Flashback Friday # 192

Miss Blunova

Greetings to all. It is good to be back. It's also good to have electricity, seeing that I didn't have it last Friday. I am continuing with my series of teachers that I had as a Sophomore. Since that year is what I refer to as "My Dark Year", I wasn't the best of student, making the lives of my teachers that much harder.

Miss Blunova was fresh out of college and bright eyed, hoping to make a difference in the students she taught.She taught World History, a requirement for all Sophomores to take. She was about 5' 5", medium build and had brown, curly hair to her shoulders. As an elementary teacher, she would have done fine. We weren't elementary kids, we just had juvenile actions.

It started simply enough when several boys changed identities for her class. Pete became Rob. Art became Ken. Whenever roll call was sounded. they chimed in for their alter ego. On the seating chart, they were their alter ego. To make things even worse, there was a set of identical twins in the class that rotated their identities daily. They looked so much alike, I'm sure their momma got them mixed up occasionally.

This tomfoolery escalated daily. I was never as bad as some of the kids in the class, but I sure didn't help things. One day, one of the guys in the back of the class began to quietly meowing like a cat. Another joined in. Yet another joined the choir. Bart & I chimed in. Soon, it sounded like feeding time at the cat shelter. One girl totally freaked out. She sttod up, hands over ears and shouted, "Stop! It sounds like a giant cat is going to crash through the wall".

There was a hit song at the time by The Oak Ridge Boys called "Elvira". Several of the guys picked up the tune and added our teacher's name to it. It went "Blu No Va. Blu No Va. My heart's on fire for Blu No Va. She'd stand, hands on hips and say" That enough. Stop it now". They guys would snicker and guffaw.

One day, one of the guys brought in a Playboy centerfold and taped it to one of the world maps. When she got to the point of showing us the county we were discussing on the map, she pulled down the map and the classroom erupted with hoots & catcalls. At first, she looked puzzled until she turned and saw the picture on the map. Her face immediately turned crimson and she sent the map back up so fast that it almost came undone from it's mount.

One day, we were watching a filmstrip and there was a knock at the door. She excused herself for a moment and stepped out into the hall. While she was gone, someone fast forwarded the cassette that accompanied the filmstrip. That made the filmstrip about 10 frames behind the tape. When she got back into the room and resumed the filmstrip, things were a bit off to say the least. The class was cracking up at the incorrect narrations to the pictures. She couldn't figure out what had happened, making it even funnier.

On another filmstrip, once again as she had to excuse herself, the cassette tape was removed from the player and replaced with a copy of a Richard Pryor tape that I had made for a friend. I figured it was worth the sacrifice, since i could always make another one. When she came back in, and resumed the filmstrip, the crass humor of Pryor filled the room. She about fell over herself trying to turn off the cassette player.

As bad as the things are that you have just read, there were three students in particular that made her life a nightmare. I will expound on these three in next week's post because what they did, will fill an entire post.