What all the excitement's about

Once in eighth grade we had a substitute teacher that confessed she used to get question marks and exclamation points mixed up. She also had a slight lisp (which is not relevant).

Instead of reviewing the history lesson like she was supposed to; she, instead, told the story of her quest to remember, once and for all, what a question mark looked like (?) and what an exclamation point looked like (!). I spent most of the class period doodling Union soldiers and Confederate soldiers playing baseball in my notebook (which is historically accurate), but I also gave a few of the players jetpacks and rocket boots (which is not).

Anyway, she droned on about pneumonic devices she devised to deal with this exclamation problem; she talked about flash cards too. Some of us (all of us) didn’t care, even though it was very apparent she was trying her best to help us in our own un-admitted attempts correctly identify punctuation.

None of her techniques worked, she said, she still couldn’t pick an exclamation mark out of a line-up.

{ : , ] / ! @ % ? }

Then, when she had given up hope, her daughter, all of four years old, came home from school one day to exclaim “we learned about exclamation points today! The teacher says they’re excited periods, that’s why they look like that!” And her problem was solved. Since then she has had no trouble remembering ‘!’ is an exclamation point, and, by default, ‘?’ is a question mark.

It still doesn’t make much sense to me, but it was eighth grade, it’s not like we were going to be doing real work anyway.
-t