Taking Chances by GJ

1972 or so. There was bad news from Viet Nam. Nixon was in trouble. People called hippies were in the news a lot. The scene: a lecture hall in a large, affluent, suburban high school. About 120 juniors packed into the room and I'm talking to them about a piece of American literature.

Fortunately, there are three other teachers, all men, also in attendance, acting as monitors.

Normally, when one of the four of us was "holding court," so to speak, we'd have pretty good notes to refer to in such a setting. On this occasion, I was more or less "winging it" with only the text in my hands. The story was very familiar to me, and I preferred working extemporaneously on such material. I tried hard, all my teaching life to sound as "fresh" as possible. The worst word I could hear was "boring."

My purpose was to set the scene of the story. I'm not sure, after 36 years, whether we were about to see a film, or I was reviewing the story for a quiz, or "setting them up" for reading the story as an assignment. I'm not certain as to my exact words, but I think it was something like the following: "Our scene is a small town in a western state. The family we are about to meet lives in a neat little bungalow on a quiet street just a few blocks from downtown.

"We would all like to have lived in this tidy little house with its flowers and trees and, of course, we all like a little grass ---" ---ROAR OF LAUGHTER---. First, I'm embarrassed at the outburst and struggling to recognize what I had said to provoke the explosion. I looked around at my three colleagues, and they are laughing every bit as hard as the kids! The noise went on for a long time and in the middle, it hit me. GRASS. It has two meanings, dummy! The current meaning was marijuana, of course! I should have said lawn, of course. Now, all I could do was laugh WITH everybody. What else could I do? (My colleagues swore that I turned red at first.) It would be neither the first nor last "joke on me," but it was a dandy while it lasted.

Off and on, for 30 years of HS teaching, I tried to encourage laughter in the classroom. Occasionally, I succeeded. Those were the moments I cherish.