I cannot even believe some of these stories! If I ever have kids I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they know that they can tell me if their teacher crosses the line. Smearing gum in kids’ hair? Making them sit on your lap during detention? My god! Fortunately, I never encountered anything even close to some of these stories.
As a side note, I went to Catholic school for a year. Worst year of my life too! Both the teachers and students were awful.
Golly. My confession * pales * compared to some of these!
I also had an eighth grade teacher named Helen Ferguson in Jane Addams School in Lawndale, CA, 1962-63. My Mom was pregnant with my younger brother when school started; the teacher gently chided me after PTA night for not mentioning that my mother, who had come to school that evening, was expecting. (OK, so I was jealous.) That’s not the worst part. My younger brother–whom I am quite proud of now–was born over the Christmas vacation. The first day back the teacher bawled me out in front of the class for not announcing that a baby had been born in the family! Is that cruel or what?
A few years ago I worked as an exam proctor for the L. A. County Office of Education. When I was hired one of the papers they asked me to sign was that I would report a “soft tie” if I knew of one.
I asked, “What’s a ‘soft tie’?”
It means that a teacher will take a soft cloth and hog-tie a child, behind his/her back, and lock him/her in a closet for a while as punishment!!!
I thought, Damn right I’ll sign it! I would report that to the police, the teachers’ union, the child’s parents, and the district attorney! I don’t think even *[prisons * do anything like that!!
Veera
This happened in 7th Grade…when a kid’s self-esteem is usually at a point where it can’t really get any lower. My teacher, Mr. Lane (who’s favorite line was, "Read my big, fat, black lips!–he terrified me) used to announce on a regular basis who had the top three grades in the class. Well, on this one particular occasion he announced the top score, then launched into a speech about how he just couldn’t believe who had come in second. He checked and re-checked the grades again, sure he had tallied the numbers wrong, but sure enough, this person had surprisingly come in second. He couldn’t be more surprised. I knew it was me…was already half-way under my desk by the time he finally said my name. I was so embarrassed. Why was it such a big surprise that I would have one of the best grades in the class? Just because I was quiet and shy and he liked the loud, obnoxious kids better? I had been afraid of the guy before, but after that I hated him.
11th Grade–Not really an embarrasment, but it really angered and disappointed me. It was History class (I loved history), and Mrs. Cain was one of my favorite teachers. One day I realized I had forgotten my folder in my locker, so I asked her if I could go get it before the class really got started. She says sure and waves me on. On my way back to class I get stopped by the Vice-principal for not having a hall-pass. I explained, and he called my teacher out into the hall. She totally denies letting me go, and then has the nerve to turn and reprimand me. When she was the one who let me go in the first place! She just did it to save her own butt.
I dunno…now that I see it written down, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But it really made me mad at the time.
I’m afraid my teeth-gritting memory isn’t as traumatic or embarassing as the above (I’ve repressed all those) but here’s a little story to let you know the ignorance doesn’t end when you go to college. Now I realize perfectly well that if this was the worst thing that ever happened to me I would be truly fortunate, but it’s one of those little things that stick with me.
So…senior year, I’m part of an internship program - mine is at a museum. In the program , you’re supposed to do a final project. They assume it will be a monster paper, but don’t state it officially. The project will get a dual grade from the museum(or whereever the student interns) and from the college, with the final grade averaged from the two. My boss at the museum decides my project will be to design an exhibit. So I do, and give it to her. She gives it an A-. Keep in mind this is a blueprint, and unless you know how to read one it will be incomprehensible.
So the history professor assigned to read this does and says she doesn’t understand it. She arbitrarily (her word) gives it a B, making the final grade B+. I suggest giving it to the college museum curator for him to assess. This works its way to the department head, who informs us that the museum curator is not academically qualified (note: this isn’t an assessment of this individual, but of the job title) because he’s not an official instructor/professor. Never mind he’s apparently the only one on campus that can understand the bloody thing. Never mind that as a college museum curator he presumably is well-versed in academia. The capper came when no one could understand why I was upset, because after all, I got a B+. Followed by a snotty comment about how I really should have written a paper, and that I should take the grade and run (OK, words to that effect).
Well, why I was upset was not at the teacher who didn’t understand the blueprint - hey, I respected that she admitted it. But I was thrown by the open announcement that form was more important than content - after they had spent the previous 4 years preaching the opposite.
