A piece of my ancient history

I am sitting at my desk in the front of the classroom as the nun who teaches American history to 11th-graders stands inches away from me.

Sister Francis, who is also our homeroom teacher, is angry — not at me, but at the class as a whole.

The end of the school year isn’t far away. At the beginning of the year I had looked forward to taking her course; I had heard she was an excellent teacher, and I hoped to learn more about the story of our country.

So I was greatly disappointed when I found out that instead of giving lectures, she would write a history question on the blackboard almost every day. We students would then go to a wooden bookcase in the back of the room and spend the rest of the class using the books to research the answer.

“They might ask this on the Regents!” she would say. And say. And say. The course didn’t seem to be about such silly things as the people, philosophies and events that shaped our country; the main objective seemed to be to get us to pass the damn exam.

At one point the wooden bookcase wasn’t good enough for her. One day she brought in a do-it-yourself bookcase with metal shelves, and during the first period she had a few of the guys put it together for her. As I recall, it had three metal shelves, and it was suspended — yes, suspended — by means of strings that were fastened to the wall.

During the lunch period that day, as Sister Francis was out of the room and talking to another nun across the hall, a group of us stood around the bookcase. One of us — a guy named Louie, who was always stumbling into trouble — gently poked one of the books on the middle shelf.

The bookcase swayed inward a little.

Then outward a little.

Then inward a little more.

Then outward a little more.

Then inward a lot more.

Then outward a lot more.

So that by the time Sister Francis returned to the room, bringing the other nun with her so she could show off the wonderful new addition to her classroom, the entire contraption had collapsed, leaving the books in a heap on the floor.

But that was months ago. That is not why Sister Francis is angry now.

She is angry about something that just happened while she was showing slides of her trip to India.

Everyone at the school knows about her trip — how she traveled to India, rode on an elephant and even met Indira Gandhi.

Yes, everyone knows about it, and they’re sick to death of hearing about it, not to mention the slides.

During the slide show a few minutes ago, she showed a picture of herself. Then she showed a slide of an elephant.

“Guess what the next slide shows,” she then said with more than a hint of coyness.

A guy yelled out, “The elephant on you!”

And now Sister Francis, who was a drama queen years before the term was invented, is Very Angry.

And she’s standing right in front of me.

“That’s it! I’ve had it! All during this school year I’ve worked hard — very hard — to see that you pass the Regents exam! I’ve worked my fingers to the bone! And what do you do? You make fun of me! Well, that’s it!

“AS FAR AS I’M FINISHED, I’M CONCERNED!”

No one dares to make a sound. I myself don’t dare to look up at her face, to see if she realizes what she has just said. I look straight ahead, at Sister Francis’ midriff, as my front teeth dig so deeply into my lower lip that I wouldn’t be surprised if I struck oil.

I can’t remember what happened after that. I do remember that we did indeed take the Regents exam some weeks later, and it was easy. Ridiculously easy. You would have aced it. Your cat or dog would have sailed through it. Even your goldfish would have passed it swimmingly.

But I still don’t know that much about history.