Dear Diary,

We’ve probably all had student teachers. Like all teachers, some were good and some were....well, you know. My sisters had a student teacher in one of their high school English classes that sometimes fit in the latter category.

They were studying one of Shakespeare's plays, which can be difficult enough to understand under the best circumstances; however in this case, it was nearly impossible. All of the students had to share books as there weren’t enough for everyone. All of the copies had even been checked out of the public library. The school tried to ease the situation by using a cassette tape of the play; unfortunately, the copy was bad and very difficult to understand. And even though the test at the end of the unit would count for fifty percent of everyone’s grade, the student teacher had the bad habit of constantly switching off the tape recorder to relate some family anecdote that everyone had already heard many times.

Both of my sisters, Amy and Bonnie (not their real names) were in the same class and as the teacher once again “clicked off” the tape recorder, Amy saw her grade of ‘A’ sprout wings and fly out of the window. As the teacher ended the story with a comment that they needed to finish the remainder of this act, Amy muttered, “Well, if you’d shut up, maybe we could.”

Now Amy is the last person in the world who would ever tell a teacher to “shut up.” Which explains why the silence in the room grew much deeper when she accidentally said it louder than she meant to plus the fact that the student teacher happened to choose that moment to stop talking.

“Why did you say that?” Bonnie softly asked.

“Say what?” Amy spat back still very angry at seeing her grade of ‘A’ flying far out over the horizon.

“Shut up.”

“You heard that?” Amy asked suddenly becoming a little anxious.

“The whole class heard you.”

Amy slowly looked around the room. Everyone, including the student teacher, was staring at her with shocked expressions on their faces. The lone hold-out was Kevin who had become very interested in studying his notebook.

Amy’s unintended outburst did succeed in getting the student teacher to turn the tape recorder on and leave it on for the remainder of the class. (Unfortunately, she returned to her normal pattern the next day.)

Such monumental news didn’t take long to circulate around the school. “Amy told somebody to shut up?” was the question most often asked by unbelieving classmates. The Spanish teacher kept staring at Amy with a look that implied, “Do I really know you.” And it didn’t help that she was good friends with the regular English teacher. Everyone know that story wouldn’t remain a secret very long.

“Quit it you guys, that’s embarrassing.” Amy kept saying.

“Don’t feel bad,” Ricky said. “You just did what the rest of us wanted to do.”

The final chapter of this saga was written when the regular English teacher returned.

“I hear that some of you had problems with the student teacher," she said. "One of you even told her to 'shut up'.”

“Yeah! Way to go, Amy.” Kevin said as he slapped her on the back.

I wonder why Amy was trying to dig a hole underneath her desk? Not really, but I do keep forgetting to ask her just what grade she did get that year.