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when I was in Canadian grade 11
I was the most gargantuanly belligerent teacher's pet that wasn't in the the special classes. I was a socially awkward failure whose only approval came from the teachers whose asses I stuck my nose into the furthest. My "favourite" class was English, my teacher latched on to me as the child she never had, or at least one that hadn't rebelled against her smothering nature.
Of course, we disagreed on one important deal-breaker; come book report time she didn't regard comics as real literature. Fucking unacceptable. The most difficult part of my project was convincing her otherwise (the real reason I asked to do a comic was because I hadn't read a proper book in ages and didn't want to go through all that non-superman effort, so I chose some obscure graphic novel)
It still embarrasses me how long I worked on that essay, complete with powerpoint presentation and huge hand-drawn poster. I was surging with regular spurts of adrenaline come presentation day, and hardly even listened to the other students ahead of me. I arranged everything just so, and after loading the slides I dimmed the lights and a great big cover of a bare-chested hero beamed onto the wall.

Suddenly I understood. I realized all the ridicule, all the looks and shoving and swirlies and why nobody seemed to ever want to talk to the sad pizza faced geek. It took staring at that fucking ridiculous cover in near life size proportions to realize why I was never really taken seriously. In front of my class, I suffered a personal epiphany.
Every student was now staring at it with a half-interested half-incredulous smile of sarcastic disbelief, and I thought for a minute what a layman in this situation would think. No amount of nerd blathering could explain this away. It was a big oily bugling hero whose artist saw fit to draw every arm, leg, chest and facial hair in excruciating detail.
So I bullshat the whole thing. This cover was the hero's self-image as he progressed mentally and socially through the deep personal journey of self-discovery, in mid-century America, his struggles with masculine identity and self-worth, how the monster behind him was a visual allegory to his lurking and ever-present "battle" with alcoholism.
As soon as I was confident I had lost the classes' attention I wrapped it up without showing any other progressively greasy slide. I don't think I ever really mentioned it was a comic at all. I was sweating, though not as much as the hairy chest man, when I sat down.
I never read that comic again. My teacher kept the poster, I got a resounding A, made a few friends, and never mentioned it again.
(Wed 19th Aug 2009, 18:26, More)