This was my son’s karate instructor who is currently still sitting in jail. What’s worse is that his wife, who co-owned the karate school (and now is the sole owner) had just given birth to their first son like…a couple of weeks before this? She announced immediately that she was filing for divorce, which says to me that she knows he is guilty (otherwise you’d think she’d try to defend him, right?)
My own inappropriate teacher wasn’t inappropriate in any sexual way, and nothing like what some of you guys’ stories are, but I’ll ramble on at length about it anyway because it’s therapeutic.
When I was in 6th grade, my teacher, Ms. Stockton, was loved by almost everyone. That’s because she was really nice and funny and so on to about 98% of her students. But every year she picked out one or two kids in her class to treat like utter crap. I was one and so was a girl named Alicia who was in my class. She would regularly try to humiliate us in front of the class. For example, Alicia was painfully shy and Ms. Stockton would constantly make up examples for her lessons that “starred” Alicia and usually involved things like dating or having crushes on boys in the class. These were examples for things like math and it was a stretch for her to make them up, and they were designed only to make Alicia turn bright red and try to melt into her chair.
Another example of her oh-so-nice attitude toward those of us who weren’t her favorites: A little background: I’m bipolar, and started showing signs of this as early as age 4. I started having suicidal thoughts somewhere around 4th or 5th grade. I saw a psychologist once a week from the time I was about 6 until I was 17. OK so one day at school I was going into a serious depressive episode. You know that feeling you get sometimes when you’re carrying, say, a stack of dishes, and you think “what if I just dropped these?” and part of you is actually a little bit afraid that you won’t be able to stop yourself from doing it? Well I was having that kind of thought about diving head first off the top of the swingset onto the hard-packed ground. I used the payphone during lunch to call my psychologist, hoping that I could talk to her about it. She wasn’t available (I think she may have been out of town?) so I went to the school nurse. She had me sit in the nurse’s office for a while, probably not knowing what the hell to do with me. In the meantime, Ms. Stockton was very concerned that I not get bored sitting in the office, so she sent up about 30 pages of math worksheets to do. Math was my worst subject and she knew I hated it. Nice thing to do to a kid who’s already feeling like hurting/killing herself. Also math related: we were working on something new in class but I’d been absent the day before when it had been explained. I tried to pick it up on my own but it was a new concept (don’t remember what) and I just didn’t get it without having it at least shown to me once. The teacher was walking around the room helping kids and answering questions. I put my hand up. She came over and I said “I don’t get this, can you show me how to do it?” and rather than just helping me with it, like she’d done for everyone else, she rolled her eyes, did a big dramatic sigh, and stood up to address the class: “Can someone come help Katherine? She doesn’t understand.” Gee thanks. Deny me the benefit of actually being taught the material AND humiliate me in front of the class, all in one shot.
She gave me a failing grade on my science fair project because I was out of town that whole week visiting my dying grandmother who lived over 2500 miles away (who died the day after we got back) and so I’d had a classmate take it to school for me. The classmate set it on the table but didn’t open it up–it was one of those standard 3-panel cardboard things. Since it was still folded up on the table and therefore not being displayed, she marked it as a zero. Since the majority of that quarter’s science grade was based on that project, I got an F on my report card. When I got back from the trip it was just a week or so until Christmas break. She gave me a massive stack of make-up work that I’d “missed” while I was gone, and told me I had to have it finished by the end of the 2-week break. It was almost all math. Several whole workbooks full. When I got back and said to some of the other kids “wow you guys did a lot while I was gone” they looked at it and said “uh, we didn’t do any of that stuff.” In fact, a lot of the stuff I didn’t actually learn in any class until I got to algebra, a couple of years later. The teacher just wanted to make sure I was totally miserable over the break.
And one time, as a punishment for something (I think it was not turning in my homework) she made me go out at lunchtime and instead of letting me eat lunch [which by the way, we did outside as our school was too small to have a cafeteria of any sort] she made me sweep the blacktop. The blacktop is the size of a basketball court. It’s black asphalt. It was Tucson at noon in a hot month, so probably over 100 degrees. The broom she gave me was a toy broom about the size of a large paintbrush. It didn’t have a handle, so I had to sit on my heels or go around on my knees to sweep.
She also once told the class that when women have an abortion, the doctors don’t tell them beforehand that they will hear their baby screaming as the doctor kills them, but that it was true and for most women it traumatizes them for life. (Yes, it was a Christian school.)
