Miss McMenamin
When I was a boy in Junior High School (grades 7-9), Home Room was the gathering place for the beginning of the school day. My Home Room was presided over by the tyrant known throughout the school as Miss McMenamin. The woman's iron-handed rule included ingenious and unique penalties for offending her. If a student's behavior did not meet Miss McMenamin's rigorous standards, that student was required assume "The Position" in the aisle on hands and knees between the rows of old wooden school desks. Then, facing the tyrant at the front of the room, the offending student was required to bow, first arms in the air overhead, and then forehead to the floor, over and over, while chanting repeatedly, " I'm so sorry Miss McMenamin, I'm so sorry Miss McMenamin, I'm so sorry Miss Mcmenamin." Fifty to one hundred repetitions depending on the infraction.
One member of our class, I'll call him Freddie, was so constituted that the very act of breathing looked, both on his face and in his demeanor, like an act of mischief or insubordination or both. Needless to say, Freddie spent just about every waking hour in Home Room on the floor doing penance before Miss McMenamin. I am told, that if this were to occur in school now, the student would have to be wearing a helmet, knee pads, special gloves, and even then the lawsuit would be gargantuan.
One member of our class, I'll call him Freddie, was so constituted that the very act of breathing looked, both on his face and in his demeanor, like an act of mischief or insubordination or both. Needless to say, Freddie spent just about every waking hour in Home Room on the floor doing penance before Miss McMenamin. I am told, that if this were to occur in school now, the student would have to be wearing a helmet, knee pads, special gloves, and even then the lawsuit would be gargantuan.
Freddie, to give him credit, was a kind of "canary in the coal mine" when it came to responses and reactions to the idiosyncrasies of our teachers. Naturally he rubbed Mis McMenamin the wrong way, but his reaction to Miss McMenamin was topped by the adventure of the Eighth grade substitute we were blessed with one wintry day.
It must be noted here that the schoolrooms at our Junior High school in Southwest Philadelphia were heated from a boiler in the basement, tended by Mr House, our cranky custodian who inhabited the subterranean levels of the school building The classrooms were connected to the basement boiler by wide mouthed ducts that looked like the giant funnels on a steam ship. These openings were located about seven feet up one of the walls in each classroom.
On that fine winter day our class had as a substitute teacher a woman whose physical presence was so breathtaking that it sent adolescent boys into hormone induced shock. Her technique of controlling the class was non-existent. After the usual introductions, she began to move about the outside perimeter of the classroom at a near run while verbally tossing instructions into the midst of the class, a class that had become over stimulated and out of control. It had quickly gone completely berserk!
The acme of the noise, the wrestling, and general activity was reached when Freddie, in a fit of uncontrolled stimulation, managed to wrench a sneaker from a classmate's foot and launched it in a perfect arc into the heating funnel seven feet up the wall. This was truly a remarkable shot from the center of the room. However, it went almost completely unnoticed due to the melee.
Somehow we were all eventually saved by the bell, and we wandered dazed out into the hallway seeking recovery and redemption.
HOW SORRY, young Danny Boy???? I read blogs too, yuh know!!!!!
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