A Short Story About Coloring and My Childhood Smart Mouth

My job as an elementary teacher means I probably spend more time coloring than most other adults. I have to make a lot of examples of projects to model student work, I make a lot of posters to post behavioral prompts and background information, and so on. I have an entire desk drawer devoted to markers and pens and dry erase markers and pencils and coloring tools of all variety. It's really somewhat out of control.

I don't mind coloring at all. It's often very calming, and gives me a nice break from having to think about nine different life-or-death school issues at the same time like I usually do. Some projects take longer than others, and when I find myself caught up in one of the longer ones, my mind almost always wanders back to a particular memory:

My history as a rule-following school toady goes all the way back to kindergarten. I loved school, I loved my teacher, I wanted to do well and worked very hard every day I was there, which was every day except the one sick day when I had to stay home. I remember there was only one sick day because it broke my heart that I couldn't be at school and was so excited the following day when I was allowed to go back.

Two years later it wasn't the same story. School was something to survive more than anything else because I had the worst teacher of my entire life. Seriously. She was the embodiment of every bad teacher caricature that has ever been illustrated in any comic strip or middle grade graphic novel. One day we were doing a second grade project that involved drawing and coloring flags from countries all around the world -- I think it had something to do with a school wide play or festival or musical blow-out or something. I was given Switzerland. I though this was great. All I had to do was draw a big plus sign in the middle, leave it alone, and fill the rest of my paper by scribbling my red crayon into oblivion. I didn't have any real attention span to speak of as a child (which is so different now, of course), so I literally scribbled. Everywhere. In all directions. It looked less like a flag and more like a piece of paper that had recently held four pounds of spilled spaghetti.

The teacher was stalking the aisles to evaluate our works in progress with her best impersonation of the animated schoolmaster from Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and when she reached my desk she stopped, stared, clucked accusingly, and sighed angrily.

"Didn't you learn how to color in the same direction like everyone else did in kindergarten??" she barked.

I looked at my paper, which I thought looked fine, and noticed that, yes, my red streaks were all over the place. Not knowing what else to say (and, frankly, a little tired of her at that point in the school year) I looked up and innocently said:

"I guess everyone else learned how to do that on the day I was sick."

And then the look on her face. If she could have legally gotten away with smacking me upside the head....