ouish

Friday, January 16, 2004

Busted!

A good friend of mine emailed me to tell me about our old 7th grade teacher/later to be principal (from a Catholic school) who was busted for subscribing to child porn. Neither one of us were that surprised.

I had nothing against this man. He never did anything when I was in school to make me think he was some kind of predator or anything. I do have three memories of him that stick out in my mind. I’ll only go into one now. It’s kind of long.

The first one is a good memory. I was in 8th grade. There was a statewide or countywide contest that involved testing in different areas that he wanted our school to compete in. One of the categories was current events. He chose me and another person to compete in that area for our school. The other person was a boy who had a crush on me at one time, asked me if he could kiss me during The Outsiders, I laughed and said, “No.” So, I would stay after school with crush-guy and read Time magazine and Newsweek and the two major New Jersey newspapers. I was (and still am) a newshound. I would watch every newscast when I got up in the morning, at 6:00 pm, and at 11:00 pm (in case there were new developments since 6:00). I thought I was ready!

So, the day of the competition, all of the kids from our school who were competing piled into different cars with different moms and went to some other school (I can’t remember where) to take our tests. Standardized test environment with proctors and scantron! I was in heaven! I finished in no time, checked and rechecked and flipped my booklet over to indicate I was done. There were a few things that I wasn’t sure of and so I didn’t feel as confident as I did before the test. But I knew a lot of the answers. After the allotted time was up and the proctors collected the tests, we all went to the gym and sat in the bleachers to await the results. I can’t remember how many categories there were. I know I just zoned out for awhile because my category was going to be near the end. A few people from our school were getting honorable mention and so our mood was kind of low. Not that honorable mention is bad, but we wanted to win. I kept asking the crush-guy how he thought he did. He would still talk to me even though I really humiliated him. For a 13 year-old, rejection is a pretty big deal. Anyway, we would compare answers that we could remember and second-guess what we had turned in.

Finally, they got to our category. They go backwards from honorable mention to first place to build up the drama. Crush-guy got honorable mention! Crap! That means I’m next! But…they didn’t call my name. Third place. Not me. Second place. No. So, I’m thinking that they lost my scantron, or forgot to call out my name during the honorable mentions. Then, they called my name – first place! I won! I beat crush-guy and every other 8th grader in the competition! I went to the middle of the gym to accept my wood and bronze plaque, pose for pictures and then made my way back to the bleachers. It was a very proud moment for me and I remember that the principal (my old 7th grade teacher/principal/busted porn downloader) was so happy for me. It was really nice.

When I think of that memory it’s kind of hard for me to imagine him in a dark room, downloading hardcore child porn. Can’t argue the facts, though.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home