Mom, the other flour teased my flour at school today!

[laceblade]

Throughout my pre-collegiate years of education, I often found various classroom situations to be quite ridiculous. So many assignments that we are given in the first 12 years of our lives are both useless and ridiculous. I feel that enough time has passed for me to talk about elementary and middle school without risking possible repercussions (high school is probably something I won't touch on for a while.).

But anyway, now with years between myself and some of these incidents, I am supposedly wiser, and am able to confirm that yes - those incidents were as heinous as I thought they were at the time.

So we will begin with one that takes place in 7th grade. In 7th grade, all students in my middle school had to take a Family and Consumer Education class. We learned about nutrition, cooking, domestic abuse, and sex (vaguely), among other things.

For this class, one assignment was that of giving birth to a flour baby. Each student was to carry around a 5-lb sack of flour for a week (I think?!). Carrying this sack of flour was supposed to make us think twice about having sex, because it was irritating and cumbersome, as were babies. At the end of the week, our teacher told us she would check our flour babies for "abuse" - make sure there were no torn edges or significant dents. I swaddled my flour baby in an old doll blanket and hoped for the best, although I found the situation quite amusing because my sister was preparing to give birth to her first child, and I knew that having a baby was much more involved than toting a bag of flour.

I haven't even gotten to the ridiculous part yet.

Our teacher informed us that, as these flour babies represented real children, we should be free to name them and love them. When I got home from school that day, I pulled down a book of saints off of the shelf, and began leafing through it. I was obsessed with Redwall and Dragonlance novels at the time, and I wanted my flour baby (a boy; sexes were assigned by the teacher) to have a noble name. I found Tarcisius, a boy from the 3rd century who died protecting the Eucharist from an angry mob. I thought that Tarcisius sounded pretty cool, too.

The next, we had to tell our teacher what the names of our flour babies were.
TEACHER: Jackie, what did you name your flour baby?
ME: Tarcisius.
(Some people laugh.)
TEACHER:....You can't name your flour baby that.
ME (indignant): Why not? You said we could name them whatever we wanted to.
TEACHER: ......If you name your baby that, then all of the other flour babies will make fun of it.
ME: ..... (taking a minute for the absurdity of that statement to sink in.) Maybe the other flour babies can get over it!
TEACHER: You will have to come up with a nickname for your flour baby.
ME: (hostile glaring)

I think this is one of those times in which I felt severely wronged, went home and told my mom, and she was all, "Oh for God's sakes, Jacqueline, who cares?!"

I CARED, and I still do today! It was a pretty stupid conversation. Especially looking at celebrities, naming their children after Dragon Tales characters, fruit, or that one guy from My Name is Earl, who named his kid "Pilot Instructor." TARCISIUS WAS A BAD-ASS NAME.

I continued my defiance when I became confirmed in the Catholic church, choosing not a saint's name for myself, but "Aila," a name that means "light-bearer" in Finnish.

Comments

[were-duck.livejournal.com]

I'm glad the other flour babies didn't make fun of your flour baby for his unusual name. It just shows that the younger generations are a little more accepting than the stodgy old folks.

[tigrin.livejournal.com]

Tch! How rude of your teacher. >\ I'm glad I didn't have to do that. I actually never had any sort of domestic classes in school. It always seemed like it would be more practical to take than Calculus or something.

[jume.livejournal.com]

sounds like your average ignorant home ec teacher! or most vocational studies teachers that I've known x.x;

[sasha-feather.livejournal.com]

That is an awesome story. Thank you for sharing it!

[sasha-feather.livejournal.com]

P.S. I like this story because it's not just about the ridiculousness of junior high (which is universal), it's also raging against the "man" and rebelling against society's expectations. Hee!

[frecklemehappy.livejournal.com]

HA. Badass.

Is this the same Home Ec teacher that we all had? Because if so, I have an interesting story, as well.

(Incidentally, I named my flour baby Sakura, because I was obsessed with anime at the time. So woohoo for original names!)

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

No kidding! Just her "Because the other flour babies will make fun of it" was so mind-boggling to me, and still is. THEY ARE BAGS OF FLOUR. WTF.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Yeah, our school mandated it, and then we had another one in high school that had a more extended sex-ed part (although it was pretty much too late, as one girl in my class already had a 18-month-old child). As awkward as it was sometimes, I guess that I approve of stuff like that being mandated.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Thank you! You are welcome!

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. OMG, I wish that I had known about anime in middle school. That would have been awesome.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Yeah, really, where do these people come from??

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

And then there are actual people named stuff like China Miéville who don't enjoy their werid names when they're kids but end up liking them when they grow up.

And no, I don't want to know what shape your flour baby is in now. All full of meal worms and bad smells, no doubt, from neglect.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Bwahaha, no, I think my mom made cookies out of him. Cannibalism FTW!

I do, however, still have a peanut that we referred to as a "manatee." We kept our manatees for two weeks, learning every curve and crack in the peanut. Then, the peanut was mixed in with hundreds of other peanuts, and we had to pick ours out of the mix.

That was also in 7th grade....maybe I should throw that away!