I flunked sophomore English and I am perversely proud of it.

I was assigned a teacher who I did not get along with right off the bat because she talked to me like I was a first grader and carried herself like she was the smartest elite on the face of the earth.

She had a bad habit of trying to drag things out of something when there was nothing there and make mountains out of molehills. Of course, to her, the most important thing we could learn was sophomore English.

By the time I got into her class I was already literate and on top of that I could count which when you think about it is about 95% of the schooling a person really needs to get by.

Mark Twain once said that he never let his schooling get in the way of his education and I think he was right. In fact I once said that to her and sat back and triumphantly watched the fireworks. It killed an entire class which was a pretty good deal.

Early of I told her just to give me an F and leave me alone. For the first semester she only gave me half my wish. She failed me but kept bugging me.

It was late in the quarter and the class was studying the American transcendental movement which was big in the Boston area in the 1830s with Emerson, Thoreau and that gang. She told me to stand up and describe the intrinsic mechanism.

"By means of levers and cogwheels Charlie Blackburn puts the mechanism into gear where it turns a gypsy head. The retrieval line from the lobster pot is run through a snatch block and wound twice around the gypsy head where it is allowed to slip to keep from working its way off of the gypsy head, yet with enough line tension to provide for pulling the lobster pot aboard," came off the top of my head.

"That's not the intrinsic mechanism!" she said, horrorfied.

"That's what Charlie Blackburn calls the gypsyhead setup on Alicia V," I replied.

Charlie Blackburn was an interesting town character. He was born before the turn of the 20th century and graduated from high school and was granted a full scholarship to Harvard where he majored in Divinity just before the Forst World War broke out. He accepted a commission and led a company going over the top with Blackjack Pershing.

He returned and decided he didn't want to be a preacher and took up lobster fishing and drinking cheap whiskey and when drunk, which was most of the time, was given to singing bawdy sea chanties.

Then in his seventies he went out fishing every day and drunk or sober it was said he was the best boat handler on the South Shore. Nobody over the age of six called him anything but Charlie unless they were in front of their parents.

A lifelong bachelor, he named his boats Alicia after a whore me met in France back in 1918. Alcia V was his current boat.

Charlie was also feared at the annual town meeting and there were an awful lot of people that had been burned to cinders for making the mistake of writing Charlie off as a drunken lobsterman in a twenty five year old suit with a pint bottle of Seagrams in the pocket. He had a sharp as a razor and didn't give a damn who thought what. Five years earlier he had taken the side of a 12 year old kid and gotten a teacher fired.

Come to think of it, even the town moderator walked on eggs when Charlie got up to speak.

"It's run off of a Briggs and Stratton 7 horsepower horizontal shaft engine which runs a hydraulic power steering pump from a 58 Olds and forces Dextron II ATF through the lines powering a hydraulic motor," I continued.

She glared at me when one of the guys spoke up. "He's right about how it works and that's what Charlie calls it. He calls it the intrinsic mechanism."

I was told to sit down and she never bothered me after that.

I simply opened a book and read.

While I failed that class, I have to say that of all of my classes I learned more there than I did in most of the others put together because instead of sitting there pretending to be interested, I read.

For five days a week, forty-five or so minutes a day I sat in that class and read. When I was handed a test I would turn it in blank and when it was corrected I would receive a zero unless there was an odd number of questions and you got a point or two for putting your name on right. When that happened I would get a grade below zero because I never bothered.

Still, I read for 45 minutes a day and managed to learn more in that class than I did in most of the others I took.

I still think she was a lousy teacher to this day and gloated a year or two after graduation when I heard she got knocked up by the vice principal, who was another one I crossed swords with but that's another story.


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