he pronounced the "Niger River" in Africa as the N-word (and got away with it!). Gee, I never tire of talking about CRAPPERTON! Next entry Previous entry Go to diary entries Go back home |