![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about Robert R., one of my old high school classmates that I ran into at the reunion last week. Back then, we knew him as "Bobby the Wop," not because we were so ignorant and hateful that we would call an Italian kid a wop, but because during our junior year when he ran for class president, his campaign posters all read: "Vote for Bobby the Wop!"
We had so few kids of Italian ancestry in our school that none of us knew what the word meant, so we went to the most reliable source of word definitions that we knew of: our English and Creative Writing teacher, Mrs. Sheridan. The incident stands out in my mind because she looked so uncomfortable, but seemed to feel that her obligation as a teacher meant she could not duck the question. She hesitated, opened her mouth, and then hesitated again. She looked at Bobby, who sat smiling at her in the middle of the classroom. She looked at the rest of us, who all sat bent forward with our heads cocked, ready to learn and expand our vocabularies.
( Politically incorrect virgins )
We had so few kids of Italian ancestry in our school that none of us knew what the word meant, so we went to the most reliable source of word definitions that we knew of: our English and Creative Writing teacher, Mrs. Sheridan. The incident stands out in my mind because she looked so uncomfortable, but seemed to feel that her obligation as a teacher meant she could not duck the question. She hesitated, opened her mouth, and then hesitated again. She looked at Bobby, who sat smiling at her in the middle of the classroom. She looked at the rest of us, who all sat bent forward with our heads cocked, ready to learn and expand our vocabularies.
( Politically incorrect virgins )
