When I was in grade 9, my English class was made up of 27 boys, 3 girls. Our teacher was Mrs. Venton, and as the urban legend goes, she later went insane. In the hindsight of adulthood I can tell that, generally speaking, she withstood the unending onslaught of pubescent testosterone (the strongest, and stinkiest, brand of testosterone) with relative stability over the course of the 10 months in which we hollered, hooted, and kicked desks clean over in her miserable, third-floor afternoon English class. And yet, there is a seductive quality to the notion of Mrs. Venton's eventual, rumoured nervous breakdown. Confronted with the baboon-like yowling and staunch academic dispassion of 27 male bodies fitting and starting to find their way to full adulthood, she lost her cool more than once ("ya stupid fools!") and after we were done with her, she was never heard from again. Except for the legend, which stands thus:

Shortly after we were done with her, Mrs. Venton came upon a loonie which had been accidentally sealed into the newly-made hallway floor of North Toronto C.I., and went insane trying to pick it up.

I am relatively sure this did not happen. When asking Mr. Waldron about it years later, he said this did not happen. But lordy, lord, what a story. What a clear, precise concept: a grade 9 English teacher, nearly obliterated by we horrible, monstrous boys, confronted with a single immovable object and completely doing her nut trying to move it. It may not be "true," but it'll be true till the day I die.