My Most Embarrassing Moment in School—and the Lesson That Stayed With Me
It was fourth grade, and we were doing one of those round-robin read-alouds where the teacher goes down the rows and everyone gets a paragraph from the same book. I don’t remember the title, only that it was about pioneers, and that I was doing fine until I hit the word “colonel.”
I knew it meant a military officer. I had seen it in video games and on the covers of old paperbacks. But my mouth froze. The letters didn’t line up with any sound I knew. I stared at it for a few seconds, felt the room go quiet, and then I took a wild guess: “co-lo-nel.”
The classroom did that thing where it feels like one giant creature waking up. A few kids gasped, then came the snorting and the muffled laughs. Some boys in the back didn’t even try to hide it. My face went hot. I laughed too, a fake little laugh, hoping to look like I was in on the joke. The teacher held up her hand and said, “That’s enough.” Then she looked at me and said, “It’s a tricky one. It’s pronounced ‘kernel.’” She moved on to the next kid, and the reading continued.
For the rest of the day, I kept replaying the sound of “co-lo-nel” in my head. That was maybe twenty-five years ago, and I can still see the classroom, the cracked chalkboard tray, the poster of a rain forest above the pencil sharpener. Embarrassment has a strange way of getting locked in. When you feel exposed, your brain seems to file away everything around it—the light from the window, the shuffle of someone’s shoes—like it’s trying to make a complete record of the moment.
What surprised me later, when I thought about it as an adult, was how little I remembered about the teacher’s response. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t scold me. She corrected the word and moved on. That should have felt safe, maybe even reassuring. But it didn’t feel that way at the time. The laughter from the other kids had already made it clear that getting a word wrong was something to avoid at any cost.
For the next few weeks, I read ahead. I counted paragraphs and marked which ones were mine. When I got close to my turn, I scanned quickly for anything long or unfamiliar. If I spotted a tricky word, I’d try to whisper it under my breath or skip it if I could. I didn’t want people to see me stumble again. I wasn’t a bad reader, exactly, but I started reading the way some people drive a car—with my hands tight on the wheel and my eyes locked on the next ten feet.
That habit stayed with me longer than I’d like to admit. For years, when I read aloud, I would silently pre-read the next sentence, scanning for traps. I got so good at skipping unknown words that I could glide right past them without anyone noticing. It worked. But it also quietly taught me that reading was something to be survived in public, not something to enjoy.
Now I spend a lot of time in my son’s second-grade classroom. I volunteer during reading time, and last month I watched the whole scene play out again in front of me. A girl raised her hand and read a sentence from a book about space. She got to the word “alien” and pronounced it “ah-lee-en.” A few kids laughed. Her face turned the same shade of pink mine had done all those years ago.
I didn’t have to search for the right thing to say. I had been rehearsing it for two decades, in a way.
“That one fools me too,” I said. “It’s ‘A-lee-en.’ You know, like the movie. Keep going.”
She said the word again, correctly, and finished her sentence. A few seconds later, the reading moved on. Nobody mentioned it again. She raised her hand to read again ten minutes later.
I don’t know if that moment meant anything to her. It probably didn’t, at least not in the long run. But it made me realize what I had needed back in fourth grade, and didn’t get. It wasn’t a lecture about how mistakes are good. It wasn’t someone telling me to laugh at myself. It was just a grown-up who put the mistake into a normal, boring category—like a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom—without making me feel like the center of attention.
That’s the thing I try to do now, both at home and in the classroom. When my son stumbles over a word during homework, I just say the word naturally and keep going. I don’t ask him to sound it out when his brain is already fogged with frustration. We deal with the word again later, maybe that night or the next day, when there’s no audience. The same goes for his spelling tests. If he wants to write a word wrong a few times before getting it right, that’s fine. I try not to hover.
There are a few other habits I’ve picked up along the way. At home, we have a “tricky word” jar in the kitchen. Whenever anyone—me, my husband, my son—mispronounces something, we write it on a sticky note and drop it in. Once a week, we read them out loud and laugh about how weird English is. I started it as a joke after I told my son the “colonel” story, but it’s become a small, quiet way of saying that not knowing a word is not a signal that you’re behind or slow. It’s just what happens when you’re learning.
If a kid in class gets teased for a mistake, I’ve learned to do less, not more. I don’t stop the whole lesson to deliver a talk about kindness. I just say, “That word does look strange,” and keep reading. It turns out that a quick, calm acknowledgment does more than a formal speech. It tells the kid who made the mistake that an adult is watching out for them, and it tells the rest of the class that there’s no performance to keep following.
I’ve also learned that some kids try to laugh at themselves first, the way I did in fourth grade. When that’s a kid’s reflex, the last thing they want is an adult saying, “Are you okay?” in front of everyone. Sometimes they need an audience the most, but a small, neutral moment afterward—while packing up, or in line for lunch—can be enough. I usually just say, “By the way, I mixed up that same word when I was your age. Took me years to get it right.” No deep meaning. Just the truth.
The word “colonel” still gets me. Every single time I read it, I have to think. Sometimes I whisper “co-lo-nel” to myself before I say it correctly, just to make sure I’m not getting ahead of myself. My son thinks that’s hilarious. He’s at an age where he mispronounces words on purpose to see how people react. I’m not sure if that means he’s confident or if he’s just trying to get ahead of the joke. I don’t think I need to know the answer to that right now.
What I’m still figuring out is how much weight to give those old moments. They shaped how careful I am, how much I scan ahead before speaking, how quickly I jump to save another kid from the same landing. That’s not all bad. But I also have to remind myself not to treat every stumble as something that needs to be rescued. Sometimes a kid can read a word wrong, hear the laugh, and just let it pass through them without taking root. I didn’t, because I had no model for shrugging it off. The best I can do now is try to be that model—someone who gets words wrong, says “huh, that’s a weird one,” and keeps going.
I still don’t love reading out loud. I don’t think I ever will. But I do read to my son every night, and when I hit a tricky word on purpose, I make a point of pausing, making a show of sounding it out, and getting it wrong on purpose. He rolls his eyes. We both know the word. But I want him to know that a wrong word is not a crack in the floor. It’s just a word. And you’re allowed to miss it on the first try.
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