Rantlets of your past

The BBQ Pit
1

So what are the little rants you wish you could have posted some 10 or 20 years ago? Things that, even if they were current news, would be considered lame posts, but every now and then still bug the shit out of you?

For example: Ninth grade. Math class. The teacher was explaining to us that a number such as 123 should be pronounced “one hundred twenty-three”, and not “one hundred and twenty-three.” No “and”, just go straight from the hundres to the tens. So she went around the room asking students to repeat various numbers. “Three four three”, she asked one student.

“Three hundred forty-three”, the student replied.

“Good”, said the teacher. “Billy, seven five one.”

“Seven hundred fifty-one”, answered a bored Billy.

“Excellent”, the teacher beamed. “tdn, pronounce nine nine seven.”

I got all excited. I mean, I always thought math was sort of a breeze, but this? Answering this would be a snap. This was an easy A. Effortless brown-nosing.

I sat poised in my chair. I was up to the challenge. I had fantasies of the boys lifting me on their shoulders in triumph, girls throwing themselves at my feet in adoration, Harvard offering me a full scholarship, and that Nobel guy giving me a trophy of some sort. My victory was about to be realized. This was my diem, and I was about to carpe it.

I steadied myself, and snorted back the hocker that my recent cold had so generously provided me with. I drew in my breath, and let loose the brilliance of my answer:

“Nnnninehunnnndrednnnninetysevennnn.”

Oh no! She gave me one with a nine as the tens digit! And with my cold, I put extra emphasis on the N, making it sound like I said “and.”

“Try again”, her twisted maw belched.

“Nnnninehunnnndrednnnninetysevennnn.”

Crap! I did it again!

I could feel myself turning red as the foulspawn I called my classmates pointed at me and laughed. My teacher was suddenly wearing a witches hat, standing next to my mother who was wearing a jester’s hat, and both were chanting in unison “You’ll shoot your eye out, you’ll shoot your eye out!”

Evil nine-giver-outer bitch of a teacher then turned to innocent little Suzie, and said, “Can you please show Mr. tdn how to pronounce it right?”

Little Suzie, cute as a button, faced the evil teacher and said “Nine hundred”, then paused to turn to me, her sweet face darkening to that of prissy bitch, and bragged, “Ninety-seven.”

Damn that little slut! Had she not paused to darken her face to that of prissy bitch, she would have gotten it wrong too! Instead, I am left here looking like a fucking moron.

So here’s to my bitch of a former teacher: Fuck you, you algebraic asswipe, you quadratical cunt. The square root of you is fuck you, bitch. The absolute value of you is suck my mother fuckin’ dick. You^2 + ThisClass - Me = the hell with all of you. Times nnnninehunnnndrednnnninetysevennnn.

2

Did you stutter when you answered? Not sure I see what you said wrong there, so I have to assume the rant is the teacher picking on you.

Is this the case?

3

I don’t remember ninth grade math being Calculus or anything, but we at least were going over actual math instead of pronunciation issues. :rolleyes: Anyone in the real world (by which I mean, outside of the bizzare culture of high school) who bitched about someone saying “Nine hundred and ninety seven” would be seen as an idiot, far more than the person who made the ‘mistake.’ And isn’t that more of an English/grammar issue anyway?

It’s not been 10 years yet, but I’ll make that my mini-rant. All the idiotic stuff teachers taught me in 9th and 10th grade, much of it with the implication that we’d have to use this to succeed in college. Half of the things my 9th and 10th grade AP English courses tried to teach me about literature analysis and essay-writing were wrong. I had to unlearn it later and get back into the habit of writing essays that are actually cohesive and relevant instead of just paint-by-the-numbers formula essays. My 10th grade English teacher didn’t know that a protagonist doesn’t have to be a positive or heroic figure. Dear god, why was that the teacher for an AP class?!

And while I’m bitching, I still remember in middle school when one of my science teachers corrected me to tell me that Saturn is the only planet with rings. I was a sci-fi geek, don’t try to pull that crap with me, lady!

4

Try saying it out loud. If you still don’t get it, try emphasizing the N in “ninety.” Sort of sounds like “Nine hundred ‘n’ ninety seven.” If you still don’t get it, maybe it’s just me.

5

Minor rants from the past that never were? I’ve got one. I was extremely pissed off when I found out that the strung out chicken shits running Sesame Street decided to make it so that EVERYONE got to see (and therefore confirm the existence of) Aloysius Snuffleupagus. When I was a kid, we had to watch Big Bird get mocked and ridiculed becuase no one believed he was real. This sometimes frustrating phenomenon taught me about imagination. It taught me about cherishing friendships for what they are instead of the popularity they may bring. It taught me to be weary of grown ups becuase they often miss the point, and/or are too busy to stop and notice the magic of life. It taught me about not giving up on friends or my dreams, no matter how unrealistic they may be.

