The Extra Credit Cucumber

Did you ever have a class in school that was so hard that you relied on endless extra credit to save your grade? Marine Biology was that class for me.
  It was mostly the terms. It helped a little, that the class would go out in groups and explore the seashore for marine life and identify the items we found.
  We even ended up in the Puget Sound pulling up core and dredge samples off the bottom. One day the teacher pulls out a Sea Cucumber from a dredge sample.
  "Anyone that can eat a piece of this cucumber gets an A."
  Well, I grabbed the little guy and bit a piece off, after all I had been waiting all day for a chance to gets some extra credit. I found the urge to puke right there in the harbor. It felt like it was trying to claw its way back up.
  I can’t describe the feeling as that piece of snot slid down my throat. The teacher had offered extra credit before. I had done this credit. But I needed more to pass the class. The pressure of missing the credit I needed to graduate drove me to biting down and swallowing hole this little cucumber.
  "Are you okay,” he asked.

  I shook my head and sat down.
  He then finished his thought. "As I was saying. When we get back to the shore, I would have cooked up that little cucumber and anyone that wanted to try and could have done so for extra credit. But sense Farnworth was so hungry for a snack. No one gets extra credit."
  He looked at me then and smiled.
  "Farnworth, if you keep that your snack down you get an A if you throw up on my boat you flunk."
  The waves rolled the boat and at least one woman threw up on the way back. Everyone looked at me each time the boat rolled. They thought I was crazy, but if I flunked that day I would have flunked the class. I choked up a few times; I got my A for what it is worth to me now.