School Dayz

Oh high school. It's interesting what you do and don't remember from those days. Most of my memories of high school consists of not finding parking, disobedience in seminary, reading Steinbeck, skipping assemblies with friends to feed ducks, and a lot of seemingly embarrassing moments. I recall one particular embarrassing/hilarious moment:

I was a Sophomore in a computer technology class. Unless I had a friend in my class, which in this case I didn't, I came across as the quite and shy student...the opposite of every other student in this particular computer class. This class overflowed with the type of popular kids that made fun of anything not them, lived for lower back tattoos, preferred energy drinks to water, and dyed their hair black...very cool things back in 2001.

The teacher of this computer technology class was an uninterested educator who gave you an A on any assignment if you turned in something with your name on it. With the bar set very low- I always finished any assignment in record time and the rest of class was spent playing mine sweeper and tuning out talk of Green Day's latest mind-blowing hit.

One day we were given an assignment to research a subject that we found interesting and put together an informative slide show presentation. I assumed that we would just email the presentation to the teacher and, as always, that would be that, easy A. Without any care, I picked the most basic subject I could think of for quick research: barnyard animals.

So simple. In under 15 minutes I threw together a slide show about the different types of barnyard animals: cows, sheep, horses, goats, pigs, and chickens. I included a picture, three bullet points of information about each--what they ate, Latin root names, and life span. I also included a audio button that you could click to hear the sound that each animal made. Done and done, I emailed it to the teacher.

The next day in class it was announced that we would present our slide shows to everyone. Having basically created a slide show for children, I was a little nervous. After several people presented their slide shows about teenager things of interest such as music, cars, sports, etc., I hesitantly got up and announced my presentation:

"My presentation is about different types of barnyard animals." 

The fact that I titled it "Barnyard" Animals is something real special in and of itself.

Everybody was already giggling.

"The first animal here is a cow..."

Some boy in my class: "MOOOOOO"
Another boy chimes in: "MOOOOOOOOOOOO"
Everyone else: "MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

I continued on.

Every slide that I presented was followed by the class making that animal's noise.

After I finished and sat down the teacher asked for everyone to clap, instead I got "moo-ed."

Some kid sitting next to me: "So are you going to be a farmer or something?"

Me: "Yeah, probably."