High School Stories

Shrek in the Classroom

When I was a sophomore in high school, my reading class was about British literature throughout the ages. For our Romanticism unit, we had a poem packet that contained four poems, and after each poem was a set of questions that we had to answer.

One day, during class, I was looking through the packet. When I came across the sheet of questions for the last poem, I instantly saw a picture of Shrek's face on it. Scared, I flipped back to the front and pretended I didn't see anything.

The next day, we had a sub, so it was just a silent work day. The only thing we had to do that day was read the last poem and answer the questions. As I sat down at my desk, I overheard some of my classmates commenting about how the Shrek picture was staring into their soul.

Before I did anything, I took out one of my black pens and started scribbling all over the picture until it was nothing but a black square. I then did my work.

Two days later, the teacher was going over the questions with us, and after we were finished, she mentioned why she added a picture of Shrek. She said it was because she thought Shrek was beautiful. By the way, the poem was called "She Walks in Beauty." I then showed the class what I did, and the kid sitting next to me said "How dare you defy our dark ogre lord?"

Everyone then started talking about "Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life." The teacher had no idea what we were talking about, and when she heard about it being a video, she exclaimed "I should put that on the projector!"

I started begging her no, since she was one of my favorite teachers and I didn't want her to get fired. Thankfully, she didn't play it but still wanted to know what the fuss was all about. I told her the name of the video, and she said that she would look it up soon since spring break started the next day.

Seriously though, what if she left the door open while she was playing it on the projector and someone was walking through the hallway and heard it?

In case you were wondering, she said nothing about the video when we got back from spring break. I didn't ask her about it either, and it was as if she completely forgot about it. No one else brought it up, and everything was normal from there. As each year passes, I can only imagine what the current sophomores go through when they get to that point in the curriculum.