That Sure Beats Tennis Elbow
(I’m in seventh grade. My best friend is actually very fit and a good athlete, but very lazy, and she’s always trying to come up with ways for us to get out of gym class so we can hang out on the bleachers. Our teacher essentially knows all her tricks and is rarely fooled. One day, we are told that we will be having a substitute gym teacher, and she comes up with a plan.)
Friend: “Okay, so he doesn’t know me, so we need to do a stuffy voice and he’ll let us off.”
Me: “A what?”
Friend: “A stuffy voice! You know. Follow me.” *walks up to new sub and begins speaking as if her nose is clogged* “Are you by stubstidute?”
Substitute: *not even looking up from his clipboard* “Nice try. It’s just tennis practice, ladies.”
(Annoyed, my friend goes to take her place with the rest of the class and I follow. The substitute comes out with a tennis racket and a ball.)
Substitute: “I know a lot of you find gym class really boring or intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be! There’s no reason to try to get out of it. There is literally nothing scary about any of it. Especially tennis.”
(To illustrate his point, he tosses the ball, then bounces up on his feet to hit it towards the wall… right before screaming like he’s been shot and crumpling to the ground. We run for another teacher, who calls an ambulance, and later during homeroom we are told his Achilles’s tendon had snapped.)
Friend: *turning towards me, white-faced* “You know, if he really WAS trying to show us how harmless and not-scary gym class is, he failed big time.”
(Don’t worry, he was okay, but he wore a boot and spent the rest of the year behind a desk teaching another homeroom class!)
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