Erasing My 6th Grade Teacher

Funny how the mind works.

Since I began writing yesterday’s post, I have been wracking my brain, trying to remember the name of my sixth grade teacher.  I know his first name was Glenn, and I’m pretty sure he spelled it with two n’s.  Not that we ever called him that; as far as we were concerned, his first name was Mister.

I think his last name was something Irish, and that it may have started with a C, but that’s as far as I can go.  I’ve tried an on-line search using my best guesses with no result, and have decided to quit trying.  His name may come to me at some time in the future, or it may not, but I'm not going to worry about it anymore.

He was a pretty good teacher, and we got along well for the most part, but I think maybe I have blocked his name from memory because of an unpleasant incident that occurred in the spring semester of my sixth grade year.

Back then, long before the TAKS tests (or whatever they are calling them this year) we did take certain diagnostic exams.  Passing them was not a requirement for advancement and they didn’t affect our grades, but taking them was required. One of them was a reading comprehension test that was administered each spring.

That year, after the results came back, Mr. (Whatever the Hell his name was) had my mother called in to a meeting in the principal’s office.  He then announced to me, my mother and the principal that I had scored 130 points, a perfect score, on the reading comprehension exam.  He went on to say that no sixth grader was capable of a perfect score on that test, so it was obvious that I had found some way to cheat. 

My mother had just started to say something in my defense when I interrupted.  I pointed out that we had taken the exact same test the year before in Mrs. Simpson’s fifth grade class, and I had aced it then as well.  At that point, Dr. Dishron, the principal, apologized to my mother for her inconvenience and told Mr. Whatever that maybe he should have checked my records before accusing me of cheating.

Several years later, Mr. Whatever was murdered in his apartment by a homosexual lover.  I was somewhat surprised, but have to admit I was not particularly upset.