Sorry siblings

When I was in 7th grade, my math teacher's name was Mrs. Haddix. She was a fine enough teacher but her one vice was that she was obsessed, literally obsessed, with Alaska. She had lived there for a few years and was suddenly the resident expert on Alaska. Every day, she would somehow incorporate something about Alaska into the lesson. When we were learning about the volume of cylinders, she went into a lengthy discussion of the containers that they used in Alaska to collect the rain from the roof because they didn't have enough water otherwise. In fact, things were so bad they only showered for a few minutes and never took a bath. And the saying in their house in regards to the toilet was 'If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down" and so and and so forth through out the entire class. Whenever my friends and I would get bored we would count how many times she said the word Alaska. I remember the record being well over 100.

Flash forward three years.. I'm in my sophomore speech class. Our first speech of the semester was supposed to be on our pet peeves. I decided to write mine on teachers who had annoying habits. I talked about three or four teachers including Mrs. Haddix (I don't remember exactly who else I talked about or why but I think one of them was teachers who were pregnant. I just remember saying something about how if you are in high school you just shouldn't be pregnant, whether you are a teacher or a student.) I went into a lengthy discussion of Mrs. Haddix fetish with Alaska and all the stories that she would tell and how unrelated to math most of them were.

Throughout my speech, my teacher was laughing almost uncontrollably. I couldn't understand, I mean, I am funny but not that funny. In fact, I didn't even think this speech was that good at all since I had written it the night before. I finished my speech and looked up. Most of the students looked mildly entertained, my teacher was wiping away tears and surprisingly, a few students looked horrified. Confused, I began to sit down just as my teacher said, "You know Mrs. Haddix is my mom, right?" Apparently it was common knowledge that someone had forgotten to tell me.

The good news for me was my teacher hated Alaska as much as we did.

The bad news for my younger siblings is they all had Mrs. Haddix.