They couldn’t even get mad…
3 minute read
August 12, 2019, 10:17 AM
After the Journal entry where I spoke about my seventh grade year, which generated a lot of great discussion, mostly on Facebook, I thought I’d share an amusing moment from eighth grade.
Eighth grade was one of my best years in school. I had a great group of teachers, and I had a much easier time with the kids. Sure, some kids were still terrible, but not like seventh grade. I didn’t get in trouble at all in eighth grade, except for one time in the middle of the second semester, when I got written up for something relatively minor, but which was entirely my fault.
To give some background, my mother has always enjoyed sharing information that she learns with me. In the era of the Internet, I typically use it as a starting point to do my own research to turn up more information about it, but back then, with much more limited resources, I typically took it at face value, and was still happy to have learned something new, even if I couldn’t necessarily dive into it more deeply. In this particular instance, what Mom shared was that men who wore boxer shorts had higher sperm counts than men who wore briefs. Okay. So 13-year-old me just learned an interesting new factoid, though I didn’t really understand the whole mechanism behind it (if you want to know, go look it up for yourself). But in any case, I was a tad more knowledgeable than I was five minutes earlier, and that was awesome.
Now, fast forward to one day in school at the beginning of eighth period, just as Spanish class was about to begin. I’m sitting there chatting with another kid, and I brought up what I learned about types of underwear and their relationship to sperm count. The teacher overheard this conversation, and, understandably, she didn’t like it. After all, we’re in school, and here I was talking about wearing boxer shorts for higher sperm counts.
In hindsight, duh: not the best choice of venue for that topic, as interesting and as educational as it might be. It was somewhat related to sex, even though that was not my intent, and as you well know, it is not advised to discuss S-E-X in school (at least where the teacher can hear you). Clearly, I just found it that interesting, and just had to share this fact that I had learned from my parents. I mean, after all, I learned it from my parents, so it couldn’t be that bad, right? In any case, I remember being surprised that the teacher took issue with it, specifically because I had learned it from my parents, and thus had assumed that it was okay. Apparently, I was wrong.
That said, I got written up for that one, but didn’t get sent out for it. I didn’t get an opportunity to hide that little faux pas from anyone, either. I don’t remember how Mom found out, but she found out pretty quickly – the day that it happened, if not mistaken. My homeroom teacher, meanwhile, knew exactly how to handle the aftermath of the incident. He knew me pretty well, and knew how I rolled. We had a discussion about it the next morning, the gist of which was that he knew that I knew better, so don’t do it again. I admitted that it was a lapse in judgment, and yes, I realized that I definitely knew better. Clearly, I had been so excited to share what I learned that it had clouded my judgment.
My parents, meanwhile, were put in a slightly uncomfortable position with that one. They were unhappy that I got myself in trouble for talking about sperm count in school, but I did learn that little factoid directly from Mom, so they knew that they couldn’t get too upset with me about it. I think that they realized that I had learned my lesson about this, so they didn’t pursue it beyond a simple “I’m disappointed” talk.
All in all, that whole incident amuses me, and I laugh every time that I tell someone about it. There are no hard feelings towards anyone for it, because what I did was just dumb – no getting around that.
Categories: Family, Middle school, Stuarts Draft