I had a professor during my short, uninspiring college career who *loved * me.
It was a mass media & society class. First day he played a variety of musical clips and sound bites to see how much of pop culture we knew. Movies and what not.
I got them all right.
It blew my mind that no one else knew " William Tell’s Overture" (AKA: Lone Ranger’s Theme") and who Groucho Marx was.
The class was a total blow off and I got an A.
Incidently, my Film Class, which I attended every class and thoroughly enjoyed, I received a failing grade because I had the audacity to say that Woody Allen was a whiny prick. ( Yes, I have grown as a person, and I do like some of Woody’s stuff, but I maintain my original stance.)
My son dresses pretty goth - plus real long hair (not as long as mine was…yet ;)) and although his grades are good, he tends to get hassled more than the jocks. He is not openly defiant, but chafes at illogical “because I say so” discipline. Also an unapologetic atheist in the bible belt. Several teachers have discriminated agiainst him as a result.
I had an English teacher I was certain hated me. He made my life a living hell. I could never do anything well enough for him. It seemed that the highest grade I could get was a C- and he always seemed to yell at me for things that I KNEW everyone else was getting away with.
Five years pass, I am out of high school and getting out of college with a number of job offers. I went back to my hometown to see my parents and I went though the old high school to see my old teachers among them this old English teacher whom my parents had told me had asked about me a number of times.
When I found him, he asked some very insiteful questions of me, clearly aware what I had taken in college and how I had done. I finally asked him why he had hated me so much in high school if he was so interested now. He response surprised me.
He said that he didn’t hate me in high school. If anything he was a bit guilty of being rather fond of me and definitely entertained by me. But he said that he knew that I had potential of being something special academically and of being the first person in my family to go to college. However, like many high school students that he had taught, I had a tendency of taking short cuts and not dotting all my "i"s and crossing all my "t"s. He felt that with a little “kick butt” action on his part I just might make it into and through college. He said he knew he rode me a bit hard, but he knew that it wasn’t going to be an easy road for me if I didn’t get in gear so he took it on as his responsibility to get me “in gear”.
When he died about seven years ago, there were hundreds of people at his funeral, and I believe the ones who cried hardest were those of us who had been certain that he hated us while we were in his class. We cried because we had learned in the passing years that just because a teacher made us work harder than anyone else and yelled at us a bit more, maybe he didn’t hate us at all. Maybe he just saw something in us we hadn’t or weren’t willing to try for.
I’ve had disagreements with teachers over religion before. I went to high school in Texas, having moved from California. I wasn’t used to in-your-face Christianity, and I had no idea how seriously people take that. And being Jewish made me a prime target for some behavior that, while not overtly discriminatory, would probably not be directed at a Christian student.
For example, in 12th grade English, we had to read something out of the King James Bible and write about it. Not recognizing Jesus as a deity, I did not capitalize the pronouns referring to him. I got marked off for that. I tried to protest the grade on the basis that, being Jewish, I did not recognize Jesus as a deity, and therefore did not think it appropriate to capitalize. I lost. Even though I lost only a few points for the capitalization, I think that it was very disrespectful of my beliefs as a non-Christian, and my religion as a whole.
Yes, I have to admit, that there were sometimes kids that just rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately for me, I’ve almost exclusively team taught, so there was always someone there who had better rapport with the particular student than I did.
The students who rub me the wrong way can be described as “smarmy.” Don’t like that particular personality in adults and am not fond of it in kids, either.
You know, that kid who ALWAYS says, “But my dad taught me to do it a different way and you’re wrong!” Ugh.