Spelling Bee Given by Illiterate Screwel Employee

It was lunch period at Von Toilet Bowl Tommy’s nickname for his favorite school in the seventh grade. A small group of thugs encircled him on the playground. One of the bullies shoved him and yelled, “Wanna fight $#!+head?”

Tommy’s backpack fell off his shoulder from the push. His marine father would not have taken this treatment from anyone. An adult playground monitor stood nearby, vigilantly monitoring, but doing nothing to help.

“You’re going to die,” the bully shouted as he shoved again. “I’ll shove that violin you play up your @$!”

The other thugs chuckled at Tommy’s torment.

Tommy punched the bully in the left eye hard enough to knock him to the ground.

The monitor sprang to the rescue, while calling bravely on his walkie-talkie for backup. He and his brave backup dragged Tommy and the bully to the Dean’s office.

Tommy had thought his fighting days were over after moving to Von Toilet Bowl Junior High from the sixth grade center in the bad neighborhood the year before.

Not so.

Tommy sat in the dean’s reception area facing a wall that was one big window looking out into the hall. The bully stood in the hall taunting him with his middle finger and making evil faces. Why was Tommy in the dean’s office and the troublemaker apparently free out in the hall? The injustice made Tommy tear up.

The secretary noticed Tommy’s tears, “Need a hanky honey?”

“Why is he free out there while I’m still in here?” asked Tommy, sounding somewhat meeker than he had intended.

“Oh, he’s not out there. He’s in the other room.”

“I saw him through the glass out there. He just flipped me off and threatened me. I could read his lips.”

The secretary rolled her eyes and dialed Tommy’s parents for the inevitable meeting – the meeting that would precipitate punishment for violating the zero-tolerance fighting rule.

Tommy would later learn that the bully had an identical twin, which explained why the bully in the window did not have a black eye. For the following two weeks, the identical twins were not so identical.

The Dean could have suspended Tommy, as he did with the bully. Instead, he punished Tommy with “in-house” suspension for three days, so Tommy wouldn’t miss school and his grades would not suffer. Tommy spent his suspension in a room with bad kids, isolated from everyone. He even had to eat lunch there.

Tommy’s sense of justice was shattered. He cried in front of his parents and the dean. The school did not care whether he lived or died. Kids could knife him while the monitor watched and did nothing, but the moment he defended himself, he was in trouble.

The Dean seemed genuinely concerned, “May I give your son something to read?”

It was the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It was the Dean’s way to show that he disagreed with the school district’s draconian policy. The poem would comfort Tommy when faced with injustice in the years to come.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

The rest of the year, no bully bothered Tommy. The mark of courage he punched into the bully’s eye lasted long enough to get the point across that Tommy should be left alone.

During in-house suspension, the school hosted a school-wide spelling bee for students in honors English classes. The winners would compete with the winners of other schools in the county, and eventually the State. Tommy knew he was by no means the best speller in the school.

The in-house suspension monitor called him to her desk to administer the test for the spelling bee. None of the other suspended students there were honors students, so only Tommy would take the test. The monitor was to read a word, and then Tommy would write it down correctly. Then the monitor would take Tommy’s list to his teacher.

Frequently, she did not know how to pronounce the word she was to read, and showed the word to Tommy before he wrote it down.

“I not sure how this word sounds. What you think?”

Tommy looked at the word, “Oh, that’s mnemonic (nuh-mon-ik).”

“Ok, what about this word?”

Tommy looked at the list again, glancing up and down it quickly before stating, “Oh, that’s pneumonia (nuh-moan-e-uh).”

After completing the list of twenty words, Tommy went back to his carrel desk and smiled. He could have written them all correctly, but he purposefully misspelled a few. He did not want to be the spelling bee champion of the school only to lose against another school.

In spite of his efforts, it was a three-way tie. The three top scorers went to the principal’s office for another bee to select the final representative. The other two students were eighth-graders, a year older than Tommy. Tommy did not win. He remembers one of the words that the principal told him sounded like “lawn-jer-ay,” a word Tommy had never heard before, spelled l-i-n-g-e-r-i-e. Tommy could not believe it. Later, he found the word in a dictionary and learned it was French for women’s undergarments.

“I thought it was supposed to be an English spelling bee,” he later told his English teacher. She was surprised he had scored so high the first time but came in last the second.

“Besides,” he added, “I don’t know much about women’s underwear!”