We’ve all encountered them: in school when we were growing up; in the workplace; in your house of worship; even on public transportation. MEAN PEOPLE! I am not referring to the Mussolinis and the Idi Amins or the Neros of the world. I’m not even necessarily referring to the physical bullies, although they certainly could fall into this category. I’m referring to the troublemakers and assholes that just seem to get the biggest kick out of starting shit with people for no other reason except that they “can.” Here’s what I am asking from the SDMB members: What are your encounters with these people, and looking back on it, why do you think they were like this? For example: I had a loathsome first grade teacher who was your stereotypical ugly spinster who singled out me and three other guys for regular harassment. As I grew older and eventually got to speak with others who had the bad fortune to have her as a first grade teacher, everyone seemed to agree that she hated boys, and she would always pick on a couple to be especially mean to. That was 45 years ago and I still remember her, as do my classmates. SO…that was one example but feel free to use examples from school, church, temple, your job, wherever. WHY are some people just plain MEAN!?
Have you MET people? Most of them are jerks or idiots!
A decade or so ago, I was a member of a group of friends that included a person who turned out to be mean. He was good at seeming very nice and agreeable. But he spent a lot of effort relating the supposed mean things one or another of us had said to the one they’d supposedly said the thing about. So he caused a lot of ill will among the group. And most of the things people supposedly said, he’d just made up. Why did he do it? I think he found seeing people get along well boring and liked to see the upset and fights. It was like a TV show where there had to be conflict for him.
What are your encounters with these people, and looking back on it, why do you think they were like this?
Lotsa people don’t make kindness to others their #1 priority, nor do they see the need to modify their own behavior to suit the pleasures of others. Everyone’s experienced what they’ve felt to be uncalled-for aggression. I’m not sure how useful it is, except as a cathartic exercise, to speculate why the aggressor was aggressive. It might be more interesting to hear from The Mean People® personally and have them explain themselves. I can think of any number of things that motivated the OP’s teacher.
I’ve had a few mean people in my life:
My fifth grade teacher hated children. She once let me go to the bathroom, and when I came back, started YELLING at me, screaming and everything, until I was almost in tears. Then she turned to the class and said, “That, kids, is anger displacement.” That’s right, she was teaching a lesson. She is also the only one who paddled me, ever. I hate corporal punishment in schools (and so did my mother, when she found out!) and don’t understand why you would ever allow a stranger to beat and humiliate your child. And no, it didn’t teach me any kind of lesson, it just taught me fear and terror.
When I was living in Nashville the girls there were very racist and absolutely vicious. There were these three blond girls who tormented the crap out of me and this half-black girl, every day. I hated them so much. Nashville in general sucked ass if you weren’t white, but they took it over the top. 
One of my first “real” jobs I had a coworker who reveled in making people’s lives miserable. She told us one day she woke up every day and planned who to torment all day long. I was one of her targets, as were many others. And we had a very close-knit group until she came in. She was a mean bitch…and then she got pregnant (by lying to her Catholic bf about birth control in the hopes that he would marry her) and got 100% meaner.
I don’t care so much about the day-to-day meanness you get when walking around. Ok, some people might just be in a bad mood or whatever. But this kind of day-after-day meanness makes me think, now that I am fully grown up, that the person must be just miserable.
You rang?
Every mean person I ever met that I came to know at all well had been ridiculed and mistreated most of his or her life. Garbage in, Garbage out.
My mother used to tell me that I should feel sorry for Mean People because god doesn’t make people that way and something horrible mush have happened to them to make them that way.
I think Mean People are miserable in themselves OR they are psychopaths who really just don’t care who they hurt as long as they get what they want.
We had the mean old lady across the street who if we dared to touch her yard would come out screaming at us and if our ball went into her yard she’d come out and take it. It was funny (or not) but even the dogs hated her and one day my dog trotted up her curved sidewalk, careful not to touch a single blade of grass, went onto her porch, jumped into her flower box and took a dump.
After her husband left her for another woman she told the one last person in the neighborhood still talking her that she regretted being so mean and it had been because her husband had been abusive.
However my sons father was Mean, and he enjoyed it. His favorite thing was to stir up trouble and he loved making people mad so he could laugh at them. He would brag about and make fun of them. That it would come back to hurt him through losing jobs and quite literally getting his ass kicked didn’t phase him at all.
I think some teachers are mean, especially to the boys because it’s a means of controlling the class. If they can terrorize a few of the boys the rest of the class will fall in line. I had a nun like that in 3rd grade. She was under 5’, tiny woman. Most of the students were bigger than she was.
I still remember her coming over to talk to my parents at the book fair and putting an arm around me while she was telling my parents most of her students were scared of her but she knew I wasn’t. Like HELL I wasn’t!
I think she really was a nice person under all that meanness, it was her way of taking and keeping control of a classroom.
Same thing happened to me too, only it was second grade. And it was 50 years ago. A spinster who apparently felt it was her duty to take boys down a peg, especially smart ones. (Years later, my nephew had the misfortune to have her as a teacher and the same thing happened to him.)
My son had that teacher for 6th grade a few years ago except she wasn’t ugly or a spinster. She had decided long ago that boys were trouble and her beliefs were confirmed over and over the harder she tried to force them to be quiet and stop moving through repeated humiliation. Other parents confirmed my feelings about her, too late for my kid to avoid her. She wasn’t mean, she was ignorant, misguided and poorly supervised. I’m sure she was nice to lots of other people, including the girls in her classes.
