It sounds like this experience has become a focal point for a longer period of time. If it was just the teacher, it might help to do something about it. But is it that, or are you trying to “fix” that entire period of your life?
I have been a teacher for ages. I have met teachers like your math teacher. Personally, I think they should be stoned to death.
However, save your breath and time. Assuming that asshole is still teaching, there is absolutely nothing you can do or say to make him change his ways.
Should you feel the need to get revenge, find out if he is still teaching. If that is the case, write a letter to the principal or superintendent of the school district and simply say what you have said; politely and in a “just want to let you know” kind of way.
This will go into that teacher’s permanent record. Not that that will really mean anything at this point in time, but in case anyone might be stupid enough to want to promote him higher in his department, this will not look good.
Although I can understand your resentment, and kind of applaud your efforts at stopping him from doing the same to other kids, I think you should let it go and let karma work its wonder.
I agree that he wasn’t “kind of a dick.” He is a miserable person who shouldn’t be allowed to be around children. I’m willing to bet that he scarred other people. He has deep emotional problems that drive that kind of bizarre, inappropriate behavior. You wouldnt’ be able to get through to him.
Don’t waste your time on him.
What an asshole. I agree to let it go though - and I know how hard that is when you’ve stuff that you just need to say. A boss once said to me ‘You’ll be waiting a long time for an asshole to admit he’s an asshole’, and, while there are one or two people I don’t think I’ll ever be neutral about until they are grovelling at my feet, weeping and gnashing teeth at their regret over the wrongs they did me, it’s true - part of being an asshole is not thinking you’re an asshole.
I find I get closure on something when I talk about it to a friend and they get righteously indignant/angry on my behalf - for me, it’s all about acknowledgment, even if it’s not from the person himself. Tell a friend or your parents the whole sordid story and bask in their deserved sympathy for a bit. Then write a letter to the asshole saying everything you want to say, and don’t send it.
I also agree that if you are going to get in touch with him, 22 is not the age to do it. Better wait until you’re 30 and have won a Nobel Prize… 
Strange, the same thing happened to me. I would like to do it too, but it has been more than 10 years and I have no idea where he is or whether if he is still alive.
The best thing is just to imagine it and let it go. Some books suggest writing a letter as if you are addressing him, and let it be.
Find out where he lives, blow up his letter box.
He is probably not teaching anymore. Thank goodness. It would have been great if you had talked to someone about it and prevented other children from going through the same abuse but I can understand the fear of authority at that age.
Writing a letter is pointless. Writing it all out here was probably good therapy.
Thirded. Contacting him now is unlikely to end well. He’ll still be an asshole, and you’ll probably feel like crap after having to deal with whatever shit he flings at you in return. Fuck that guy.
But I do like the suggetions about writing to your good teachers. You know, I should do that. Brother E. was a great influence on me, and I think he should know that.
God, I had two fifth grade teachers just like this. Mean old harridan and a horrible old man for the other. And I was a good student - I mean A’s except for B’s in maths, and intelligent, bright, and eager. But these guys did the same thing.
I remember coming into the room once after legitimately asking for the bathroom pass, and Mrs. Donlin started YELLING at me, telling me what a horrible little kid I was, for a full minute or so - then she turned to the class and said, “Class, that’s displaced anger.” And sat down. Never explained or apologized.
Mrs. Donlin also paddled me, for not getting my homework signed by my mother for three days in a row. :dubious: I hated her, and Mr. Schenck, while nowhere near as bad, was worse.
But I agree with the others that they only take up space in your soul if you let them. Those moments have never left me but I don’t let them eat at me - I had an advantage in not keeping grudges because I kept them all for my mother, but I have even let go of that bile now, mostly. They are old now, and telling them wouldn’t accomplish anything. Everything he said about you was wrong, and him saying it never made it right.
I sorta had a similar experience, though with a person who was a child in the same class, not a teacher.
I’m now 41, happily married with a child, and I’m a lawyer by profession. I am by outwards appearances a “successful adult” - but of course I’m still the same person as the nerdy, insecure child I was back in grade school.
