Once, Twice, Three Times a Dunce

     I received a weird gift last weekend.  I was over at my Mom and Dad's house eating dinner with my wife and kids on Sunday.  Well, my Mom has been going through the attic.  Shortly after we finished eating, my Mom mentioned Precious Moments figures my Grandmother had gotten for my sister and I.

     While a lot of you who know what Precious Moments are may be cringing, I have to admit they are adorable, nauseatingly sentimental, generally owned exclusively by moms and grandmas, but adorably cute none-the-less.  They are ceramic figurines that generally depict big-headed, ultra cute, cartoonish children in all manner of over-the-top cuteness.  The perfect mother's day present (if your looking for ideas).

     Anyway my Mom mentioned that my Grandma (who had worked at Hallmark in the early 90s, where Precious Moments are generally sold) had bought a bunch of them for my sister and I when we were kids.  A few seconds later she came into the room with a little box.  I opened the box, to see a figure of a little cartoonish boy, sitting on a stool, wearing a dunce cap.  I immediately remembered something from kindergarten:

     One day, when I was roughly the same age as my older son I got a bright idea.  It was one of those boring days, when there is a lot of busy work handed out.  It was a day when my class had a substitute teacher.  I was in kindergarten, so this was the first substitute teacher I had ever had.  Quite honestly I thought she was rather awful.  She had an extremely nasally voice, was wearing what appeared to be nurses scrubs, and generally had a rotten disposition.  Everything she said sounded unpleasant.  I disliked her instantly.

     This was bad news.  I was usually a really shy child, some of my first memories were of clinging to my mom's leg and using her to hide behind when unfamiliar people so much as breathed near me.  Well, my distaste for this woman, who had apparently taken my awesome goofball teacher, Mr. Tolbert, away from me, led me into mischief.

     Busy work for kindergarteners is generally coloring, today was no different.  The entire class was coloring, while the intruder was at Mr. Tolbert's desk reading a newspaper, and ignoring the entire class.  Suddenly I got an absolutely brilliant idea.  Examining my stock of crayons, I realized they would fit almost perfectly into each of my nostrils.  BRILLIANT!  I readied the green and yellow crayons (typical colors of snot, good choice I thought), then called some attention.

     My friend Jacob was at the other end of the large table, minding his own business and coloring.  He would get a kick out of this.  "HEY JACOB, WATCH THIS!!"  I yelled in his general direction.  Then I quickly jammed the crayons into my nostrils and then shook my head around a little, rolling my eyes.  In milliseconds most of the class was in stitches.  I had called Jacob, but the entire class had answered.  It was great.

     Almost instantly the trespassing pig was on me.  She had a tight grip on my arm, and was lifting me out of my seat.  The crayons had fallen out of my nose and broken on the floor.  I was still laughing.  So was a majority of the class.  She was not.  She seemed genuinely offended and upset.  I bet Mr. Tolbert would have laughed.  She had put me in a chair in the corner of the room.  Then, she made her first real attempt at actually teaching the class.  "Attention class, John is being a DUNCE, so now he has to sit in the DUNCE chair.  We don't stick crayons in our noses, do we?"  The sub made a dunce cap out of a large sheet of paper and put it on my head.  DUNCE was scribbled down the side in red correcting marker.

     The whole class was staring in my direction, no one was laughing anymore.  Humiliation was flooding all of the good, fun-loving feelings of a second ago and drowning them.  I had gone from happy to really embarassed within seconds.  Not to mention, I had no clue at all what a dunce was, apparently me.  I got the impression I was in a lot of trouble.

     The day rolled on, I got to go back to my seat.  Becky whispered "Are you okay, you had to sit in the dunce chair?"  "Yeah" I replied.  I didn't know how to feel about it, I just knew it meant I was punished.  When my Mom picked me up from school I didn't say anything.  I thought I would be in big trouble.  The substitute had seemed really mad.

     When I got home I immediately went outside to play because I didn't want to confess the crayon incident.  I was outside for a while, then my Mom called me inside.  "OH NO!  She asked if my teacher had made me sit in the dunce chair.  I told her what happened, expecting yelling and punishment.  Well, my Mom smiled and told me the teacher shouldn't have done that.  My Mom told me that my classmates Paul and Robbie, who were twins and enormous momma's boys at that, (if your reading, sorry, you probably overcame that) had told their mom what happened, and their mom had called the school to complain about the substitute.  Apparently dunce chairs and dunce caps were considered archaic and cruel in the 1990s.  Go figure.

     The puritanical punisher never worked in the Milford School District ever again, which isn't a particularly big bridge to burn, about three schools total.  If you lash out at a kindergartener by utilizing a pre-1950s punishment method perhaps you shouldn't be teaching kids, even as a substitute.

     My grandma apparently had found the dunce chair incident really funny and cute, enough so to capture it with a ceramic figure.  Although my grandma passed away in 1993, it was like I had just received a gift from her.  It was friggin heart-warming.  The day after opening the dunce, I was at the playground with my kids.  As I came screaming down the swirly tunnel slide head first after my boys, to a cadre of frowning, judgemental parents I felt sheepish.  Then I saw the boys smiling back at me, laughing like hyenas, and I realized things don't change much.