So this is another story about one of the horrors that occurred in my second grade class. If you haven’t read the first one I recommend reading it, but you don’t have to have read that story to understand this one.
Let me start by explaining a little bit about the school I attended in second grade. You see I went to an itty, bitty, little church school and every morning we’d have a worship service in our classroom. So basically how this would go is we would all arrange our chairs in a semicircle around the Bible and the teacher would sit at one of the ends of the semicircle so they could be seen and also because no one really wanted to sit next to them.
Anyway, it might seem a little weird to anyone who went to public school/wasn’t raised in a very religious environment that we had worship at school everyday at my school, but it was actually kinda cool. It was cool because we got special jobs to do for the worship service. Well at least there was one job, there may have been more but they probably weren’t fun because I don’t remember them, but the cool job was getting to light the candles. This was an awesome job, because as a little kid the times you get to play with fire are extremely limited due to the inherent danger, but this of course is also what made it all the more exciting. I would always excitedly wait my turn to light the candles because as far as class room jobs went it was definitely at the top of the list.
Also since we were little kids we used those super long matches to light the candles and I honestly don’t understand why those can’t just be the norm instead of the little tiny ones. I mean with the foot long match you get all the fun of playing with fire with out the extremely pressing fear of burning your fingers before finishing the job since the match is so tiny. For a long time I was actually kinda afraid of using regular matches since the stick is so short and I’m still a bit wary of them. Plus the little matches are so flimsy and difficult to use, but the long ones were super sturdy.
Our worship services were also fun because we would get to sing songs and just listen to the teacher tell stories that she’d emphasize were extra special compared to the usual ones a second grader hears.
Anyway so one day we had our chairs in our little circle and were just nicely singing one of our church songs. When this one girl (we’ll call her Pam) Well Pam was sitting at one of the ends of the semicircle and she had puffy, dark brown hair. She happened to be sitting a little too close to the candle so when she turned her head her hair caught on fire. No joke, her hair literally caught on FIRE from the worship candle.
This of course happened at one of the best times in the service, when we were singing a song. So we’re all just singing and looking at our hymnals when the teacher who was all the way across from Pam on the other side of the circle happened to look up and notice before anyone else that Pam had caught fire. Mid song the teacher went from singing a note to a horrifying shriek. She lunged across the classroom and basically tackled Pam to try and put her hair out. Now I’ll have you know that the teacher was a pretty big lady and if she were to jump at me like that, I think it might be scarier than the actual fire.
Thankfully the teachers quick tackle reflexes allowed her to put out the fire pretty early on but it was still freaky. Pam was fine but her hair was all burnt and gross and the whole classroom smelled like burnt hair which if you’ve never smelled burnt hair well lucky you because it smells like utter butt and we all were just like, “stupid Pamela making the whole place stink with her stupid hair mer gjgdham.” Not very sympathetic to the poor girl who burned her pretty brown hair, no we didn’t care that much since we were fine, but having to deal with the stench all day, now that was horrible.
Also, after the burnt hair incident, we were forced to sit two or three feet away from the candles during worship which I found frustrating for some reason. I think maybe it came from my hatred of even the smallest change, so this tiny shift in the semicircle irked me. That combined with having a horrible smelling classroom for a day made me just a little bit mad at Pam for lighting her hair on fire, like how dare she slightly inconvenience my life with her traumatic accident.
I also remember the next day asking Pam if she got her hair cut to you know cut off the burnt part and she just said, “No.” and that was it.
I didn’t know what to do with that answer since I was so sure she’d trim the burned part out. So I was just like “Okay…” and walked away but inside I was thinking What the heck? She’s just walking around with burnt hair! But I guess it was whatever. Maybe she liked it like that or something? I don’t know. I don’t think it was noticeably burnt but still it was kinda weird, but I guess she can do what she wants.
The moral of the story is that you should be wary of sitting too close to candles, because you could catch on fire and have your teacher attack. But also, I’d say try to be more understanding than the second grade me. Sometimes your semicircle gets shifted, but you just gotta let it go and accept the change because hey it could be your hair and if it was, you’d probably appreciate moving away from the candle too.