True Confessions: I Am A First Grade Flunky

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I listen to a local talk radio station every morning when I get up, and this morning, the call in question was: What test have you failed that you are embarrassed to admit?

As I lay in bed, trying to shake the sleepy seeds from my eyes, I pondered the question. Most people commented about driver’s tests they failed repeatedly, etc. And although I did “fail” my driver’s license test when I moved to SC (I actually was just convicted of driving while Yankee) - I didn’t feel particularly embarrassed about it.

Then it hit me. I flunked a first grade math test.

When I was in first grade, my dad got a promotion at work. However, as is often the case in sales, when he got promoted, he got a new territory and had to relocate. So just a few months in to my first grade year, I transferred to a new school.

I could claim this was a very traumatic experience, but the truth is, it really wasn’t. I was a pretty happy-go-lucky, go-with-the-flow type of kid, and I made friends fairly easily. The problem was, along with transferring schools, I transferred teaching methods. And let me tell you that really messed me up.

See, at my old school, we had just finished learning that C+A+T=CAT and D+O+G=DOG. So naturally, when my first math sheet was placed in front of me and it said 2+1, I proudly knew the correct answer was 21. And 1+2=12. Quite frankly, I found the whole exercise to be quite a piece of cake and finished early. So early, that I got time to look at the pretty objects above each problem and color on them. Little did I understand that I wasn’t supposed to color them, I was supposed to count them.

Of course, when the teacher started asking for people to give their answers out loud, I realized my mistake. And I tried to correct it, but y’know, crayon doesn’t erase that well. Embarrassed, I tried to hide my paper until after the lesson, so I could ask the teacher for a do over. But the teacher’s aide saw my paper, and immediately reported it to the teacher. I started to tear up, but the teacher patted my head and said it would be okay.

Soon, I found myself in the back of the class getting to draw circlers around bicycles and butterflies while the rest of the first grade class got to study things like trigonometry and how to tie your shoe. It was fun in the back of the class, the teacher wore silly hats and didn’t ask much from us, just to draw quietly while her morning headache wore off.

I didn’t understand what “remedial” meant. I didn’t know I was in the “special needs” class - I just knew I got to goof off while the rest of the class did work. And that was fine with me. Here’s the problem, though. Once you are in one of those classes, they never. let. you. out. I was like an innocent person trapped in jail. The more I said I wasn’t guilty, the less they believed me. In fact it was worse. The more I said I understood the math lessons now and that I was smart, the more they would say, “Of course you are smart, dear. In a very, very special way.”

One day, while riding in the car with my mom, I mentioned to her that I didn’t study with the rest of the class, but got to draw pictures in the back. She about flipped her lid, and she marched in to the teacher’s office the next day and got the whole thing straightened out. In fact, I suddenly went from being in the back of the class coloring, to the front of the class doing the special accelerated (SRA) reading and math workbooks (which I loved, and was so sad about when I finished them all and they wouldn’t let me do anymore).

Anyway, I suppose it’s not really that embarrassing either - cause it cracks me up writing this. But anyway, there you have it. I was a First Grade Flunky.

What similar childhood funny stories do you have to share? What tests have you failed (as a child or an adult) that you don’t usually admit?

2

When they lined us all up to take our hearing tests in second grade, they gave us all instructions at the same time. I, (as usual), did not pay any attention to the instructions. No problem, I thought, all I have to do is watch the people in line in front of me. With a last name at the end of the alphabet, I was always last to do these sorts of things. So I watched as everyone else got the enormous ear muffs put on and raised their various hands several times. This being several years before the introduction of the walkman, I did not know that sounds were supposed to come out of the ear muffs, nor did I know that my classmates were raising their hands in response to hearing very faint tones in one ear or the other. To me it looked like random hand waiving. So when I got to the chair and put on the ear muffs, I raised my hands at random a few times and went on my merry way. A couple of nights later, I noticed my parents acting strangely at the dinner table. They were speaking very slowly and loudly, asking if I could hear them. This was of course in response to the letter the school had sent home saying I was deaf.

3

Classic!!

4

My mom flunked kindergarten :stuck_out_tongue: I don’t have any details. The first E I got was 6th grade math. I had attendance issues, and math is hard to keep up with when you’re not there.

