'How To'

I've been commanded to blog this story from my high school years

I think I was in 9th or 10th grade at Barker Central School. I was in Mr. Olsen's "oral communications" class. He gave us an assignment: Choose a partner and, next week, you will give a "how to..." presentation before your classmates. That week my friend Carl & I had a difficult time deciding what we wanted to teach the class how to do. We were both big sports fans, though, so we ended up teaching them how to make a poster or something using football cards. It was really dumb. And we knew it. And we failed.

But Mr. Olsen gave us a 2nd chance. For some reason, we felt like being jerks and so for our next attempt we taught the class how to count page numbers in a book. Seriously. I turned 50 pages (orally declaring each page number along the way) and then Carl counted 50 more. Actually, if I remember right, Mr. Olsen stopped us about about 68. We had failed a second time. But he was a gracious man (and I'm pretty sure he found us amusing) so he gave us a 3rd and final chance.

Carl and I tried to think of something we were experts in. But what would that be? Then it became obvious. We were experts in "how to give a horrible 'how to' oral presentation". And so for our 3rd presentation, as our fellow students watched with anticipation (and Mr. Olsen with fear), we began to share our expertise. First, we communicated to the class (as we made another football card poster) that a 'how to' presentation should never involve poster making. Second, we told the class to never, under any circumstances teach the class how to read the page numbers of a book. To illustrate this horrible idea, we counted again (I think we only made it to page 18), until Mr. Olsen shouted out something like "Alright, I can't take it anymore". And he gave us a B- under the condition that we never count page numbers in his class again.