In the work world its nice people you have to watch out for. They think that being nice means they don’t have to carry their share of the load. Give me a mean co-worker over a nice one any day.
You remind me we had this mean old lady come down the stairs once to yell at my mom. I answered the door, and unwisely, shouted, “Mom! It’s the old lady from upstairs!” Well, I was eight. She proceeded to ream my mother a new one, saying how she wasn’t old - she was sixty if she was a day - and then started yelling at her to tell her I rode my roller skates in the hallway all the time.
When my mother could finally get a word in edgewise she told the old lady I didn’t own a pair of roller skates (truth: I just rented them from the rink when I went!) It was hilarious.
@Cjepson and Shiftless: It makes me wonder WHY those hateful people decided to become teachers in the first place. Let’s face it, teaching is a rough enough job as it is; going into it with a hateful attitude toward students that you haven’t even met yet is astounding and perhaps even slightly sociopathic.
In the work world its nice people you have to watch out for. They think that being nice means they don’t have to carry their share of the load. Give me a mean co-worker over a nice one any day.
Actually I have been employed with a number of mean people who also happened to be lazy asses. One in particular was especially lazy and we all had to literally do her work for her since the supervisor would dump her work on us. If she had to help us out she would ALWAYS do a horrible half ass job and screw us up. I recall being off for a few days and I saw what she did when she was “covering” for me. I showed the supervisor and complained and my supervisor replied “ok well then fix it.” When I griped that lazy harpy should fix it, my supervisor said “Don’t worry; she’ll be retiring in a few years” which was lower management speak for “I don’t really want to deal with this problem because it’s too much trouble and not worth my time when I get the others in the group to do her work instead.” Guess what: That was a GOVERNMENT JOB!
It is an interesting quandary and not easily dismissed.
I had quite a number of abusive teachers in my elementary and high school years. Of the two, it seems to me that my 1st through 7th years in elementary were much more unpleasant.
I remember quite vividly my 4th grade math teacher who treated me like I was something she scraped off of her shoe. Honest truth, she made math so uncomfortable that it took me until I was 2 years older to actually ‘get over it’. And I loved math at that point.
Fortunately, I did get over it but I still have a bit of a grudge against that woman. Meaningless as she may well be deceased, but I always wonder WHY somebody that spiteful would get a job training children. I believe that the problem has been somewhat abated by the oversight of concerned parents, but still the question is unanswered.
Are these people just inter-generational bullies?
That seems like a facile answer, but what rebuttal could one give?
I think I had her too, but in 2nd grade. This was a woman who never ever smiled or spoke a kind word to anyone. She had a rule that you couldn’t go to lunch until you finished your morning’s work. Well, I was very meticulous, and often didn’t eat my lunch until I was on the bus home. She also used to lock kids in the “cloak room,” which had neither air nor light. And she mentioned to our parents at a PTA meeting: “I hate all kids, especially boys.”
I was fortunate to have some really good grammer school teachers. Considering how bad my homelife was I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t been. But my fourth grade teacher was a terror. Long dark skirts, a tight gray bun…
Once I got up to sharpen my pencil. I guess because it was making noise she came up behind me, grabbed my shoulders, and shook me so hard my teeth rattled. I spent a lot of that year “out in the hall” for constant infractions. My mother wouldn’t get me school supplies so once she had me stand up in front of the class all day long. Like that was going to make me suddenly decide to bring notebook paper?
After that, she had another kid in class go get me some of that grayish, hugely lined 2nd grade paper and a fat, stubby pencil.
Yeah, I learned a lot that year.
There are a lot of people out there who never got the lesson that you should treat others the way you’d want to be treated. This is reinforced by the fact that being a giant asshole will get you a lot of immediate results in life, especially when you’re screaming or intimidating people who are in a service position. Everything from waiters and salespeople, all the way up to employees and business partners: “I’m paying you, I should be getting what I want and I should be getting it five minutes ago! Why are you such a worthless human being?!” There’s a time and a place for screaming, but there are far too many people for whom it’s the first response to any situation.
Long term, I console myself with the fact that most of them are miserable people. What else can you really do?
Here’s a hypothesis:
Some people get into teaching because they view it as fun, with short days and summers off. That’s not uncommon. I’ve met adults who think that’s all that teaching is.
Then they find out that it’s hard work. The kids are ungrateful, the hours are tediously long, the pay sucks, and the teacher is expected to uphold (at least the illusion of) a squeeky clean life.
After a few years of this, with possibly no forseeable alternatives, they start to see their life as a miserable failure. And whose fault is that? Those damn kids! In other words, they’re projecting their own misery onto their charges.
In dysfunctional relationships someone is always being mean. Unemployment, bitter divorces, addiction, gambling, cheating, etc. etc. Don’t they all produce angry mean children and adults?
Like bullying, children learn what they live.
Everybody wants to talk about bullying without addressing the real issue. If a five year old is acting out like this, chances are someone in their life is too. One of his parents may be bullying the other or the children.
I’ve known lots of people like this.
A 4th grade teacher who would bust both people she caught cheating on a test, the cheater and the cheatee. Since I got copied off of regularly I got busted several times for something I didnt do. She went out of her way to call me a cheater, and sent notes home with me to my parents telling them that I cheated on tests. One time I missed a day cuz I was sick, and the class was shown a movie about Muslim culture. The next day she announced a test on the movie, and stood in front of me and said that she wondered how well I was going to do given that I decided to skip her class the previous day.
Damn. I’ve actually known a bunch of teachers like this. Bad memories. Between them and the constant bullying in grade school & high school, I really hated school.