But some soft-skinned-cry-baby-bitch-bastard-whiney-1985-coked up-therapist-type-mother-fucker decided that this was too confusing for kids and now everybody can see the giant hairy muppet. Now this teaches kids that . . . that . . . oh yeah, it doesn’t teach em shit. They ruined the whole point of Snuffleupagus in a bout of wishy-washy-worry. He was reduced to just another pointless freak wandering the back alleys of Sesame street. Way to go you spineless jellyfish! Fuck you! Now Big Bird has murdered his best friend & is addicted to crack cocaine, Burt is a terrorist with a paper-clip pimpstick, and there is war and strife the globe over. Nice. Congratulations. Way to fuck up something that was good and beautiful!

I’ve had that one in me for a while. Never really warranted its own thread, but I feel much better now. . .

DaLovin’ Dj

6

tdn, this was a thing of beauty. I have one teeny, tiny suggestion, though. Instead of suck my mother fuckin’ dick, I would have went with suck my motherfuckin’ balls. There’s just something so funny about tea-bagging your math teacher.

And it’s been way too long since I’ve read a rant with the word cunt in it, a vastly under-used word, in my opinion.

Good job!

7

Why thankee, ma’am! I was just channelling Eddie Murphy, but I agree. And tea-bagging is an excellent term. I trust there is no need for me to point out the high correlatory possibilities between “tea-bagging your math teacher” and the overabundance of as-yet unnamed musical ensembles.

8

Ahh, I get it. But what threw me off was all the nnn’s. The teacher, in this case, was an idiot and deserves the aforementioned tea-bagging.

9

dalovindj, the reasoning I’ve heard behind that is that they thought it might be a really bad idea for kids to get the idea that when they tell the truth (in this case, that Snuffy exists) adults won’t believe them. In the case of sexual abuse or something, that could be really bad – “he said not to tell, and they won’t believe me anyway, so I guess I won’t.” That kinda makes sense to me.

As for my mini-rant, the asshole vice-principal who snuck up behind me one day when I was in ninth or tenth grade sitting in the hall talking to friends and patted me on the head can kiss my ass. The reason? Not so much the patting, as rude as that was. No, he can kiss my ass because I thought it was a guy I knew who would deliberately do that sort of stuff – I didn’t really mind, he was just a tease – so I turned around saying, “DAMN YOU!”

I got taken to his office and lectured on how I shouldn’t swear at vice-principals. Excuse me, asshole, YOU snuck up and PATTED ME ON THE HEAD. I know I’m fucking short, but I wasn’t in fucking PRESCHOOL either! NOBODY PATS ME ON THE HEAD WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION!!!

I know it sounds stupid. I should have spoken up at the time, but I was a basically good kid. I didn’t realize until several years later how stunningly inappropriate and rude it was for him to do that.

10

Heh, I had something kind of like that happen to me once. Kinda. OK, not really.

I was a senior in high school, and I desperately wanted to make my mark in the musical world. Being from a Very Small Town, I had few outlets to do so, so the school’s annual Gong Show (remember that shit?) was my chance. Most of the acts were quite beyond lame, so I figured it was a shoe-in for me to win, as long as I wrote an intelligent and cerebral song showcasing my virtuousity. Evidently, I miscalculated the sophistication of my audience. I was booed from measure two. I was never gonged, but was still booed throughout. When the curtain closed, I shot the audience the finger in a big way. Imagine my surprise at looking in the wings to see a teacher looking right at me and my finger.

She never got me in trouble, though.

Since we are pitting awful schooldays memories, here’s a big bonus fuck you to Mr. Hrffznfluegger or whatever the useless pile of excrement’s name was. This was in JHS, so I was maybe 14. I was walking down the hall with my friend Adam when Mr. Hrffrrgzuuger – about 6’4", 280 lbs, all of it in his arms – pushed Adam from behind. And not lightly. Hard enough that Adam fell on his face and broke his glasses. Please note that there was no provocation, no warning, and it was from behind. Mr. Hrfffnnneezzerg simply decided to assault a 14 year old.

Adam didn’t want to persue any sort of charges, but I hope that that asshole did that just once more and is now rotting away in prison for assaulting a minor.

Fucker.

11

This one is for Mr Peters, my fucking bastard of a Calculus teacher.

