The day started well with him looking forward to the school excursion.
The party of thirty or more young school children entered the museum. The teacher led the way into the main hall where all kinds of exhibits were on display. He was upset from the moment he saw the glass cabinets filled with displays of fossils. Then, when the noise of excited children grew, and with all those hands on the glass cases, he became really distressed. He couldn’t understand how the kids in his class could be so thoughtless. Most of his class mates were nice enough most of the time, he thought. He hardly heard the explanation given by the teacher about how these buried plants and animals had gone through a process of water evaporation with only minerals remaining.
When the teacher saw how distraught the boy had become, with his continually complaining about the noise, he arranged for him to sit the time out in the school bus.
Owing to the generally quiet nature of the boy and the fact that he rarely said anything anyway, it was quite some time, and completely by accident, that he was found to have a big misunderstanding with the meaning of the word ‘petrified’.