Short Story | Teen Ink

Short Story

June 13, 2017

We all have a time in our lives when we need to step up and take responsibility either for the protection of others, or for the purpose of owning your mistakes and mishaps. For me, it was in 3rd grade, and it was not for the latter.

Let’s just say that my 3rd grade teacher..well..wasn’t the best. By that I mean that she didn’t pay much attention to our class, was always on Facebook or Twitter, honestly she probably didn’t even care about us that much. We were supposed to be learning reading and writing skills, instead, we talked about our weekends and video games or whatever else there was that was somewhat interesting. I didn’t realize it at the time, because I was in 3rd grade and was in lala land, daydreaming about puppies and unicorns half of the time. But then one day it hit me like a truck, hey I might actually need to know multiplication and division for the future! So, I took the responsibility of my education into my tiny little 3rd grader size hands, and put it to good use. I taught myself and others responsibility by convincing the teacher (with help from my friends of course) to get us a class pet, a lizard named Georgie (his name was really George but we liked Georgie better).

The first week didn’t go so well, mainly because little sticky hands were jetting out and petrifying the poor guy almost every 15 seconds or so for about 5 minutes at the end and beginning of the school day, and he probably hated us because of that and hid in his little hut all day.

“I think Georgie hates us...oh well, he’s just a cute little lizard, he doesn’t know any better.” My friend Katie once said.

My teacher on the other hand, started to give us tasks every morning to keep him alive and healthy, which in turn helped us form and learn responsibility at a young age. My task was to make sure he was fed at the start and the end of the school day, which I hated because I had to handle bugs and worms and whatnot. It wasn’t so bad because my teacher was there with me and made sure that I was okay with the bugs, and if I wasn’t, she’d either do the task herself or help me do it, which was a big step for her because she actually started to make story problems (involving math and sentence forming) about Georgie and some students.

After a few weeks, I began to feel like I was actually learning something from the class, and that made me extremely happy. Sadly, Georgie died (probably from an anxiety attack or maybe a heart attack, we don’t know) overnight. It was devastating at first, because all of the kids and I loved him very much, but his death taught us another thing, that nothing lasts, but you should enjoy the good things in life for as long as you possibly can. I believe this encounter has impacted who I am today because I am almost as responsible as my parents are (my dad has the mentality of a 13 year old, but I love him all the same), but not quite.

Responsibility is an essential thing to learn. Adults must be responsible in order to keep their jobs, without it, you could become disorganized or viewed as lazy and could potentially be fired.

To this day, the lesson and memory of George still floats around as an inside joke between my parents and I. When this unit started, I told my grandpa all of the topics for it and he joked;

“Well, don’t forget about your old friend George, maybe he’ll influence some of the crazy ones in your class!” Little did he know that those words sparked an idea, which led to this personal narrative.


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