We have all been in a situation that has caused our faces to turn bright, tomato, red. We have all been the center of attention, at least once, for all the wrong reasons. We have all had embarrassing stories and believe it or not, so have our teachers.
While it is hard to imagine our teachers being mischievous like we are now, it’s true! They’ve been there before, they were once our age and even they have been in embarrassing situations.
Jonathan Adams, an English teacher here at Placer, claims he’s had more than a few embarrassing moments but one that will forever be burned into his mind was the time he fell asleep in class. “It was my senior year and I had never fallen asleep in a class before. We had a teacher who, seemed, to have just given up on our class. In fact, one day a girl brought a pet mouse to the class and he threw it out the window! I mean, this guy was just asking to get fired! Anyway, it was a geometry class and I was completely zonked from staying up the night before and I swear, I only slept for about eight or ten minutes when I felt something touch my hand. It woke me up and then I realized…I had drool spilling off my desk. I lifted my head and had a beard of acne and drool. The drool pooled on top of my desk. Of course, I had to go to the bathroom and clean up. When I returned to the class there were kids pointing to my mess of a desk that still had drool hanging off of it…it was a nightmare.”
Speaking of math classes, our teachers in the math department have been through some pretty face-reddening stuff too. Rick Foley, one of our mathematics teachers, as well as football coach, was caught smooching his girlfriend in the hallway! “We had both come up with this clever plan to get out of class at the same time and meet up. It was the first time we had attempted to do something like that and our principle, who was a mean, mean woman just for the sake of being mean, caught us and gave us both Saturday school. The funny thing about that though, was that we got the same day to work and clean up the campus so we just got to spend more time together.”
Even our principle, Peter Efstathiu, has been embarrassed. “I was in my journalism class and I thought I was alone, so when this Van Halen song came on, I lip synced the whole thing and moved around as if no one was watching, and when I came out of the room the class applauded me! I was so embarrassed but I played it cool and took a bow.”
Annette Udall, in the English department, had her most embarrassing moment her freshman year of high school. “I had lost several retainers before and I knew that I just could not lose another one or my parents would kill me. It was during lunch when I realized I had accidently thrown my retainer into the trash can! I had to go digging through all the trash, as everyone around me stopped and stared.”
Brittany Haydon, English teacher, was a sophomore when her embarrassing moment occurred. “It was a really icy day, the ground had wet patches everywhere and I was walking with this cute boy that I really liked. We were walking down the library steps near the auditorium when I just ate it. Like full on, feet-up, ate it. It wasn’t even a fall I could just get up, recover from, and pretend didn’t happen; I was down and there was nothing I could do with it. When I did get up, though, everyone clapped. It was so humiliating.”
So when your embarrassing moment comes, know this: it happens to everyone! It happened to our teachers and it will happen to us. It is completely normal and we have all been there. When you find yourself walking out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe, or tripping up the stairs in front of a crowd of people, just play it cool and laugh it off. Our high school memories are what we make them and if we linger on the bad moments too long, we’ll start to overlook all the great ones.