Monday, the 30th of August, 2021.

That’s the day I (accidentally) cursed us all.

When I was planning my junior year classes, I decided that between all the options available for science classes, astronomy stood out to me the most. I knew it would be a class that I, an aspiring theatre major, would probably not have the chance to take after graduating from Shaker. So, I decided to take the opportunity while I had it. And let me tell you, I think it was a great choice. Mostly.

A handful of my friends also decided to take astronomy this year, and by some coincidence, we all ended up in the same class. On the first day of school, we immediately sat down in what would become our little cluster that we like to call “The Bane of Mr. Child’s Existence.” We gave ourselves that name for several reasons, the biggest one being that the mysterious Planetarium Curse started with us. More specifically, me.

On the second day of class, we were given a two-foot long strip of paper and asked to draw a scale diagram of the planets of our solar system, except we were not given measuring tools or the actual distances. We had to guess. As I’m drawing all nine planets (because Pluto will always be a planet in my heart), I realize that I need to label them. I’m going down the line: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and I get to Saturn. I write out that label and immediately pause. I stare at it for a second as I realize what I wrote.

I didn’t write Saturn. I wrote Saturm.

I look over to my friends and tell them about my careless mistake, which they all thought was hilarious. I erase it, fix the mistake, and continue on. I go back to label the sun, and I did the exact same thing once again.

I spelled sun as sum.

I felt like a complete idiot for making the exact same mistake twice within five minutes, but then I felt even worse because

I managed to spell a simple three-letter word wrong.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that these two spelling mishaps would actually be the cause of an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. The next class we had, there were more spelling issues. They weren’t mine this time, but I slowly realize that the Saturm incident had a greater impact than I thought. No one in our area of the room was incapable of basic spelling before. But suddenly, during every class we had in the planetarium, at least one of us would spell something, usually a very easy word, wrong. Spelling Earth as Eearth, sunlight as sunglight, even going as far as spelling our own names wrong.

A whole semester later, awful spelling still plagues our corner of the planetarium, and my friends all blame me. We named this strange phenomenon The Planetarium Curse. I agree that it is my fault, since maybe if I was paying a bit more attention while I was labeling the planets that fateful day, none of this would have happened. But at least I started a trend that would give me one more thing to look forward to in astronomy: a chance to laugh at myself.