Just re-read the OP. An embarrassing test moment I had was in my broadcast electronics class. On the test we had to draw a push-pull circuit. I couldn’t remember so I tried to doodle it out of my subconscious with some stick figures. My instructor showed it to the class. It was funny but I also blushed really really bad so then he felt bad. Ay, what a test.

5

The first test I can remember flunking (which isn’t to say that there weren’t any flunked before that - I just don’t remember them) was a ten point quiz in Pennsylvania history wherein we were required to list every single county in the state. There were two quizzes, one with the first half of the counties, alphabetically, and a second quiz with the rest of them.
I decided this was stupid. (I still think it’s stupid.)
I failed the first quiz, and failed the second one even more.
I still got an A in the class. It was a lightbulb moment for me, figuring out I could blow off some things and still get the desired grade.

In college I muffed a chemistry lab assignment. The directions simply did not make sense to me, so I did whatever I could to generate some numbers for the lab report. Apparently these were the wrong numbers. I got a 5 out of 10 on the report (half credit for at least performing the experiment). This wouldn’t have been so bad, but the prof also helpfully noted in red ink, “This is the lowest possible score you could receive on this assignment.”
Gee, thanks.

6

The only class that I failed was my high school drafting class. The first chapter was a bunch of lettering. The perfectionist that I was at the time, I wasn’t able to complete the assignments to my own satisfaction, so I never turned them in and I never got to the later assignments.

7

Not precisely what the OP asked for, but: I flunked out of college after my sophomore year. I had to sit out a semester, go through the entire application process if I wanted to get back in, and include an essay detailing how I had learned from my mistakes and what I would do differently to succeed next time. I did all that, for some reason (there was nothing special about the school, except that it was well-regarded and expensive; there were dozens of other schools that would have been a much better fit for me, almost all of them closer to home to boot). They readmitted me, for some reason. And then I promptly flunked out again at the end of the next semester.

…They didn’t let me back in after that.

8

The only exam I failed was a psychology paper aged 16. I failed along with the majority of the class. The teacher cried. We all felt kind of bad for her. She was a good teacher, but easily distracted if we didn’t feel like doing anything that lesson.

9

I didn’t flunk out of anything, but I was expelled from kindergarten. Expelled, as in my parents received a letter saying, “We can’t have your child in our school any more, you’ll be getting a check for the unused tuition.”

10

I cannot write in cursive.

Can’t do it!
‘hangs head in shame’

11

I wish I could say I failed this test way back in grade school but this was in college.
Stayed up a good part of the night studying for a final exam that was an architectural history multiple choice test. Names, dates, styles, locations.
Got to the lecture hall and a bunch of students were outside of it looking at postings on the wall. What are they checking out… grades!?
The final exam had been the previous day and I had missed it. Automatic F on the final.

12

I failed handwriting, but I am not embarrassed about that. It was stupid anyway. I can write legibly now if I want to, and if I don’t there is this big computer thingy I can use.

It’s not quite what the OP is looking for but the one I am most embarrassed about, if not the driver’s test which I failed the first time (complicated), would be the stupid “lice test”. Went to India for two months in the summer. Came back to school. Back then they tested the kids’ heads for lice. Yup, I had little nits. Sent home, and stayed home while my mom washed my head with that stupid shampoo and combed it, painfully (I have those curls that bounce back to your head when you pull them) until they were all out.

I don’t think any of the other students knew, but it was still embarrassing. Eew.

13

I swear I did the EXACT same thing. I had to go for additional testing and my mother always believed the original tester was an idiot.

14

I was playing with some kids in my grammy’s neighborhood and when Grammy found out, she pulled me inside and washed my hair in kerosene because evidently she thought they might have lice. I remember her making me sit on her 60s vinyl kitchen chair, the kerosene dripping down the garbage bag she was using as my bib. My hair didn’t smell/look right for days after that.

15

I’ll bite.

What did you do to get expelled from kindergarten?

16

My understanding is that I was considered “out of control.” It was a religious school, but teaching a different flavor of religion than we practiced at home. So the powers-that-be may have had a notion of “good” behavior that was at odds with my family’s notion of “good” behavior.

