As I looked around the class, I saw that there were people snickering. It has been a few minutes since the teacher asked us a question, and no one has answered it yet. The teacher then said, “It’s so obvious! It’s right in front of you!” I then thought to myself, “Well if no one is going to say it, I might as well go ahead and do it,” since I thought everybody was thinking the same thing. I raised my hand, and the teacher called on me. I looked at him straight in the face, our eyes locked in a serious gaze, and then came some of the very first words that I have ever said in this class: “A penis?” Just like that, the tension in the classroom rushed out as if there was a dam blocking the exit, and it decided to collapse at this exact moment. Everybody was laughing, and that was when it occurred to me that I might have come off a bit too strong for first impressions.
To some of the people in that class, I was known as a friend that they often saw around school. To others, however, I was probably a perverted, teenager that always had a sexual reference to anything that was said or that they saw. My teacher even looked at with a strange “what is this kid thinking?” look. It’s nice to see that I made the teacher laugh, but maybe talking about penises on our first few days of school was maybe a little too intense for an English class. To defend whatever was left of my dignity, I said: “Well everybody was thinking about it, too! I mean someone had to say it!” That was when another reality hit me: Nobody was probably thinking that. I mean if you think about it, “A Red Herring” talks about a little girl climbing a tree, but relating the tree to a penis is probably not something everybody thinks about on a daily basis. I was so sure about the answer, though! The conditions were perfectly fulfilled; there were kids snickering to themselves; the teacher, himself, was sort of laughing about it, suggesting in a tone that there was something obvious that we didn’t want to say; and the text said something about a little girl and a tree, so it got me thinking, “Hey, why not a penis?”
It was from then on that whenever there was a sexual reference in the class, my teacher would call on me and ask about “What this phrase would mean” or “What the hidden meaning behind this sentence” was. He would even give me a side glance whenever the text actually had something sexual in it. At first it was a subtle thing, and I didn’t notice that he was calling on me for that reason. As the days passed, however, I realized that he was doing it on purpose. That led to this “special,” but awkward, bond that my English teacher and I have. I do enjoy it thoroughly, though. Ever since then, I have become bolder and more comfortable in that class. I even wrote a preach about another student that basically talked trash about him, but I knew the teacher wouldn’t mind. All this was possible because it all started with: “A penis?”