In first grade the teacher’s first question was “who here can already read?” Those kids got automatically put in advanced placement and I spent years reading ahead in an attempt to catch up to them. None of us had been taught even the basics of reading in kindergarten. That all got straightened out when I entered middle school.
Also in elementary school I taught myself (with the help of my mother) how to write my name in cursive. I was told to stop doing that until the rest of the class learned cursive.
In middle school we dressed up for Halloween one year; I was 12. I wore a recital-quality ballet outfit that we’d actually purchased for a real recital I was to be in, and my mother helped with my makeup. In Home-Ec class the teacher dropped some pencils and then looked at me (first row) to help her pick them up, without asking. I obliged, while she folded her arms and studied me. Rather than thank me, she had me stand in front of the class while she checked under my poofy/frilly skirt to see if it was too see-through for school. As I faced the class she lifted it up in the back to look underneath. Then she called another teacher over and had me do a “turn on the catwalk” to see what the second person thought. All right in front of the class. Second teacher thought it was fine and I was allowed to sit back down.
Dress similar to this. Maybe it had shown a little much; but my ballet teacher and mother thought it was perfectly fine, and even if it weren’t, the teacher could have handled it much better. I wore less clothing when we dressed out for gym.
I had a classmate who was always getting in trouble for silly things (rocking on his chair, talking, nothing serious). His father passed away when he was in 8th grade. A few weeks later he was rocking back on his chair and the teacher started yelling at him (probably smacked him too), saying things like “it’s your behavior that killed your father, you’re responsible for his death.” The joys of a Catholic education.
Last I heard, said classmate was the local district attorney, so he turned out okay…I guess.
I already wrote about my bitchy kindergarten teacher in another thread, but I just remembered something a gym teacher said in elementary school.
I think it was 5th grade, but I’m not totally sure. Anyway, it was a warm day, so we had gym class outside, and we were doing some kind of race where we all had to run a lap around the school building and we were all given a time when we hit the finish line.
I was never in good athletic shape as a kid, and was a very slow runner. I don’t remember how long it took me to run around the building (let’s say 5 minutes), but I was dead last and I remember the (male) gym teacher having a fit as he was looking over the times. In front of the whole class (I think we were lining up to go back in) he angrily yelled, “Five minutes!? That’s slower than the kindergarteners!” And he yelled a few more things about how he couldn’t believe how slow I was, etc etc.
I can only assume he thought I was deliberately dawdling, rather than just naturally being slow. But considering I was always picked last for teams, and the other kids would make fun of me for my lack of ability, it was pretty hurtful to have a teacher do it.
Halfway through a high school gym class game of volleyball the teacher calls out to me from the sidelines, “Maybe you should sit out today; I can see your maxipad.” mad:
Something similar happened to me in 3rd grade, though I don’t think it was a response to anything I said or did.
I don’t know if this is typical of the time (the early 70s), but in my grade school classes were divided up three ways: accelerated, standard, and remedial. I was in the accelerated classes, and had always done well. The 3rd grade accelerated teacher was Mrs. Meyers, and she was very popular. Everyone in the accelerated program looked forward to her class. I would guess that many kids who had her as a teacher would rate her as their favorite from their entire time in school. She was older but taught in a fun and unconventional way, with a lot of music, hands-on projects, and self-directed study. And she let us stay out for an extra recess period every day!
Sounds great, right? For most kids in the class it probably was. Not for everyone, however. See, she also singled-out two kids every year: one was her favorite, while the other was openly mocked and ridiculed in front of the rest of the class. The favorite was always used as a positive example. She would use the other kid as the negative example (“Don’t be like so-and-so!”) or to tease or taunt directly to get a laugh out of the rest of the class. To top it off, she would give the “negative example” some sort of derogatory nickname and use it in place of their actual name.
Her nickname for me was “The Blob”.
I don’t know why, exactly. I wasn’t fat, but I also wasn’t terribly athletic. I guess I also must have moved too slowly for her, as I remember her commenting on that several times. Either way, everyone else thought it was hilarious.
