in sixth grade my homeroom teacher caught this kid stephen saying,
âthatâs so gay.â
so he told the class that for the rest of the week, anytime you wanted to express something negatively, you could say,
âthatâs so stephen.â
and it started out as a joke, where even this stephen kid was going around using it, laughing at it, not really caring. it was funny, i guess.
but then one of his friends got a bad mark on a test and said,
âthatâs so stephen.â
we had a blacktop recess and everyone kept saying,
âthatâs so stephen.â
and when we got too loud doing groupwork and had to separate and work silently, everyone in the class kept muttering,
âthatâs so stephen.â
and the weirdest part was that even though it was just a word we were using, even though it had nothing to do with stephen,
we all sort of blamed stephen.
and as everyone kept using âthatâs so stephen,â all week, you could see stephen himself finding it less and less funny.
we played a game called âpamplemousseâ in french class and everyone got stephen out right away if they could.
someone literally went and found one of stephenâs art projects when nobody else was around and ruined it so he had to start over.
and when my homeroom teacher found out about it, he sat everyone down and told us that it wasnât okay to say âthatâs so stephenâ anymore. that the things weâd been blaming him for werenât his fault and the things weâd been doing to him werenât fair.
he told us that stephen couldnât help it that he was stephen. he didnât choose to be stephen. he was born stephen.
and thatâs when it clicked.
we all felt pretty stupid, i think, for sort of falling for it, but iâll be damned if iâve ever had a teacher get a lesson across so utterly and completely as mr. bernard did.
it hadnât even been the full week.
titsay
romaincrisis
vaporwave
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