1224. Testosterone

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It was Fredericka’s first year of teaching at a High School. In fact, it was her first day. The principal had told her to “dress modestly”. Dress modestly! What an old-fashioned concept! What an old-fashioned expression! She would dress tastefully! Fashionably! Appropriately!

Fredericka chose to wear a loose white blouse with the top buttons undone. It was, after all, still hot from the dying summer. And she chose a “modest” brown skirt with a slit up to the lower thigh that was both cooling and feminine.

Well! The testosterone in the class of sixteen year old boys! Fredericka could smell it. It was overbearing.

“Boys! Boys! Open the windows! It’s stuffy in here!”

The excitement when Fredericka reached up to open a high window.

“Boys! Boys! Let us have less tomfoolery!”

That did it. That took the cake. Fredericka would not change the way she dressed. She wouldn’t change because of a classroom of chauvinistic sex-ridden boys. It’s the boys that needed to change. They needed to learn to produce less testosterone. Tomorrow she would begin such a lesson. She would wear the shortest skirt she could find, and God help any boy who misbehaved.

25 thoughts on “1224. Testosterone”

    1. Bruce Goodman Post author

      The boys will win until they discover she’s a good teacher (or not!) of whatever subject she’s meant to be teaching and she will win when she starts teaching what she’s meant to be teaching! (At least that’s what I reckon!)

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    1. Bruce Goodman Post author

      It’ll all come back – one day – mine did after (I won’t say how long) a long time. Now that I know I’m not going to be included in the pantheon of the greats, it’s kind of a relief, and I enjoy it!

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                1. umashankar

                  Perhaps my greater exposure to Eliot is accountable for my preference of him. I was quite in awe of ‘The Wasteland’ and his other works. Still am. About the footnotes, I agree it does hamper the interpretations unless you are conversant with the references, somewhat like Charles Lamb.

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                  1. Bruce Goodman Post author

                    I’m so horribly unread. I knew the Hollow men and the one that begins “A cold coming we had of it” – and Prufrock and a few things about cats. As for the rest, I’ve never been able to understand a word! I shall try to make amends, and perhaps you can guide me,

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  5. derrickjknight

    That skirt mirrors one worn by a barrister in a case where I was an expert witness once. Except that both her slit and legs were longer. She was known for her flirtatious display. On the question of contact by the exchange of photographs, she claimed that “people don’t change over time”. “Oh, I think, they do. I had a black beard once”, I replied. And I wasn’t trying to be funny. Even the judge collapsed with laughter. The barrister just collapsed. Maybe, had I still been a teenager, my testosterone would have got the better of me.

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