Tortillas and Gorillas

The teacher handed a lesson down to us in reading class that still burns my ass to think about. This was seventh grade at Fairmont Junior High School in Boise Idaho. I can’t seem to remember the name of the teacher, but I couldn’t lose her visage from my memory bank if I wanted to.
The reason that she is still so memorable can all be traced back to one poorly conceived lesson on pronunciation. One morning she got it into her head that since the double L’s at the end of the word ‘tortilla’ are pronounced with a Y sound rather than a hard L sound, the word ‘gorilla’ should be uttered the same way. I knew immediately and without question that she was wrong, yet she moved passed her hesitation and had the class sounding it out and comparing the two words. GO-REE-YA. TOR-TEE-YA.
The bizarre thing was the way that she brought the concept up to herself more than anyone else, even though she was standing in front of a class and had been giving a lesson up until that point. It was like she put herself on the spot and I could see heavy confusion register in her face as she attempted to sort out the incongruence. But she was able to talk herself through it and convince herself that the commonality in spelling meant that they MUST be rule bound to sound the same. The unmistakable look of skepticism in respect to her own flawed theory never left her face, however. Once she had cast herself in the spotlight of doubt, she felt compelled to move on quickly to give herself and the class the impression that she knew what she was talking about. I was sitting towards the front, so I could even hear her mutter, “Yeah, I think that’s what it is… yeah, that’s what it is.”
When you run up against a situation where you are not sure of something, it is perfectly fine to say so in the humble opinion of the Left Hand. What the hell is wrong with admittance of the possibility that you may not know EVERYTHING? How hard is it to qualify an assumption? If you don’t know something, I won’t hold it against you, but if you go and present your half cocked conjecture as fact, then forget it.