Mortification in English Class

Hello! Today I had a rather interesting, semi-mortifying experience at Zoom-school and I thought it might be cool to share. 

This weekend, my English teacher gave us an assignment. She wanted us to write a "tweet" about something we're passionate about (basically just a casual, 280-character blurb about something we like). Then, on Monday (today), we were going to private message her our tweets while meeting with our discussion groups of about 11 people, and she'd read it out loud so the group could try to guess who wrote which tweet. 

Well, my discussion group includes eight teenaged boys, many of whom acted kind of joke-y when we had a video call to talk about a project outside of class. So naturally, I assumed their tweets would be joke-y and wrote a silly one of my own to match. Good idea, right? No. WRONG. Very, VERY wrong. 

I entered the Zoom meeting today and soon enough we started hearing people's tweets. The first guy wrote, in a rather well-informed tone, about a sports team he liked. Another shared well-thought-out opinions about tennis. A third wrote his about classical music, and a fourth went on a tirade about coding. 

As the tweets were read off and the writers were guessed, my levels of dread were climbing. Oh no. My tweet was NOT anything like these ones. All of these boys had intelligent, carefully considered things to say about erudite passions of theirs, and mine was... definitely different. 

We were nearing the end of the class and my tweet still hadn't been read. Eventually, there was one left. It was mine. My teacher went "Okay, we're going to read Abby's now- everybody already knows it's her since she's the last one." 

I tried to cover my face with my hair and retreat into the shadows created by the poor lighting in my room. After a class session full of collected thoughts on people's cultured passions, my tweet went like this: 

"did you ever meet someone and just feel like life as you knew it would never be the same? like you could love them forever and then a little longer? me, too. that's how i felt when i met cheeseburger." 

I- 

My tweet was about CHEESEBURGERS. I wrote a tweet, framed in a way that made it seem like it was dedicated to the love of my life or something, about CHEESEBURGERS, and it was read out to the class after my classmates had shared really smart things, while everyone knew I was the author. When I tell you I emotionally melted into the floor, I am not exaggerating. Why didn't I take this more seriously? It's an AP English class; of course people were going to say smart things. Everybody was so smart, except me, there at my desk seeming like a Cheeseburger Queen. My friends said it was funny, but the goal apparently was not to be funny, so the only effect this had was me publicly declaring my passion for that good ol' meat-cheese-bun combo. 

I will return to my English class. But I will not be the same.