The New York Times Project

If you know me, you know that when something doesn't necessarily go my way or I think it is stupid and not worth doing I tend to do mischievous things to undermine the project and/or whomever decided to force whatever it is upon me. Here is one of my favorite examples:
Let me take you on a short trip through time. Ninth grade of High School. The class was World Geography. Mr. Dachille was the teacher (in fact, he still is).
A little background of our relationship prior to ninth grade: In fifth grade (I went to the school k-12, 13 years) I and my friend Andrew were sent to the upper school to pick up a box for charity. We went to the two main floors and for the life of us were unable to locate this box. So we thought, maybe it’s on the third floor. So we climbed the stairs and started to walk down the hall from the South. We made it about half way down the hallway when we hear from behind in a New York accent, “Ah, excuse me...” We turned around and there he was. (This man is like T2, for those Camels who are reading this. I think he must have been at his desk looking out the window by the door, saw us, and wanted to pick a fight.) We didn’t know who he was, we had no reason to. Lower schoolers had no business knowing upper school teachers. We had better things to worry about like video games and other stuff. So we looked at him, he was ten foot tall if he was a foot. He asked, “What are two doing up here?” and we answered, “Looking for the P.R.I.D.E. Box.” With a very stern voice he responded, “Well it wouldn’t be up here, it would be downstairs.” That’s all I remember, apart from then searching through the rest of the upper school. To say the least, it was not a pleasant experience of the upper school. And that is all I knew of this man, Mr. Dachille.
So here I was, ninth grade and low and behold the ninth grade homeroom teacher was non other than Mr. Dachille. As far as Andrew and I knew he was the very same mean old man who had hounded us four years prior. We had World Geo with this man. (p.s. The year was 1999.) The first day he gave us a packet, the entire trimester of classes, dated May 1997. 2 ½ years old. He had been teaching the exact same material for 2 ½ years. Anywho, the year went on and Mr. Dachille was not very nice. Although behind the tough skin we could start to tell he had a softer side. But that was not to be tested. He gave us a project called the New York Times Project. This was a reoccurring project that we had to do every few months. This man collected the New York Times. When he gave us this project he would take a stack of the Times and pass out three to everyone, all from one to five months old. The project was to summarize all of the international articles.
The most number of points you could get was a 20. I never got 20’s, ever. So, this was one of those moments. I hated this project. I would always procrastinate until the last night. I had to do something to see if this man, this very scary (who might be human) man was actually reading this entire damn project. So I did some of the project and injected some things that were not in the articles. Here they are:

- Habibe’s political structure this is so annoying I can’t believe I waited this long to do this darn thing has been slipping over the past few years.
- This is so bad so very very bad because they need to come to an agreement before long or else the fight will be going on for a very very long time.
- This is so horrible I can’t believe I waited till tonight to do this.
- I hate this. I think it’s just a waste f time and so is that project where we have to go to the cia website and look up every individual country when we have so many countries to right about.
- I cant stand this it’s soo annoying its so incredibly annoying to me because I cannot figure out what is going on in the world and I don’t think it matters what went on four months ago or even 5 months ago.

I got a 20 on this one. I couldn’t believe it. This awful man didn’t read this at all. I merely filled each page and was rewarded for the bull shit.
Mr. Dachille turned out to be the man, as we grew through high school Dachille became a friendly guy who was funny. As I said before, this man showed a little of this during ninth grade. Molly, a girl who rights everything down, asked Mr. Dachille where they land Air Force one if there is no airport and Jamie answered, “Oh, they just clear a field and land it there.” Mr. Dachille responded to this, “Don’t say that, she’ll write it down.” He also motioned writing something down with his hand.
I recently saw him at a reunion and told him that I was going to send the project to him and he agreed to read it to the class. I will be sending it tomorrow.
That is all.