"Class, it's time for drawing!" said Ms. Phillips, my second grade teacher. I loved to draw and always looked forward to drawing time. There was only one person in the class who loved to draw more than I did, and that was George. George sat next to me at one of the long tables our class used as desks. We both got out our pencils and Ms. Phillips passed out the drawing paper. I sat there busy drawing Wilbur from Charlotte's Web. George was drawing an astronaut on the moon. When he finished he showed me his picture.
"Pass it around. Put a star in the sky if you like it and a circle on the ground if you don't," George said as he handed me his paper. I really liked his drawing so I put a large star in the sky and passed the picture and the instructions George had given me on to the other person sitting next me. She also liked it and put a star in the sky. In turn, she passed it on to the person sitting next to her. When the picture came back to George he started crying. I looked at the picture and saw that everyone had drawn stars in the sky indicating that they liked it. I just couldn't figure out why he was crying.
As the bell rang for the end of class I finally realized why he was crying. He hadn't said, "...put a star in the sky if you like it..." What he had actually said was, "...put a star in the sky if you don't like it and a circle on the ground if you do." Because of my dyslexia I had mixed up the instructions and passed the wrong information around to everyone. We had all drawn stars in the sky and on top of that, my star had been the largest. He must of thought we all hated him and his drawings.
The next day at school I looked all over for George so I could apologize and explain what had happened. He wasn't anywhere to be found and he never came to school again. I felt so guilty and was never even given the chance to apologize or explain. This has been something I have never been able to put behind me and forget.
I did get two valuable lessons from this mishap
that are now rules that I live by. 1) Always listen to instructions
and make sure you have them correct and 2) never allow someone to leave
thinking you hate them because you might not get the chance to set thing
right. Because of my following of these rules I have never had the
same thing happen, but I still wish I could apologize to George.