Yes, I had to spend half my senior year in high school trying to learn Calculus from someone who couldn’t teach, didn’t explain anything, and only barely gave a shit. I didn’t, surprise surprise, learn a whole lot, and had to take it again in college. Mr Peters confused me so much it was really hard to understand what I was taught in college – I had to unlearn a lot of the trash I had to assume to do the problems in high school.

Yes, I had to listen every day to sexist jokes. He joked about women every day that I was in the class. These were the kind of jokes that people would be fired for in a normal workplace, not less a school. He did it because there were only four girls in Calculus, and he knew we wouldn’t speak up. Bastard!

Yes, the last day of that class, he preached to us. He took us out of the school and made us sit in the bleachers of the football field. Then he told us all about Jesus and how our faith would see us through the rest of our lives.

I hate him. I hope he was fired, and then tied on a hill of fire ants. I hope ravenous mice chewed his testicles off. I hope his every day is full of pain and suffering, and I hope he lives the rest of his life broken, desolate, and that he becomes insane and homeless. I hate everything about him.

12

Since every post seems to be school related, I’ll add one from grade six that isn’t rant worthy, but annyed me then and still annoys me a bit now. Actually, on second thought I’ll add two, I didn’t like that teacher :wink:

First, when I was younger, I got picked on. A lot. By anybody who thought they coudl annoy me. So one day, in class, the girl next to me decides to start bugging me. In the middle of class. I’m trying to pay attention, being the sweet, innocent little girl I used to be, but that ain’t happening. Next course of action, trying to get her to back off. Well, in the end, we both got detention. I showed up for detention, and was told that it was for not paying attention in class. Which bothered me, because I was trying to pay attention but the other girl was being a bitch. But in the end, all I had to do was write some stuff on a card, and that’s what I wrote.

Second, this teacher never explained anything to us, ever, math in particular. He would assign some work and we were expected to do it. It wasn’t much of a problem, since the book had good explanations and I was a good student anyway, but then I missed a day of school. Did I get help with what I missed? No. I had to figure it out for myself. Not too hard, just a minor nuissance. Then I got detention for not having my homework from the day before (which I wasn’t there for, and was never told that I had to have it done). We were told to leave it out on our desks. Of course, I just had a blank piece of paper, so I wrote “Wasn’t here yesterday” on the sheet and left it as is. Still got in trouble. Ticked me right off.

13

My rantlet is for my high school algebra teacher.

Before graduation we signed up for our position in line for the ceremony (front, middle, or back). My partner and I signed up to be in the front third of the line so that we would be done before everyone got sick of the ceremony. When we were lined up for the practice run, we were almost dead last in the line, behind people who had signed up to be in back. My teacher was one of the coordinators, and when I saw her I asked politely if there was a mistake, since we were supposed to be near the front. Her answer? A yelled, “Tough! Things happen, suck it up! You want me to put you last?” Now, I’m sure she was stressed, but to this day I have no idea why she was so damn hateful about it. Mrs. T—, may you contract a nasty case of itchy, hairy anal warts.

Well, maybe just one wart. It wasn’t that big a deal.

14

I suppose I should add a minor rant about Mr. Rupersberger (yes, that was his real name), and other English teachers like him. He would give vocabulary words and definitions for us to memorize. The next day he would go around the room asking each of us what the definitions were. Those of us that thought for ourselves and gave definitions in our own words were told that we didn’t learn the assignment. The prissy-ass little brown nose teacher’s pet bitches would regurgitate the definitions word for word. They got praised for it. Hey Rupie, way to encourage mindless conformity, assnut.

This was the same guy, who, when asked for a definition of “hippie”, replied, “It means a fag.” Some how wishing to teabag that guy seems really wrong.

15

Mr. Ricketts was one of my worst teachers ever. He taught a class on herpetology and ornothology (reptiles/amphibians and birds, respectively). I took this class in my sophomore high school year. The man had a personal passion for birds, which is great, more power to him, but when those of us in his class didn’t share his enthusiasm for avian creatures he took it out on us by being a complete prick and making assignments very difficult, not to mention lowering student morale and increasing apathy. One time he handed out copies of a field guide for birds and he expected us to memorize about 200 or so species of birds in about a week’s time, as there would be a test on them later. When the test was given it was in the form of having him show slides of the birds (slides from his own personal collection). Most of the pictures only showed a small, indistinguishable bird on a distant power line or tree branch silhoutted against the sky taking up about 95% of the picture. Even if I had been able to study the whole guide in the insufficient time we were alloted (never mind the fact I had homework in other classes, plus a personal and family life), there would have been no way to identify the species of the birds. Most everyone in the class bombed on this test. I ended up getting a D in his class. I didn’t care. Like I said, he was an asshole and I don’t think anybody liked him anyway.