OK, I’d like to know how you parents would handle this…
My cousin is in second grade. She forgot her lunch and asked if she could call home to have someone bring it to her. Her teacher told her “no” and that she’d just have to learn a lesson from this. Megan apparently had no money so she went all day without eating. When her parents picked her up, she was white as a sheet with a headache and stomach cramps from hunger. My uncle is a highschool teacher in the same school district. He can’t say anything because it’s a well-known fact in that partcular school district that, if you are a teacher and you take up for your kid against a fellow teacher within the same district, the teacher you confront will do everything they can to make your child’s school year miserable (and this is a Catholic school system!!!) Now, I don’t think my uncle would do this to a student of his if their parent confronted him but it’s apparently widespread enough that other teacher’s keep their mouths shut if they feel their kid is being mistreated. Anyway, that evening was an open-house and my aunt confronted the principal who told her that no child is allow to make any phone calls. Their telephones are for business purposes only.
My mother was pretty angry about the whole thing. Her question is: So what exactly IS their business?
When I was in school, I remember calling home for my lunch or forgotten homework. Personally, I never liked the shame of having forgotten something so I did my best to remember things. My teacher’s/parent’s anger was enough to teach me a lesson. Once in a while, I forgot something and I was allowed to call home for it. Hell, I’m 25 now and I still occassionally forget things. However, being 25 and not in jail, I usually have money with me, I can get to a phone, or, if someone tells me I’m not allowed to use the phone, I can tell them to fuck off.
As a former teacher, and I’m sure there are lots of other posters here who can back me up, the school is “in loco parentis” (I hope I spelled that right). This means that they legally take parental responsibilities during school hours. I bet you could raise some real hell about not letting a little kid have lunch for the lack of a single local phone call, which wouldn’t cost them anything anyway.
Man, they used to actually loan us the money itself at my school. I think you had a maximum of two loans on your tab before they cut you off.
I am a teacher (third grade), but there is no way in hell I’m coming to the defense of any of these cruel freaks. To say their behavior is unprofessional is far more than an understatement–it’s absolutely horrifying. I hope every one of them got their asses fired, if not dragged into court.
I grew up the social outcast, and frankly, I think that is to my advantage as a teacher. I was so painfully ostracized and easily humilated for most of my elementary life–it’s made me quite sensitive to the emotional well-being of my students. Next to the academia, a sense of mutual respect is what I want to impart most to my students.
These freaks got off on the power, as pathetic as it is to feel powerful over a group of 8-year-olds. Indefensible frauds. And Zette–you go girl!
“Me fail English? That’s unpossible!”
“English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England.”
I’m a huge fan of teachers- most everyone in my family is a teacher, and my dad worked his way up to principal and then superintendant. I have tremendous respect for teachers.
BUT those few bad ones in the bunch can sure traumatize a kid for life. We had one substitute teacher who was just plain mean. There was one boy in our class who never talked, from kindergarten until he was in high school. We didn’t even know he COULD talk. The sub would always call on him and he’d just sit there… and she’d wait, and make snide comments, while the rest of us squirmed uncomfortably. If someone said, “Todd doesn’t talk”, she’d just get more angry until Todd finally ran out of the room in tears. There was also a girl named Anna Something whose last name was so impossibly Polish that nobody could pronounce it, not even her. That sub would harp on her, “What is your last name!” (when the girl’s name was written on the page right in front of her face) until poor Anna broke down into tears.
My personal story is about an evil woman who taught 7th grade. I was a desperately shy child who never spoke up in class or called attention to myself. In 7th grade, I was also suicidally depressed; I was going over the edge. It was the end of the day and I needed to ask the teacher a question, so I walked up to her desk and waited while she was talking to another kid. Bear in mind that I was so shy, it was a major accomplishment for me to be able to walk up to the teacher’s desk. Over the intercom, they were starting to announce buscalls, and my bus was one of the first to be called and I had a MAJOR phobia about missing my bus, so I decided the question wasn’t that important. I went back to my chair, and the teacher freaked out and was literally screaming at me in front of the whole class about how rude and impatient I was, blah blah; she must have shrieked for five minutes. Everyone just stared at me with their mouths open; I’d never, ever been yelled at before. I’d never, ever been in trouble before. This incident probably wouldn’t have much effect on a kid who wasn’t so shy and suicidal, but I’ve never been able to get over it.
My eight grade history teacher Mr. Fleming used to ride my ass every f-ing day, no matter if I acted like a little bastard or a angel.
He would never give me the benefit of the doubt on tests/quizzes/papers… but if you were a cheerleader, or flirted with him, you only had to sign your name to get an “A”.