Back then, I was utterly friendless and a failure. I knew this was the case because I was told daily by a certain child (call him “John”), who, it would seem, made it his life’s work to inform me in words and deeds of this fact. More, he organized the other children, boys and girls alike, into a gang whose primary source of amusement was mocking and humiliating me. This went on for years and I sort of accepted it as my natural state - some of my earliest school memories are of being in a taunting ring of fellow students, with the girls laughing and chanting various of my nicknames while the boys took runs at me, kicking me and smearing me with mud and dogshit. Occasionally I would catch one and beat him, which generally got me in trouble - after all, it was always my account vs. everyone elses’. Oddly, the teachers never seemed to notice and I never told my parents - in those days, that just wasn’t done. Needless to say my academic performance was terrible and I was on two occasions sent to a school appointed psychiatrist (who said there was nothing wrong with me).
The other kids must have known the persecution was unjustified, but it is in the nature of young children not to care.
In any event, this went on until I went to a different school. My academic performance improved and I made friends. Suddenly, I was not unpopular. I was no different, but I was no longer persecuted - which sort of surprised me more than anything, as I was by this time convinced I was a social leper and irredemable.
Flash forward twenty years.
I am now a “successful adult” by society’s standards, I suppose. I was walking down the street near my house when I passed an LCBO store. There was a ragged panhandler accosting people comming out of the store. He was selling this street newspaper that some street people sell, as a self-help thing. I did a doubletake - it was “John”. Even after 20 years, even under the dirt, the booze bloat, the unshaven face and the ragged layers of clothing, I recognized him. He did not I think either recognize or notice me.
I just walked on.
My reaction was the oddest thing, not at all what I would have predicted. I suppose I should have felt either schadenfreude or compassion, or both. After all, it is almost a stereotype - the person who did me wrong brought low. But I felt neither of these things - my immediate reaction was fear, like the intervening 20 years never happened and he had the power, somehow, to bring me down to that state again - as if all the passers-by would form a taunting ring and random strangers would attack me at the word of this rummy.
Edit: this all happened nearly a decade ago, and I’ve never seen “John” since.
One of my earliest school memories is the time we were doing one of those exercises when you make words out of the letters of a longer word. I came up with “neon” and I was pretty chuffed because I was the only one in class who got it. My teacher told me that it wasn’t a word so it didn’t count. My only proof was that it was in a song by Elton John (“In Neon”) and he said that they sometimes made up words for songs. (As it happened there was no dictionary available.) I was livid, and I’ve never forgotten. (Altho it was a good lesson for me in teacher fallibility.) I have often wanted to track down Mr Mills with a dictionary, and say “I told you so!” I am certain he doesn’t remember.
I worked at a coffee shop for a long time. My first manager hated me and thought I was stupid. She generally made my life miserable until she transferred out of that store. (She refused to allow me to be taught how to operate the cash register or the espresso machine, so I was not only frustrated and bored, but I was also a liability to my colleagues, who constantly had to cover my unskilled ass.) Once she left I started doing a lot better at my job, and ended up working with her again at a different store, a few years later. Again, she hated me and thought I was stupid, and she eventually got me fired.
She is now a security guard in the mall that we used to work in. I probably make at least three times more money than her, in a job which uses my brain and doesn’t require a dorky uniform. I don’t think she recognizes me any more but every time I see her I am tempted to introduce myself, give her a big hug and thank her for getting my lucrative career started, and ask her how she’s doing.
I haven’t yet, but I think I should. I know she’s sad and pathetic, and it would be like kicking a puppy, but honestly, she went well out of her way to be a colossal bitch to me, in two distinct situations. I’ll leave Mr Mills in peace, but this coffee-drone-turned-mall-security-guard is different.
No. You’re a grown up (although posting this might indicate otherwise).
Get over it. Chances are the incident isn’t nearly as traumatic nor his behavior as egregious as you remember it to be. Reality is rarely as cut and dried as our memories would have us believe, especially when we’re kids. Use your perception of the experience to motivate yourself to do well and leave it at that.
