Coo Coo Ca Choo

Though I was both a good student and a bad one at various times in my life, the one thing I always was was an honest student. Not only was I unwilling to consider tampering in the dark arts of cheating, but I was almost always unwilling to ask for or accept help of any kind; I would sink or swim on my own (I'm not saying that not asking for help was good thing, but it was my thing). But the one thing I grew accustom to asking for help with, was also the one thing I could be said to have cheated on.

Its easy to peek over shoulders when you don't have a nose.

I am a good speller, and I have a strong grasp of grammar (thanks in no small part to having an English teacher for a mother), but as anyone who has been reading this blog has probably noticed, when I get too interested in what I am writing I often write nonsense; I will write words out of order, and I will repeat sentence fragments, and I will drop in words that were from a previous incarnation of the sentence that is still lingering in my mind. I don't have any  reason to think I am dyslexic (at least no medical professional has ever suggested it), but I find that I make these mistakes frequently, and then am blind to them if I try to proof read my own work. So, with my writing issues being what they were, I came to accept early in high school that I needed to have my essays proof read, despite my normal stance on refusing all help, and luckily I had an English teacher in my home who was willing to do this for me.

Now, to be sure, even though I realized that I had little choice but to accept my mother's help in proof reading, I normally was very uncomfortable with anything beyond a small correction; if she fixed the spelling of a word or reorganized a couple of words, I would just use the correction she had made. But if she found one of my aforementioned nonsense sentences and completely rewrote it, I would throw out both my version and hers and try to come up with a brand new sentence.

You might think with the advantage I had in parentage that I would have gotten top marks in English, but the truth was that with each year they slipped a little further down. This brings me to grade 12, when my marks in English were in no danger of failing, but with little hope of honours either. Late one night I gave my mother what I had hoped would be the last draft of an essay that was due, and she handed it back to me with more red ink than I had ever seen. I didn't have it in me to basically rewrite the whole essay, so I took her changes at face value, and after one more check from her I was done.

When I got that essay back it was graded 100%.

Never before in my childhood had my mother put school work of my up on the fridge to be seen and remembered, but she put that essay up. I won't say that my mother rarely felt proud of me, but rarely could I tell that she was, however, after that essay I could see her glowing with pride.

But amoungst all the pride there once slipped a little joke. Wondering one night how anyone could get a perfect score on an English essay, she mused that my teacher probably wanted to sleep with me. Not that it matters, but 17 year old Sean would totally have slept with his English teacher because she was pretty hot (oh, and I was a nerd with no prospects). I probably wouldn't even remember that conversation or the feeling of wishing it were true if I hadn't used the exact same technique to get 100% on my next essay.

Although the second 100% essay got a place on the fridge too right next to the first one (that was still hanging there weeks later), after the second one mom started playing up the teacher must want to sleep with me to the max. Not only was this a frequent topic of conversation, but she went out and bought me the movie The Graduate.

The music of this movie aged well, the appeal of
Mrs. Robinson to teenage boys, not so much.

It suffices to say that I never again used a rewritten sentence from mom and I never again got 100% on an English essay. But looking back on this years later, I can't quite guess what my mom's angle was. I'm pretty sure she didn't understand her role in my getting 100%, because I don't think she ever realized that I normally didn't take her editing suggestions. I'm also pretty sure that she wasn't actually wanting her 17 year old son to sleep with his 30 something teacher.

You might think the obvious conclusion was that she was joking, but then that would be because you don't know my mom; I'm pretty sure she ran into Red Foreman sometime in the 70s and he said to her "Lady, lighten up. (plus something about feet and asses)" I suppose her boyfriend of the time might have come up with this and got her to play along, but no matter what the truth was, it was an odd end to an odd situation, with seemingly everyone acting out of character.