I don’t remember being in any particular trouble; I think mainly the teachers were unhappy that I didn’t pay attention and preferred playing to sitting at a desk. I remember being alternately bored stiff and bewildered because I couldn’t follow the lessons. Some time after I was moved to public school, my parents discovered that I had a major hearing deficit, which probably hadn’t helped matters in my old school.

Another story of abject grade-school failure:

I failed the unit on rounding in fourth-grade math. I missed the part where the teacher told us that to round a number with N digits after the decimal to X decimal places, you should go out to the (X+1)th decimal place, check its value, and proceed accordingly. I thought you were supposed to go out to the Nth place, check its value, round up (or not) the (N-1)th place, then take the new value of the (N-1)th place and use it to round the (N-2)th place, and so on.

So given a problem like “Round 1.2468 to 1 decimal place,” I rounded 1.2468 up to 1.247, then to 1.25, and finally to 1.3 . Bleh.

17

When I took a hearing test for employment fifteen years ago the company had a big testing booth with several seats in it, and you faced a large window. The person administering the test sat outside the window for whatever reason. The nurse doing the rest of the physical passed me off to a young attractive female intern or coop or some such. She takes me into the testing booth, hands me the headset and a hand held button. Press the button, blah blah blah. She goes back out and sits at her station there and presses some buttons.

Nothing. She’s goes from being bored to watching me intently, and still nothing. She presses some more buttons and looks at me expectantly. Nothing. I just shrug and give her my “Nope nothing” look. She calls the nurse over and they have a conversation. The nurse takes over and repeats the process, complete with her expectant look and my Nope response. She fiddles and looks at me. Nope. Fiddles some more. Nope. The talk some more. The nurse does something else and watches me closely while she’s pressing a button. I can just barely hear something. I hold up the button and give it A click while indicating “a tiny bit” with my other hand. The nurse turns things off then walks into the booth. She gestures for me to give her the headset. She looks at it then sets it down in the seat beside me and hands me the set that had been there and says “I knew you couldn’t be THAT deaf”. She goes out and has a one word exchange with the young girl and walks off. The girl, blushing now, speaks into her microphone and says “Sorry about that, we’ll start now”

They had to turn the volume up so loud that I could hear it from the other set of headphones.

Oh wait. I just thought of something else! Work related also. About five years I ad to be fitted for a respirator. This involved putting the mask on and being hooked up to a machine that measured the seal while you did a range of things. Like “Bend down, shake your head from side to side” Each of these things were for a period of time, and the tester was prompted by a screen on the testing equipment. For instance “Look up and then down for thirty seconds, now turn you head to the right and hold it there for thirty seconds”. When the tester got to “Make a angry face for thirty seconds” I couldn’t stop laughing, so yeah I had to do that one over.

18

Me too, but I just stopped going because I couldn’t really afford it and there were some issues at home. I could have dropped all classes, but I just decided to fail them all instead.

19

My older sister (older sisters can be evil to younger brothers) claims that I failed an art assignment in the first grade. Allegedly, the teachers had read a story about 3 squirrels and the assignment was to draw a picture about the 3 squirrels. I drew one squirrel and a tree. The teacher asked why I didn’t draw the other two squirrels and I responded that they were hiding in the tree.

20

In grade 5 I had a project to do. I had to pick any topic I wanted, and as a homework assignment, complete a fairly simple 3 or 4 page outline. I never got passed the first introductory paragraph. Now this would have been in maybe 1972 or 1973 and no one got homework back in those days in elementary school! Are you kidding me? Interfere with playtime?

Anyway I remember thinking that I’d finish it the last night, or weekend or something, but then my parents had plans for us and I never told them about my homework assignment being due the following day. That morning I wrote a very apologetic note in my project to the teacher explaining that I ran out of time and could not hand in a final project. It must have left some scars in my brain because I still remember the embarrassment to this day. The project topic I picked was electricity.

What made matters worse was that I hid it in the garage and one of my older brothers friends found it and read it, along with the note to the teacher, and then teased me about it.

I failed a grade 10 English test on the Nevil Shute novel “No Highway In The Sky” too. I figured I could read the odd page here and there, and then the last chapter and pull off a decent grade. I figured I was smarter than the teacher; I was wrong. Grade 10 English is the only final exam I had to write in all of high school.

I must have failed a few tests in college too, but since they were actually freakin’ challenging, in most cases, I’m not as emotionally scarred by them!