On the train last night, I heard a young girl weeping to her mother that the reason she didn’t win the science fair was because ‘the teacher doesn’t like me’, and it made me sad for her, but also sort of nostalgic at the same time.
I had a teacher in highschool who I maintain to this DAY gave me poorer grades and always picked on me to do math problems on the board because he did not like me.
My sister was the same way, and I know several people who say teachers didn’t like them.
So my question is for TEACHERS or SPOUSES of teachers. Did you ever, consciously or unconsciously, find yourself treating a student differently just because you don’t like them, their personality, their attitude, their looks…
When you look back on other years of teaching, do you see it in hindsight? Or is this something that all students use, simply as an excuse?
The teachers I’ve known have sometimes graded students more harshly due to the student’s defiance, or slovenly work habits. But any teacher who would give a poor grade simply for a personality conflict is a poor teacher indeed.
But I’m wondering if perhaps unconsciously some teachers may just react differently to people because of a personality conflict. Just as an anecdote, I’m terrible at math, and always have been, just skated by on Ds and Cs in math, and my sophomore math teacher KNEW that ahead of time when I told him that I was worried about the class.
He picked on my CONSTANTLY, would take my notebook and scold me for doodling in class, would make me do problems on the board, probably 3x more than any other one student. He loved math, I hated it, and that had to be a conflict.
Also an anecdote, my husband had to QUIT teaching, simply because he loved his subject matter TOO much. He taught british literature and shakespeare. And when students came in and asked “do we really have to read this shit?” it was everything in him not to go bonkers.
I won’t say that there aren’t teachers who do this. I’m certain there are.
However, the times when I’ve really heard “the teacher doesn’t like me” is when a student has coasted through his or her academic career for some time and then suddenly comes up against a teacher who demands actual work instead of typical student bullshit. A lot of students will take this personally and, citing the fact that they got straight As until this teacher came along, will simply state that they don’t stand a chance because the teacher doesn’t like them.
I’m not saying this is every case or even most of them, but I’ve seen it happen many times.
Classmates of mine who complained of teachers not liking them usually exacerbated the problem by acting out or testing the teacher to prove their point. That’s not to say that there aren’t teachers who are truly despicable, I’ve had a few myself who hated me with a passion – but they gave me fair marks. I remember a physics class where one of the brightest students was corrected by the teacher on some point or another, and as she was a bit cocky, took it the wrong way. From that point on, she sought to disprove everything the teacher taught, and generally tried to make everything difficult, disrupting class in the process. I think the teacher got fed up with it eventually, as she was moved to a different class, but ultimately I think it’s a two-way street.
Hold on here, jarbabyj. It could be just that the teacher was hard on you because he knew you were bad at math, not that he didn’t like you as a person.
Put yourself in his shoes, you have a student who you know gets bad grades in math and even made a point of telling you that she is worried about the class. And then you caught her doodling in class and such. Wouldn’t you be a little hard on her, making her do problems on the board and scolding her for doodling in class, in light of the fact that she made a point of telling you that she was worried about the class?
It’s more likely that he was more worried about you than many other kids and felt that you could do it if you just tried. He probably liked you (unless you were some smart mouthed brat who made his life difficult in class with constant disruptions) and felt that being tough with you was a way to help you get your grades up.
As for the OP, of course students are treated differently. A kid who is constantly disruptive will be cut a lot less slack than a generally good kid. But for the most part, teachers (especially veteran ones) are pretty good about not judging kids on how they look and stuff, but on their behavior and performance since they are used to all different types wandering through their classes and they have time to really get to know them.
Who the kid is generally doesn’t affect the kid’s grades too much. In fact, a student who is doing poorly might get a better grade on a given piece of work than the straight A student since the teacher might realize that the A student is coasting on a particular assignment. That happened to me a few times.
Btw, my mom is a teacher so a lot of our family friends are teachers. I get to hear a lot of discussions.
I was a teacher’s PET if anything. Doodling doesn’t mean I’m not listening. I just thought when he saw me struggling NEAR TEARS at the blackboard perhaps he’d know not to ask me up there again since I just couldn’t do it. I will NEVER BE GOOD AT MATH.
GRRRRR…
THANKS A ALOT NEUROTIK NOW I’M THINKING ABOUT MR. GRANDUSKY
I once had a teacher who HATED my friend. HATED. She was a terrible, pathological lying spaz, but a teacher should really not act this way toward a student. I had to go into his classroom on a day when we didn’t have his class on an errand, and I ran into her outside the door, so she wandered in with me. He just freaked out, started screaming about how if she didn’t have his class that day, he didn’t want to see her at all and she had no reason to be there. (This was during tutorial, when students are supposed to get help from teachers if they need it, so technically, she could have had a legit reason to be there.)
Anyway, despite her totally skeezy behavior, she actually understood the course material a hundred times better than I did, and even seemed to like it. I, on the other hand, had no clue what the teacher was talking about 90% of the time. (It was an economics class, btw.) Upshot? I got a B, she got a C. We had exit interviews for the class, and the teacher straight up told me I would have done better if I hadn’t palled around with her. There is no way those grades were based entirely on coursework.
Oh, another one: I took Historical Geography of Jerusalem in Israel, and every week we went on spiffy field trips. Because of the non-classroom nature of the course, we never had any homework or tests. I think we did have a midterm essay, but there wasn’t much to base our grades on. Anyway, the final turned out to be incredibly difficult, especially considering we’d had basically no assignments for the entire semester. Everyone bombed. I think I got a D. But I still got a B in the class, because, according to the teacher, I’d been “interested in the material.” Almost everyone else got the same terrible grade that they’d received on the final. That was a pretty clear case of a teacher liking some people better than others.
In my defense, I HAD been interested in the material.
I have a situation right now where the teacher doesn’t like me. (I’m a high school sophmore.) She’s my English teacher. I’ve definately had tougher English teachers; in fact, I prefer them because I always love a challenge. The English teacher I have now is generally really really easy in grading of papers. Except when she’s grading mine. She took off points from my last paper because when referring to the book in the first sentence, I didn’t mention the name of the author (which was totally irrelevent) and I phrased something differently than she would have. Truth be told, I think that one of the reasons she dislikes me is because I notice all the mistakes she makes and I’m not afraid to call her on some of the more blatant, important ones; however, I don’t think that this should cause her to attempt to take points off for something that wouln’t matter in anyone else’s paper in retaliation.
I have had a couple of kids that I treated differently from the others. It was because of their behaviour. They were always bad, every lesson, so I began sitting them out as soon as they did something bad instead of warning them a couple of times as I do/did the other kids.
I had an English teacher in college that I always suspected had taken a personal dislike to me. Never had any concrete proof. We had to do a major paper, which counted for 40% of our final grade. One of the requirements was to have 10 references. As I put my paper together, it turned out I only had 8 references. It was the night before it was due, so I made the decision to just leave it at 8 instead of making up 2 more references. I knew it would hurt my grade, but how much could it hurt?
Well, he failed me on the paper, and consequently, I failed the class. He specifically mentioned the lack of references on my paper when it was returned to me. I had to retake the class, and had a different teacher. My new teacher and I became great friends. He loved my paper, read it out in class, and excused me from the final exam because he said “it would just waste your time.” When I related my previous experience with the other teacher, he acknowledged that my previous prof wasn’t thought of too highly by his peers.
I don’t know if I did anything to earn his wrath, or if he judged others as harshly, but the only lesson I learned from him was to just make up what I didn’t have.
Mrs. Dave-Guy isn’t here at the moment, but she teaches third grade, and there are bound to be conflicts every year for one reason or another.
Last year she had a kid who has always gotten by on his charm (yes, it starts as young as that). He actually smiled and winked at her once, thinking that would get him off the hook. It didn’t.
Once she caught wise to him, she innured herself to his antics and probably seemed to be a bit of a hard-ass. And maybe she was, for this kid, because she had to be. And perhaps the kid thought she didn’t like him. But she was merely adjusting her teaching methods to account for this one kid who thought a smile and a wink would get him out of doing his assignments.
When there’s been a kid with whom she genuinely has a personality conflict with, she takes pains NOT to be influenced by that. She always has enough grades that cannot be influenced by a bias. I mean, if you give every kid the same spelling test, and each word is worth 5 points, how can you skew it against the kid you don’t like?
I’ll ask her for specific anecdotes about this, though, when she gets home. Teaching is not an easy profession, and something like a personality conflict only adds to the difficulty.
Not much of a complaint compared to others, I firmly believe that my AP English doesn’t give me decent grades because she doesn’t like my writing style. I think this is very feasible considering grading an essay is very subjective.
She probably doesn’t like me much better now that I think about it. I have a tendency to blurt out comments with only a vague relevance to the topic at hand during class. (A few weeks ago she got bright cherry red threatened to send me to the regular english class. heh)
I’ve had two experiences of bad teachers, but I’ve been fortunate enough to have many wonderful teachers. In fact, I was named my Senior class’ teacher’s pet.
In 5th grade I had one excellent teacher for every course… except science - for that class I had Mrs. Leader. She was used to teaching less gifted kids, and for them it seemed she had unending patience. However, she had gotten wind that I was in the extended learning (honors) program. From that point on, she wouldn’t answer ANY of my questions. I remember one time we had an in-class assignment including a game which required dice. She told us to ask her for a set of die when we reached that part of the assignment. When I approached her to ask for the die, she interrupted: “Mandi, you’re a smart girl. I’m sure whatever problem you have isn’t really too hard. Think it up yourself,” and she walked away from me.
The other troublesome teacher I had was in college: my first semester English teacher. I thought from the beginning that he liked me a lot - the first day we had to do a poetry analysis so he could decide what we, as a class, needed to be taught. He chose to read mine in front of the class - no one had ever picked the angle I wrote from, and he was impressed. Later he found out I was from NY and not too happy to be studying in the deep south. He hated me ever since. He started taking off points on my papers cause I used “too many big words.” I asked him afterwards - he said I didn’t missuse them, but I was apparently trying to make myself sound smart. I didn’t use any words I wouldn’t say in everyday conversation!
Come time for the final, I was prepared. I only needed to get a C or better to get an A in the class - no matter what he took off for, I had an A on every paper. Well, I woke up that morning with a urinary tract infection. I was peeing blood. Needless to say, I went to the Dr’s and missed the test. I had left a messege on his answering machine - but he told me that it wasn’t an exceptable excuse. Furthermore, missing ANY assignment was reason enough to fail the course - and that’s just what I did. Now, three years later, I’m finally retaking that class. Wish me luck!
My oldest sister made her 9th grade science teacher hate her so much that when my other sister and I had her, my mother wouldn’t even go in the room to meet her during the Open House lest her presence prejudice the teacher against us (it didn’t). I say “made” because she was one of those people who deliberately went out of her way to yank this woman’s chain. According to my parents, she did it to have something to complain to her friends about.
Most of the cases of “my teacher haaaaaates me” that I’ve run across are usually caused by this or the “sudden challenge” variety that Legomancer mentioned. Either that or they didn’t follow directions and don’t want to admit responsibility that :gasp: they might have goofed up!
Case in point: I was student teaching high school sophomores last year. Student turns in a paper. I notice that she has left something off and mark her down. She goes to my clinical teacher to whine because (insert most whiney voice you can bear) “I (the student) have ALWAYS put this information in these papers and she (meaning me) marked me down because she doesn’t like me because I ALWAYS do well in this class and I spent all weekend going through my other papers and checked them to PROVE that I have ALWAYS had this information in them and I have them here with me to PROVE that she marked me down (she did) because she is UNFAIR…” And so on. And so forth.
This is not to say that personality conflicts don’t occur. But to take that conflict out on the student is, IMHO, highly unprofessional. Most of the teachers I’ve run across are too professional to act like that.
I knew, knew, my 3rd Grade teachre hated me. And now I cant even remember why I thought that. Maybe it was because I hated her and I figured the feeling was mutual.
Other than that, I’ve never had an experience where a teacher hated me. If anything, all my teachers loved me. I got away with murder in all my classes. Never once got in trouble, even though I deserved several times.
Mandielise, did you appeal the decision not to let you make up the test?
From Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style: “Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.”
Imagine for a moment that your teacher was Hispanic and discovered that you didn’t like Hispanics. Although it shouldn’t have affected your grades, this attitude would not be endearing.
By the way, the word south, when used to indicate a portion of the country as opposed to a direction, is always capitalized.
~ 11th Generation Southern English teacher
(I see you chose to stay.)
Monica said
Believe me, the name of the book’s author is relevant. And if your phrasing was awkward, that is a good reason to take off points. As you progress through school, standards are generally going to be higher. Learn from your mistakes.
Yes, sometimes teachers take a dislike to certain students. They are human beings and not always able to control what they feel. I agree that it is unethical for the teacher to allow personal feelings to affect your grade.
I loved my students with a couple of exceptions. I didn’t like the one who threatened to slit my throat or the one who threatened to throw acid in my face. Yet, one of my students who was previously involved in an assault on me became rather attached. You just never know.
Now that I’m retired, I’ve put down my red pencil and don’t give a damn about who is misspelling what. (I hope the other English teachers don’t gang up on me! and correct all of my own mistakes.)
Just this past term I taught a student that was obnoxious - total personality clash. She received the second highest mark in her year.
On the other hand, I’ve had students that have tried hard and were generally congenial within the class room and they have received poor marks.
I took the advice of a university lecturer (in Measurement and Evaluation… ugh) and require my students to use a student number that they receive at the beginning of each semester (instead of submitting assessments with their name on the paper). This has generally worked well to filter out any inadvertent bias I may have.
I am so interested in this thread, and I hope we have more teachers weigh in.
I am presently in college (mid-thirties) and am convinced a professor I had last semester just didn’t like me. My paranoia was compounded when I received a C+ for the course (I had received nothing lower than a B+ the entire semester and received an A on my research paper that was 30% of the grade).
I questioned the C+ and she told me that she had not received half of my final and therefore, I received an F on the final, which brought the average down. After exchanging a few emails, it appears that I answered the true/false & multiple choice portion of the test on the actual test (instead of in the blue book) and she told me that if that was the case (which I believe it was – 7:45 a.m. and all, I doubt my senses were in full force), she shredded the tests and my answers were gone forever.
She acknowledged that she had no doubt I did do the true/false/mc (especially because she remembered that I was one of the last students to leave) but declined to let me make any part of it up because it wouldn’t be fair to other students who maybe had misread questions during the semester and had been penalized.
I’m convinced that this was a personal thing and that if somehow she had liked me more, she would have given me a chance to improve the grade. But, of course, I could be totally and completely paranoid and wrong.