As you can guess, it really did wonders for my self-esteem and confidence. I also think that it ruined whatever enthusiasm I had for school and learning. I can honestly say that I coasted for the rest of my grade- and high-school career instead of applying myself, and I can’t help but think my experience in her class was at least partially to blame. Luckily, I managed to do well enough to stay in the accelerated program, and I got decent grades. (Probably more a product of a poor school system rather than my intelligence, but still.)
I spent several years thinking it was just me, which was bad enough, but I later met another kid that was in her class who she had called “The Orangutan”. He confirmed that it was the same during his time with her, favorite and all. WTF?
She had a long career, but had retired long before I got to the point in my life where I would have been confident enough to go back and confront her. I would have loved to ask her why. It was obviously some sort of strategy. What did she hope to gain or impart on the rest of the class? Did she never consider the effect on the kids she singled-out? Did parents never complain? I can’t remember mine doing so, or even if I told them. (I can’t remember doing so, but surely I must have?) How did she not get fired?
Sorry for the novel. I didn’t set out to write so much, but obviously this thread really resonated with me. I don’t bring it up much. I’m not even sure I’ve ever told my wife.
And to be fair, I’ve also had some great teachers who have influenced me in many positive ways. The teachers at my kid’s school seem great too.
My 7th grade geography teacher once went off at the whole class. I don’t remember what set him off (bratty kids? poor test scores?) but the gist of his explosion was that we were worthless and were never going to amount to anything and the country was going down the drain. He yelled and yelled.
I was horrified by this outburst and what it said to us, especially coming from a teacher. I wrote him a letter basically expressing what it felt like to sit in that class and have someone whose job it was to help you forward in life put you down. The next day, he apologized to the class. It was a little victory, but it proved the truth behind the Margaret Mead quote about the effect of a small group of people (or just li’l ole me) years before I ever heard the quote. And apparently had a lasting effect on the teacher, too, or at least so he wrote in my yearbook the following year.
There was also the physics teacher (well liked by many, myself included) who referred to me as a “Thespian or something like it” regularly. I was, indeed, president of the drama club, but I was also one of the few kids who was out at my school. I felt like I was pretty much being used to prove his hipness to the other students in a way that didn’t benefit me at all.
It happened. Its ok to feel pain about it. That it could happen again is why we work so hard to change the world. Own it, learn from it, teach from it, draw from it and use it. Never forget it. Its part of who you are and you might have never posted here or have become a success in life but for it.
Some kids go to school and hide from bullies, I went to school and hid from my teacher.
1979, 7 years old, Year 2. My teacher was Mrs. Heart. If there is any justice in this world that hateful old bitch will have been burning in whichever hell she may have believed in for many years now (catholic school – so here’s hoping) .
Her thing was spelling and if you had some trouble spelling words it was because you were a poor student, lazy, stupid and would never amount to anything - I heard that a lot that year.
I had a lot of trouble when I was a kid getting my b’s and d’s mixed up, which is apparently a pretty common thing.
Well, if you were in her class and she had shown you the difference between the letters once, and you made the mistake again, then you were just being disobedient and doing it to offend her personally.
I’m not sure how I got on her shit list, there were other kids who she didn’t like much or made mistakes but I seemed to be a special case.
I always got to school early because both of my parents worked, if she saw me in the school yard with my friends I would get called in before class and made to do spelling exercises. Same thing if I made a mistake in class, everyone else got to go to recess or lunch but I would have to stay back & do spelling work. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend all day in the class-room. Add in a lot of other things like snide remarks or always being picked as an example of how not to do things and I went from a kid who enjoyed school to one who hated every minute of it.
This went on until my parents found out, mainly because I did everything I could to get out of going to school and they eventually coaxed the reasons out of me and my older sister, who was at the same school was able to confirm what was going on by talking to my friends.
The shit hit the fan big-time, my mum was a friend of the headmistress and after a meeting with her came storming into our room and called Mrs. Heart fifteen kinds of evil bitch in front of the entire class. I got moved to a different home room for the last few months of the year and the next year had an absolutely fantastic teacher.