One day I was screwing around in class, like everybody else (probably because the perv was helping another cheerleader so he could look down her shirt) and he stands up and says “Henderson, who the hell raised you, cavemen? Stand up here.” He then ripped me a new one in front of the whole class for a good five minutes…“you have zero manners…not enough sense to get out of the rain…blah, blah”. I was so shocked I couldn’t speak and my throat got really tight (I think I was trying not to cry) and he asked me what I had to say for myself and I couldn’t say a word.
He then assigned me to a week of detention, right smack dab in the middle of basketball season, so I missed three games and my parents were quite pissed, so I was grounded for multiple weeks.
The payback came around ten years later when I was home from college out drinking with my friends when I took my buddy’s swiss army knife and flattened the bastard’s tires.
Paybacks are hell you pervert SOB.
The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don’t have it.
George Bernard Shaw
My most evil teacher was Mr. Thornhill, whom I had in the 6th grade. Up until that year, I’d been an A and B student, and had a good rapport with teachers. Maybe I sucked up and was a “pet,” but I prefer to see it as having been taken under their wings. I loved my teachers and, being an isolated social outcast too, usually got along with them better than I did my own classmates.
Anyway, we got off on the wrong foot the first day of school when I gave him a picture I’d drawn (blossoming artist nipped in the bud) and he announced (in front of the class, natch), “What, are you trying to be the teacher’s pet?” Another time, as a lark, I wrote my entire name, full first name, middle, and last, on a test before handing it in. Again, in front of the class, he announced, “Katheryn Lois Barber… if you’d spent as much time studying as you did writing your name, you would have done better on the test.” Once he even chided me for limping after I fell and got a large goose-egg (bump) on my leg, saying, “Surely it can’t hurt that bad!” He was also the only teacher to ever give me detention.
So in one year I went from being an A and B student to a D and F student. I stopped caring. I just hid in the back of the classroom reading or drawing and hoping not to draw anyone’s notice. How I graduated high school, I’ll never know. Someone musta took pity on me.
The thing that I keep turning over and over in my head was the fact that I ran into that fat bastard once in a grocery store when I was in high school, and I failed to say what I really wanted to say. He actually asked me if I was still as good of a student as I was in the 6th grade. I wish I could have said, “You thought I was a good student? How come you never told me? How come you never gave me any support or encouragement? No, I’m not as good of a student because I didn’t know I was a good student. You made me think I was a horrible student so I gave up!” Instead I just looked at him in stunned silence for a few moments, muttered, “No,” and scurried away.
I hate him.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
My high school choir teacher was a complete ass. He had zero faith in me (or in any kids today, for that matter), and seemed to resent giving me soloes. My parents hated him. At least he was forced to acknowledge I had a decent voice–when he needed a Vivaldi solo, or a Gilbert and Sullivan lead, sometimes there was just no other choice. But it was always, “Here, sing this,” never complimentary or affirming. He favored the sweet Mormon cheerleader sopranos, talking about them as if they were ideals–leaving this dark (I was in the all-black clothing artistic crowd), sardonic alto even more insecure than when she walked in there. That’s quite a statement, I must say.
The prick would blame US if we didn’t know our music. He once even said, “You guys are the ones that will look bad, not me.” How completely contrary! He chewed us out, insulted us, and nearly stereotypically bragged about the “good ole days”–we all would cringe when he’d begin the, “Well, I remember back with the Emeralds [his select group from the '60s) when…” Never mind he never taught us anything about music (except the one day every other year he was observed by an administrator). Never mind that he just didn’t care. Bastard.
I can’t even begin to list the things he said to me that were horribly crushing–I had that bastard for all four years–and prefer to keep his sharp comments blocked in my memory.
The only thing I do remember is when he said (to another student, when the three of us were talking): “What’s the point of giving her a solo? She gets sick for every concert, anyway.” That hurt like hell. And no, I didn’t get sick at every concert. I think the number was 3 in 4 years. It gave me an anxiety problem before every concert, though. Man, I hated him.
There are insidious rumors about the man that I am inclined to believe. I, too, ran into him at a drug store (why can’t we run into the GOOD teachers?), but didn’t say what I thought of him. I couldn’t. He looked atrocious, and really, he was already facing the consequences: he’d been forced into retirement, he had no spouse, no children, no siblings, no roommate, no parents…the man is utterly alone. I actually felt sorry for the jerk. Not that I said that.
It’s funny–we both had the same reaction when we saw each other: “Oh. It’s you.” And that was pretty much it. Jerk.
Thank God for my college music professors!