As someone else said, living well is the best revenge.
I had a similar experience in first grade. My teacher refused to believe that there was actually an animal called a “gnu.” She did not appreciate my showing her up by pointing it out in the dictionary, however, and I was made to sit out in the hall for the remainder of class for “disrupting the lesson.”
The experience doesn’t bother me, though. In fact it’s kind of sad looking back that a teacher wouldn’t know such a basic thing. I feel worse for the teacher than I do about being singled out or punished for something so insignificant.
Jesus, what an asshole. I have to echo some of the advice you’ve already gotten – write a letter into which you pour all of your anger, resentment, fear, humiliation, shame, and all the rest, and then burn it. Imagine the bad feelings burning away with the letter.
Tell someone you love about this – your parents, a friend, somebody you can trust to understand and feel furious for you.
Decide that you’re going to live your own good life, and be proud of yourself for getting through such a brutal and lonely time. You’re a survivor, and that’s no small thing.
Be kind to those who are more vulnerable than you, as you grow in power.
My cousin dated a composer for awhile. No one famous, but he was making quite a comfortable living writing songs and scores for TV shows and B-movie soundtracks and commercials. Like Jason Bateman in Juno: nothing glamorous, but decent enough coin to be able to buy a small house in an “affluent” neighborhood.
In highschool, a guidance counselor had been a total jackass: “You have to be realistic. You will never make it as a composer or musician. You need to cooperate. Take a course in stenography so you can have at least one useful skill. If you were to actually make it as a composer, I’ll eat a brick.” Not an exact quote, I heard this third hand but it really was “stenography”. Who the hell tells a guy to take stenography?
So a good 25 years later he printed off a list of his composer credits, tracked the now-retired guidance counselor down, wrote him a quick note to remind him what a bastard he was, and sent him a brick by FedEx (it cost a frakking fortune to ship.) He included a comparisson of what guidance counselor’s make today vs. his yearly income. The average guidance counselor today makes just over half of the composer’s income for that year.
NinjaChick, your teacher was a jackass to you ten years ago. It was a bad moment and trust me, we’ve all had them (ask me about going through junior high school with Tourette’s), but you have moved on with your life and you’re obviously doing quite well.
Forget about it. There is no reason to let that jerk use your mind rent-free for another minute.
Why wouldn’t it be just as traumatic as she remembers it? How traumatic it was IS her perception. His behvaior may have been different from her memory, but how would she not be experiencing the amount of trauma she is in fact experiencing?
I still can’t look back and laugh at this one bully from high school. If I really think about it, I can fantasize about meeting him again and beating him with a bat for all he put me and my friends through.
Nothing to contribute, but another story about a mean-spirited teacher.
It was probably about grade 7 or 8 in the library. For some reason, she asked our class doing a research project who the smartest person in the class was. I was elected and she proceeded to tell the class about the smartest people have it easiest and that of all the children in the class, I was the least likely to succeed.
I think it was some warped way of giving everyone else confidence that they didn’t have to be the smartest to succeed, but I have carried that day with me for decades now. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget her wrinkled, old, sour face.
All the same, I think I’ve done alright for myself, so in your face librarian!
I had an algebra teacher like that asshole. Fortunately, for some unfathomable reason, he liked me. Which doesn’t mean I learned anything in his class, because everyone, including me, was terrified to ask very many questions.
Another vote for not contacting him.
I suspect that his perspective on this incident is very different from yours. For you, it was a traumatic event that haunts you 10 years later. For him, it was probably a minor incident that he’d forgotten about a week later – one petty act of cruelty among many. So when you confront him, he’s not going to say, “Oh, no! NinjaChick has finally returned to settle the score!” More likely, he’ll say, “who are you and what in the world are you talking about?” You can explain it, but assuming he’s still the same jerk, it won’t have much effect on him, or perhaps it will amuse him that you expended so much effort to track him down over what is (to his mind) a silly little childhood slight. In short, I doubt that you’ll find much satisfaction.