I started Year 3 at the bottom of the class grades-wise, and finished the year at the top.
This wasn’t said in class, but it still pisses me off. During my senior year in high school, a boy in one of the middle schools in the district committed suicide, and word got around that he had been bullied frequently.
The next day or maybe the day after, I stayed after school for newspaper layout. One of the other editors brought up that her brother knew the kid who committed suicide and our advisor said something to the extent of, “I’m friends with some of his teachers. It’s a shame what happened, but this kid was asking to be bullied.”
Not necessarily: while there are teachers of mine I did complain about at home, some of the worst abuses were things I couldn’t even have described in enough detail at the time; there were others where I’d been told clearly enough and forcefully enough that the teacher in question was Authority (and Authority must be Obeyed) that I didn’t think attempts at complaining would do any good.
Mind you: when I did complain, it didn’t do any good…
I took a computer course at El Camino College in 1985; I was 36 then. In the lab class I was having trouble with a rather complicated assignment in BASIC (remember that?) and I went to the instructor for help. He must have noticed through the semester that I had been taking notes in the lecture period–I was usually in the front row. But in this lab session he bellowed at me for five minutes, in front of the class, about how I was supposed to have done it right–several things I had put in the wrong place. He didn’t faze me, because I had encountered this attitude from my bullying older brother and my drunken former stepfather.
Well, I hunkered down and returned to the assignment, and made corrections, and a couple of sessions later, I got it right. I handed it to him and asked politely, “Is this more like it?” He examined it, and then announced to the class that he had chastised me before, but I had done it right this time and now did not deserve criticism. That was that, and I was satisfied. (For a while, anyway. When I proudly told my Mom how I had done, she said, “Oh, that’s just great!” and told me about some incident when a teacher made a fuss about my good classwork and told the other kids, and somebody pulled a knife on me! This is supposed to have happened in first or second grade, but nobody pulled a knife on me until eighth grade. :rolleyes: )
One of my high school teachers was ruthless when it came to comments directed at girls. She was probably about 35ish and pretty average looking. For the most part she was good at what she taught and mostly fine with the majority of students. What was crazy was that she would occasionally pop off with the most horrible remarks to a few girls.
In the class I had her in it was always the same girl she’d talk shit to. I can only really remember the one specifically because it was so vulgar and cruel, but I know she’d said a few things to the girl before. For the one I remember the teacher was walking up and down the aisles to check that we’d done our homework when she stopped at the poor girl’s desk and said something like “You know, people would probably like you more if you didn’t smell so bad. Doesn’t your mother wash your clothes? Maybe she should take you to the gyno to see if it’s a medical issue.”
About half the people in class laughed nervously, the rest just sat there in shock. The girl laid her head down on the desk and said not a word. The teacher paused a minute and then just started teaching.
I remember wondering why her mother didn’t come up to the school rolling heads but I suppose she was too embarrassed to tell her mother. When I think back on it, I am embarrassed that I didn’t say anything to the teacher or to another teacher afterwards. I remember my friends and I talked about it later and it seemed like people said she’d do that occasionally and it was always to some girl who was a bit backward or shy.
I can’t remember ever being bullied by any of my teachers growing up, but it might just be because it was so long ago.
However, my girlfriend’s 13-year-old grandnephew was recently humiliated by his female gym teacher and the more I stew over it the more it angers me. We only know about it because his one friend from school told his mother who emailed my gf’s niece.
Apparently this bitch has the kids run/jog the track two times, and when they finish they get to go back to the gym to play dodgeball or basketball or whatever. Now my gf’s grandnephew is easily 100 lbs overweight and not at all athletic. He’s actually been making changes to his diet lately(as much as a 13-year-old can) and has started walking around the block a few times every night. Unfortunately for him he’s always the last person to finish “jogging” the track and needs his equally unathletic buddy to walk along side him for moral support.
So this garbage gym teacher of his–just as he’s nearing the finish–says to him, in front of a group of pretty girls that are also in her dance class, that he needs to ask his mom to buy him a bra and some deodorant. And then they all laughed. WTF?!