16

Then they should have simply had everyone start believing Big Bird, rather than everyone actually seeing AS. If they did it that way they would be addressing how children should deal with things that an adult was not there to see. As it stands, based on this logic, kids will learn to be comfortable telling adults things they already know to be a fact because they were there in the first place. When everyone can see him, he loses any message. It all becomes moot. It was pretty weak logic if you ask me. I think worries about the AS situation leading to children not discussing being mollested are completely misplaced. Overthinking to the highest degree. Probably by some Freud loving psychologist (or lawyer). Sometimes a giant harry elephant like muppet is just a a giant harry elephant like muppet . . .

DaLovin’ Dj

17

I had this biology teacher named <Agent Smith>Mr. Anderson</Agent Smith>. He was the kind of teacher who went off on tangents a lot – 'fact, he taught more tangents than biology. It was his last semester before he retired to Molokai, what did he care?

In any case. He would go off every now and then and tell us how girls these days needed to be modern women. Liberated women. Nineties women (since it was still the nineties at that point). We should reach out and take every opportunity we could.

Then something like, say, tools would come up in his tirade. Like this one day, he pulled out a hammer and asked, “Do any of you boys know what this is?”

In the silence that ensued, lil’ ol’ female me raised my hand and said, “It’s a ball peen hammer.”

And every time he would bring up something like cooking or sewing, it was addressed to us “ladies”. So much for us liberated nineties women. :rolleyes:

18

While I feel betrayed by Sesame Street myself, I don’t remember when Snuffy was invisible to everybody but Big Bird. So I don’t quite understand what the big deal there is – but I do understand feeling betrayed. The show’s going rapidly down the toilet. sigh

I’d also like to extend a fuck you to the whole administration at my middle school, for reasons which should have been fucking obvious at the time.

19

When I saw coven’s thread entitled Leafssuck! Leafssuck! Leafssuck!, I thought for a moment that s/he actually meant leaves. (Yes, I know it’s spring here in the USA, but it’s autumn in Australia (right?).)

Leaves do suck. If you have deciduous trees on your property, you know what I mean. They (the leaves) fall and fall and fall (don’t tell me that’s not why autumn is called “fall”) and no matter how much you rake, you’ll always be a step behind.

My childhood home was built on a small patch of cleared ground on a large property thick with trees. These trees were old. Word was, they were full-grown when the first settlers came to America. They were hundreds of feet tall, creating a canopy, and our property never got direct sunlight. (No wonder I was so depressed as a child.) And the leaves fell and fell, every year. From the time I was tall enough to wield a broom or rake, I put in my share of time raking and sweeping. It was actually easier when the leaves were wet: they would clump together and I could move a lot of them at once.

We didn’t bag or burn. We pushed them to the edge of the woods and let them return to the soil. Literally: when I was 14 and we moved, the leaves at the bottom of the pile had already decomposed and become dirt. Leaves leaves leaves leaves leaves. And, Mr. Rilch wants to take over his mom’s country property when she passes on. “Fine,” I said. “But we’re hiring somebody to rake the leaves.”

And to top it off, a few years ago, I mentioned this to MamaRilch, and she said…wait for it…“When did you ever rake leaves?”

:mad:

That’s just her: always trying to make it sound like I never did anything to earn my keep, while she worked like a dog. Look, (I told her), I’m not claiming that she made me rake leaves outside in November with no coat on. Or even that I did more than my share of the work. But I fucking well raked leaves.

20

Mine is a school rantlet as well. I stopped believing in God when I was 11. When I was 13 I was sent to a Church of Ireland boarding school where the headmaster was a C of I minister. I was forced to attend the Presbyterian church [my family’s religion] twice every sunday - even though I was totally upfront from the beginning about my lack of religious belief.

The crunch came when they started confirmation classes. I refused to be ‘confirmed’ as I didn’t believe in God. There were major rows, phone calls to my father, and intimidation, and in the end I was forced to go through with this farce. I remember that when I asked the headmaster ’ So, you want me to go to church and lie?’ he would never answer the question directly … he would bellow something about ‘every child in this school gets confirmed at 13’. What a hypocrite!!

It really bugged him later when we ‘had’ to do the C of I Synod exams in religious knowledge and I came first in the whole country with 99% - the prize was books up to a certain value - but I insisted on - and GOT, the money instead. He was pleased that someone in his school came top - but at the same time furious that it was me - the bloody atheist!!!