20. A Shining Example Of Stupidity
I had a teacher who was fired due to a spectacular display of poor judgment. I was in Grade 5, so I was about 9–10 years old. The teacher decided to reward some good behavior with a movie in class. We were given a choice between a movie about a family in the mountains and a movie about a ghost.
We picked the family-related movie because we thought the ghost movie might be scary.
The movie about a family was The Shining. We watched it—unedited—in class. Some kids hid their faces through most of it. Most of us went home and had terrible nightmares, and the teacher was forcibly removed from class and was fired the following morning. The movie about the ghost was Poltergeist.