Apparently this gym teacher has a habit of singling-out and bullying the poor kid. My girlfriend’s niece has already arranged for a meeting with the head of the athletics dept. and the assistant principal over this. I hope that some heads are gonna roll, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the teacher only gets a warning. Gym teachers in general have a knack for being shitty people without suffering any repercussions.
I still remember the inadvertently hurtful comment* I made early in my teaching career. Student rightfully so called me on it and it was an important moment for me as a teacher. When you take charge of a classroom, even of adults, your words become powerful. One-offs and little jokes that you could say to a friend now have serious weight and can really impact someone.
The flip side is that I’ve found small words of encouragement also have weight and I can make a strong positive impact just as easily. Either way, however, it’s amazing how ruthlessly easy it is to say something a student will never forget (for good or bad). Every word counts when you’re in front of a class.
*Worst part was the comment was said to encourage another student and make her feel better. I didn’t realize the implication until the other student was not happy with me.
A student was anxious because she was always the very last person to hand in a test and she said it made her feel stupid, like she didn’t know the material. Test anxiety and all that. She was a fine student- top third in the class- solid B/B+.
So I, to reassure her, said in earshot of other students that she should not worry, the test time was hers to take as much as she was allowed-
and this is where I blew it-
I said “plus, often people who hand in their tests early and quick didn’t know the material anyway”.
So another student (bright, quick, A student) said- “great. Now whoever hands in their test first will look stupid”.
She was completely right. I propped up one student by knocking others. My intention was good, my observation actually often true, but really, not a cool comment.
Reading all these stories makes me feel irritated because I doubt teachers (not saying all) will even admit being cruel. They just don’t know any better and prolly not too self-aware. Plus, it would take a lot to admit fault.
I often think of karma, because someone spoke of Phys.Ed. teachers, come to think of it, the Phys.Ed. teachers I’ve seen seemed to be the unhappiest, unsmiling folks I’d ever seen. There was a longtime Phys.Ed. teacher that retired after 27yrs and a few yrs afterward I saw him at a museum looking like a porker. I was shocked at how much weight he gained.
Definitely could use some posts from more recent users for this one.
rolling up sleeves…
In grade 9 in '79, there was an algebra teacher named Mr. Berringer, who looked he was already past retirement age - a shorter, slightly hunched, weaslier, more beady-eyed version of an elderly Jim McKay, with pants almost up to his belly, and boasting not one but two incredibly unique, incredibly annoying laughs: a bouncy, manic, Daffy Duck-like giggle, or, a sudden gasp of air that BURSTS out of pursed lips and then trails off in an extended wheeeeeeeeeze.
These laughs - infrequent, absurd, jarring, frequently imitated - did not, in any way, mitigate the supreme awfulness of this Little Ball of Hate, (heh - thanks Pat), ready to rip anyone’s head off over any chatterers or dum-dums.
Most Lords help you, then, if you asked him a question that he felt you should have already known, and so it’s possible I was more in the dum-dum category, here. His dreaded slow walks, up and down the aisles, looking over shoulders, were the worst, starting with raising your hand for help when he wasn’t nearby on his route. Having to walk several rows over already put you in bad stead with him, so you learned to raise your hand only when you knew he was swooping up behind you.
And then came the questioning, which in my case, was always an affront to him. His response would start off looking heavenward, slumping his shoulders, rolling his eyes, and letting out the most aggrieved, the most pained, put-upon sigh / gasp of exasperation, as if someone had dropped a wedding cake on him or something.
And then came the “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO, NO!!!” (yes, a crescendo)
“…I dont know why I bother sometimes…”
“Oh that’s absolutely gawd-awful.”
Senior year of high school was 1975, and I still give thanks that “Doc” W. wasn’t my teacher for any actual subjects, just homeroom. Most of his obnoxious comments to me, I let roll off my back, but he has earned my eternal hatred for what he said to my friend C. a nerdy, socially inept kid who loved writing lyrics for songs in future musicals and got picked on by almost everyone.
C. was being raised by his widowed mom, and this supposed teacher told him in front of the entire class, “C, your father died to get away from you.”
mad:
