WHY I HATED THE 6TH GRADE

Minding My Vocabulary


I had Ms Stout for my 6th grade English class. She was a woman who appeared 10 years older than her stated age but dressed 10 years younger. She annoyed me with her loud, tight clothing thrown together with gaudy jewelry. I'm not sure if she annoyed me more before or after she didn't back me up after a certain incident in class.

Again, Corey Christiansen, our gifted and talented groups' class clown was involved. For that day's exercise in English we had to write a sentence, and in it use a good vocabulary word so that is could be dissected grammatically. The previous week I came across this word in the vocabulary section of my Reading class textbook: ejaculate: to exclaim (this was the book's definition, and its ONLY definition).

In keeping with directions, I decided to use my newly learned word in a sentence:
"I ate the whole thing!"ejaculated Andrew.

Once we wrote our sentence, we had to pass it to the student behind us for dissection. I passed my paper to Corey and in seconds he was snickering and laughing to himself.

"What are you laughing at?!!" I asked in my don't mess with me cuz I know I'm smarter than you attitude.

"Do you know what this word means?" He laughed pointing to IT. I explained that of course I did and told him. He laughed even harder and then had the audacity to show Ms Stout. After I vehemently told her what I thought it meant she made me look it up in the dictionary (a real one). I'm not sure I even understood its explanation, but I knew it was something sexual and was extremely embarrassed and mad.

It was me against them now. Was it my fault that this word had a less popular meaning and they were too perverted to only know its infamous one?

(yeah, I know you didn't know it either)