Dougie: When you started that thread, bet you had no idea it would turn into a mega-therapy session. I, myself, didn’t have any such traumatizing experiences although I remember that, when I was in elementary school we had a principal who had a certain fondness for the strap, which he would administer freely in the corridor (so that everyone could hear) to a select number of victims - some, real troublemakers, others less - on a more or less periodic basis. Said victims would then rejoin their classes, tears flowing, under the watchful eye of said principal who stood in the doorway tapping gently his left hand with the strap held in his right one. For the few minutes they lasted, the sound of the strapping (and occasional wailing) followed by the silence in the classroom in the presence of the principal and the punished were both deafening in their own ways. Some 40 years later, I can still hear both quite clearly.
–Eighth grade gym teacher, near the end of the year. Her name has either been forgotten or blocked out.
She was the stereotypical butchy lesbian gym teacher. I was always the girl who didn’t participate, or didn’t really give it 100%, at any rate.
When I didn’t dress out one day (because I’d taken my clothes home to be washed and forgotten to bring them back) Ms. WhateverHerNameWas went ballistic on me, physically pushing me around, screaming that she knew that I’d left them home on purpose so I could get out of class, that I was the worst student she had, that of all the girls, I was the one who needed gym the most, etc.
I was not overweight when I was in school and there were plenty of girls who never dressed out, plenty of them dangerously obese. I told her she could go fuck herself (I’ll admit, I could be mouthy when necessary) and that I wouldn’t be taking her class for the rest of the year. “That’s just fine with me, you fat, lazy little bitch, you’ll have an F,” she shouted (in front of everyone.)
I left the gym and went to the principal’s office and told him what happened. The other girls corroborated my story.
We had a sub in gym for the rest of the year. YAY!!
–High school drama teacher, name withheld. All through high school, this woman tormented me.
She gave me wonderful plays to read, (pieces of them anyway, for class presentations), helped me figure out which roles to audition for in school productions, etc.
Then she would cast OBVIOUSLY less-talented girls in roles that she’d recommended to me, and so on.
She made me retake one of my finals (which nobody else had to do). She took me aside a few times and told me that she knew I was capable of more, blah blah blah, and, it being Drama, I tried to keep my composure, try harder, be better… but she kept casting the same kids, giving them the great reviews for lackluster performances, all the while overlooking me and several other really good actors/actresses.
I finally did discover why the same kids kept getting the parts and the grades. I took the time to read the “Special Thanks To” section in the program for the last play of my senior year…
You know how sometimes they’ll list all the people that contribute cash to the local playhouse, art festival, or high school drama department? And sometimes they’ll classify it according to how much was contributed? (Diamond: 500 or more, Gold: 200-500, Silver: 100-200, and so forth) I actually read through the contributions list during intermission.
The parents of each and every student who’d been cast in that play were listed in the Diamond class… the ones that had contributed $500 or more to the Drama department. Not all of these kids were awful, one or two of them were pretty good. But as for the majority of them, I KNEW that I and some of the other Drama class and Drama club members were better.
The fact (or theory, rather) that my teacher’s favour was purchased, rather than earned, has been nagging at me since I graduated six years ago.
Having never been cast ONCE, not even in a small role, my confidence in my acting ability went straight down the toilet.
Throughout high school, I didn’t know whether or not I wanted to pursue acting after graduation, but I was very interested in, at least, doing local plays. It’s been six years since I read that list. I’ve not auditioned once.
Internally, I know that I’m good enough, but for some reason I still carry it around and anytime I consider auditioning for local stuff, I get this naggy little voice saying, “Why bother, someone else is going to pay their way into a part, so why even waste your time?”
Silly, I know, but it is the way it is.
Veni, Vidi, Visa … I came, I saw, I bought.
[Note: This message has been edited by Eutychus55]
Ok, speaking of embarrassing, why didn’t my UBB work?
Eutychus, if you can fix, please do. If not, I suppose it’s just one more thing to torture myself with…
Veni, Vidi, Visa … I came, I saw, I bought.
You used a forward slash (), not a backslash (/).
This is a slash: /
This is a backslash: \
Anyway, ChrisCTP, you used the wrong one.
My English teacher accused me of plagarising a story that I wrote. The kicker is, he thought I had stolen Beowulf, even though he’s never read it himself! Hard to believe he’d never read it, but he was a gym teacher who somehow got the job of teaching English too. He said he showed it to somebody else and they said it was plagarised. Oh, that’s convincing evidence. The only thing my story had in common with Beowulf was that it was a hero-kills-monster sort of story. I’ve always been a very good writer (and I use a very formal/archaic style sometimes), but come on; it was not Beowulf. I still have no idea if he flunked me on that paper; the rest of my grades in that class were all A’s so I didn’t bother to pursue it.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
ABC News has a story on this topic, in one of their weekly columns: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/InYourHead/allinyourhead.html