Chocolate cakes, backwards pants and guinea pigs, oh my! I recently set out to interview the student body and the staff of Hawthorne High School to find out what embarrassing and humiliating stories they had had or witnessed throughout the halls of HHS. Some of the interviewees were hesitant to talk, some shied away from the humiliation ,and some laughed with me once they told me their stories.
Some of the interviewees, like Scott Crimmel, science teacher at HHS, decided to take the spotlight off of himself and tell me an embarrassing story of one of his students. Crimmel recalled an incident when Billy Brown, a senior and the editor-in-chief of The Clarion, “sat down at a lab table, and the chair completely shattered. Needless to say, he was a tad embarrassed amidst the class laughter. I’m sure he can embellish the story for you, since he has no shame.” When I approached Brown with the story, he chuckled and walked back to his seat without a comment.
Jake Grootenboer, a sophomore at HHS, had the same idea as Crimmel. Instead of sharing a story about himself, he volunteered an embarrassing story about one of his close friends, sophomore Jesse Dorfman. As it turns out, one morning in fifth grade, Dorfman woke up tired and grabbed the first pair of sweatpants he could get his hands on. They just so happened to be his sister’s. “They were plain black sweatpants!” Dorfman claimed. I did not attend Roosevelt Elementary School during fifth grade, but I would choose seeing Dorfman in girl’s sweatpants over returning to my homeland without a second thought. My fellow sophomore was hesitant when I asked his permission to publish this story, and I have a feeling he might be regretting his decision of letting me reveal his secret to the world.
Unlike Crimmel and Grootenboer, Sean Van Winkle, communication teacher at HHS, willingly gave himself up. After this article, there will never come a day when I walk through the junior hallway and not chuckle as I pass his classroom. To set the scene, imagine a time when there were no Promethean Boards or flat screen TVs, and Van Winkle was teaching English. Van Winkle told me that on one particular day, he decided to show his students The Lord of the Flies, and, Van Winkle says, “I grabbed the VHS movie and put it into the front of the TV. The TV moved backward, then forward and proceeded to fall from the stand. It hit the ground and exploded….right on my leg. I remember Coach Passero came running into the classroom, and shouted, ‘Oh Man,’ and removed the TV from my leg with what appeared to be his pinky (he’s a really strong guy).” I am sure the reader can almost hear my laughter as I read Van Winkle’s truly embarrassing story. “First year teaching, first exploding TV….” he added.
When I told Amanda Putz, a senior at HHS, about the topic of my story she also did not waste time in telling me about one of her own little embarrassing incidents. During what appeared to be an ordinary day of her sophomore year, Putz was making up a geometry quiz in Amy Tanis’s class. She was sitting next to an open window, stuck on a particularly intricate problem, when all of sudden a bee flew into the classroom and sat on her hand. The little creature, or a beast in Putz’s eyes, did not do any harm to the now senior, but in spite of this Putz started full-on crying. Imagine a classmate just randomly start crying in the middle of test! She begged me not to put the story in The Clarion, but once it was out of her mouth there was no going back – she eventually relented.
Some of these stories were also quite personal for me. For example, my first day of eighth grade was a blur, but I do remember being put into Mariana Da Silva’s ESL class for two weeks. Turns out the teacher had language problems of her own when she was young. She stated, “I have a funny story that I always share with my ESL students of when I first came to the United States at the age of 10 not knowing how to speak English. It was a little hard to adjust to the culture and language, but soon enough I was making friends and learning the English language. One day in class, I got comfortable enough to ask my teacher for a ‘sh*t’ of paper. No one could contain themselves, not even Mrs. Spohn! After we all had a good laugh, she explained the vowel sound difference between ‘sh*t’ and ‘sheet.’ Now, whenever I’m teaching articulation of sounds I stress the importance of learning the sounds and saying them correctly.”
Michael Davidson, a physics teacher at HHS, had an equally embarrassing story. During one of his eighth period classes he ripped his pants. He shares with me that, “I hoped that nobody heard it or noticed it. No such luck – everyone in class was looking at me like I had three heads. Needless to say, the rest of class I spent sitting on my butt – not moving.” The only words of encouragement I have for Davidson is reminding him that at least he was not wearing his sister’s pants.
Davidson is not out of the water yet. He also came into play again as Allison Zuckerberg, an HHS junior, recounted the story of how one day she left her cell phone in his class, and hours after she retrieved it she noticed that her background had been changed to a picture of Davidson’s stapler. Zuckerberg was quite puzzled for some time and stated that it was just a little embarrassing for her to walk into his class the next day.
There are also embarrassing moments for students outside of the classroom. Calvin Graham, a sophomore at HHS, revealed that once he broke a pig made out of water bottles made by Taylor Conroy, also a sophomore. Upset that her pig was broken, she threatened to tell her father about it, and Graham proceeded to cry. A couple days later, the culprit saw Conroy’s dad at a baseball game and ran out of there as fast as he could.
Bridget Grenier, a fellow sophomore, also had an embarrassing incident at HHS. Grenier was fortunate enough to have Tania Cicirale as a history teacher at Lincoln Middle School. She was also fortunate enough to have Cicirale’s guinea pig pee all over her.
Another embarrassing student story revolves around Angelina Campomizzi, a sophomore and one of the first people that came to my mind when I was thinking of interviewees for this article. Campomizzi spilled her rotten soup, which was in her locker getting nice and moldy for two whole months, all over the floor in her Spanish class. “The soup fell over and exploded.” She emphasized, “The smell was horrible and the students were not happy, to say the least.”
There were many other blush-causing and shameful incidents that came to my attention, like the one told to me by Corrine Pacelli, a chemistry teacher at HHS, who had a student steal something from her for an interesting purpose. She recalls, “[This student] swiped a box of thumb tacks from my desk. He put them on the bottom of his sneakers and proceeded to tap dance and slide down the hallways to his next class. Of course the principal caught him, and he had to return the tacks.”
To conclude, my all-time favorite embarrassing story was the very first story I received. John Di Lonardo, a media arts teacher at HHS, simply stated, “I thought a student asked me ‘where’s the chocolate cake?’ and they actually said ‘where’s the scotch tape?’”
It has been fun walking around the cafeteria and hearing what some of the students had to say about their most embarrassing moments. So, what better way to end this article, but to tell the reader about the time I pushed one of the computers in Gustav Schell’s Personal Finance class off the desk making it shatter on the ground. Trust me, it was really embarrassing.