Daily Prompt – Howl At The Moon

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” — Allen Ginsberg

Do you follow Ginsberg’s advice — in your writing and/or in your everyday life?

My ‘madness’, if that’s what we’re referring to it as, is what makes me uniquely me.

Apr 15: Don’t Blow Your Cover

Did you ever tell a lie you had to keep repeating in order to not blow your cover?

I remember that when I was in high school, I once got peer-pressured into lying to my Maths teacher to get out of a double-period of maths, to go and work on a drama assessment. Now, the way that our school timetable operated, meant that my senior Drama class was run off-line so rather than having allocated school hours to complete classes, they had to run classes both after school, and during lunch times.

So, this in-turn led to a bit of a problem when we had to work in groups for assessments. Our teachers were made aware of the situation, and were told in advance that at certain times we were to be allowed time off from classes to go and work on our assessments, only if we were up to date with our in-class work and had no outstanding homework / assessments for that particular subject.

Now, I hated Maths, and was regularly having arguments with him about the relevance of whatever we were learning *cough cough trigonometry cough cough Pythagoras cough cough cough*. Yes, yes, I was that kid. The one arguing with the teachers over the relevance of learning pointless information. Looking back, I can just imagine how much they must have hated me. Anyway, that’s besides the point. Where was I…??

Right, so, this one day I told my maths teacher that I wasn’t going to be in class as I was going to work on my drama assessment. I asked for the class handouts, and would hand them in during the next lesson. I didn’t give him a chance to question me, as I took off almost immediately. I did actually meet up with my drama classmates, and we did work on our assessment, but it certainly didn’t take anywhere near as long as initially anticipated.

It was at this point we realised that we now had an easy way to get out of Maths, and nobody would question it.

So every couple of weeks, there would be an upcoming Maths double-period that we just didn’t feel like going to… so instead during recess we all got together and agreed to get out of Maths to work on our ‘drama assessment’ and then meet up behind the Food Tech rooms, and walk off to our friends place down the street, or we’d go for a drive to the local park and just kick back for an hour or so and enjoy a daily break.

Surprisingly, this went on for quite some time… I actually think we managed to get away with it almost three or four times per month, for about 3 months. We thought we had everybody fooled. We were loving it.

One day we all turned up for a lunchtime Drama class, and the class went as per normal. Our teacher got us all to sit down after our warmup theatre-sports game, and everybody was in a good mood and she stood up and addressed the class “So, how’s everybody’s Maths classes going?”

OH. FUCK.

…BUSTED!!

Everybody kinda glanced at each other feeling quite nervous about what was coming.

“It would seem that I’ve been quite the task master, giving everybody so many group assessments to work on…”

…UH OH!!

“…because apparently, all of you have been skipping out on your Maths classes together to work on a string of group assessments. Funny thing is though, I haven’t actually set you any group assessments. So imagine my surprise when I get called in by the PRINCIPAL and questioned about it!!!”

…FUCK. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!!!

“But because I am without a doubt the most amazing teacher you ratbags will ever have, instead of dobbing you all in and giving you two weeks of after-school detention, I drew upon my amazing acting skills, and pretended that I knew exactly what he was talking about, and didn’t realise that it would require so much extra work from you all. So I think that you can all just line up and let me bend over so you can all KISS. MY. ARSE. for saving yours!!”

Everybody in the class erupted into laughter, including the teacher… but then she quickly followed up with giving us all lunchtime detention for a week for being a bunch of shits. But she did specify that our detention was going to be spent playing theatre-sports and playing dress-ups, so really, it wasn’t actually a detention at all.