Here’s a huge admission: Remember that time an incensed seventh- and eighth-grade homeroom teacher at Immaculate Conception School mockingly said, “One student even gave this answer when I asked you students to draw three kinds of angles.”

The nun drew a couple of lines, one of them pointing to the left. She waited for classroom reaction, which in seconds produced the desired collective shaking of students’ heads and a whispered, “What a loser!”

Minutes before that hand-in assignment, I’d heard kids buzzing about obtuse, acute and right angles, but I had no idea what any of them meant, much less how to draw them. Accordingly, I reasoned that if there’s a right angle, there’s a left angle. And that was my answer.

Mercifully, Sister Mary Angle Angel didn’t name the errant student, but my blush probably gave me away. The truth is that I’d missed 10 days of school, with a sneezing condition like I now have — 60 years later.

I missed that geometry unit and thus grew to fear that subject. All of that misnaming of angles came to mind Monday as I listened to National Public Radio, out of Eastern New Mexico University. An expert in elementary education referred to an experience she’d had as a teacher, when she was covering combined vowels, and a student, who almost never missed class, happened to be out that day.

The teacher was going over “ou” combinations, which appear in words like “shout,” “flour,” “noun” and “ouch.” She went on to describe the extreme difficulty the student had when reading aloud. He simply didn’t know what sound to give it.

He wasn’t even able to make such utterances as, “It’s nothing to shOUt abOUt.”

But rather than attempt to cover the entire spectrum of Western elementary education, let me mention only that once she diagnosed the problem, the child improved significantly.

At a parent-teacher conference soon after, the mother said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but my son’s reading has really improved.”

We appreciate that kind of good-news story, but I also believe too many cases of missed and/or misunderstood lesson units go unnoticed. I believe an uncaring, unprepared teacher can wield considerable clout in whether students learn to read.

Let me explain:

Too often, a missed day of class fails to have built-in makeup opportunities. If the child misses the simple lesson on the placement of fractions, for example, or where to line up decimal points, how is anybody going to know?

In Gov. Susana Martinez’s talk of reforming public school education in New Mexico, we often wonder whether the loose use of “social promotion” tends to blame the student. I’m a strong opponent to retaining third-grade students who “don’t read at grade level,” whatever that means.

Aren’t those who favor retention aware of the stigma involved when suddenly Junior needs to meet new, younger classmates? Do they conduct research that shows the heightened probability of kids’ dropping out of school some time after having been held back? And is the “intervention” the district promises ever really delivered? And is the slightly bigger, a year-older child now considered an annoyance, a distraction? Does the child sit through another year of the same subjects he failed to master the first time?

When report card time came at I.C. School, back in the late ‘40s, and the talk from on high dealt with the possibility of some of us “not making it,” one consequence which presented quite a pall was summer school or repeating a grade.

One year, Mariano Pino and Henry Lujan, two schoolmates a grade ahead of me, suddenly were promoted mid-semester. They advanced a grade, whereas a lot of us feared retention, which could have meant Henry and Mariano would have been three grades ahead of me.

My second disclosure obviously is that I’m far from being conversant with issues of retention and promotion. Yet it raises my hackles when people who write letters to the editor refer to “social promotion” as if it were a favor granted to indulged students too self-important to buckle down and do the work.

One retired teacher who was up close and person with elementary education issues, argues that “If there were more attention paid to the basic literacy issue in the first three grades, before it becomes a problem, social retention and promotion matters wouldn’t be such an issue.”

It will be interesting what results from the tug-of-war involving the as-yet-unconfirmed Secretary of Education Hanna Skandera.

• • •

I left with a glow last week after watching members of NMDog.Org and the local Animal Welfare Coalition, as they went around town assisting people with animals.

Tina Holguin, with the AWC, walked me through some of the services the organization provides free of charge. The group delivered doghouses, harnesses, vests, leashes, collars, straw and food. Holguin explained that much of what the coalition does depends on donations. Some assistance comes from monetary donations; other help is in the form of items people give to the group.

Talking to Holguin for several minutes in a back yard on Chavez Street, I felt the chill that accompanied that large snowfall we received a few days earlier.

I reasoned, “I’m cold; I feel like my ears might fall off, but I have a warm car to go to.” But what about the dogs, particularly the shorthaired variety? Well, when I witnessed the work of the volunteers for the Animal Welfare Coalition, I became dewy-eyed, thankful there’s such a group in Las Vegas.

Naturally, I thought about my two whippets, which kept us company for eight years but eventually died, one from natural causes, the other from a mauling by a neighbor dog that escaped his owner’s yard.

Canines are living creatures, God’s creatures.

“God” spelled backwards is “Dog.”

For both their sakes, let’s take care of them.