School Experience

Chapter 3

When I was in the fifth grade, my friend and I thought it would be cool to take a permanent marker and write on our chairs.  It was silly to do, I know, but we had a good laugh about it until we got caught!  I remember the teacher asking us if we had done this to the chairs and we both replied with a resounding “no”.  What we didn’t realize is that the teacher had watched us create our graffiti on the chairs and to make matters worse it was our own chairs that we marred.   Eventually, we had to fess up and boy did we pay the price.  Our parents were called into the principal’s office and we each had to confess what we had done and then use our own money to buy the sandpaper and use this to remove the graffiti from the wood.  When I read Audre Lorde’s From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, I came across the part where Sister Mary of PH says to Audre “Our guardian angels weep when we don’t tell the truth” (Lorde, 2010) and it reminded me of this time in my life when I chose to lie instead of telling the truth.

Lorde, A. (2010). From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. In M. Krasny, & M. Sokolik, Sound Ideas (p. 232). New York: McGraw-Hill.