I had a teacher who did that, too! 5th grade, also! Mrs. Wiedekamp.
My mother dyed her hair when I was a kid (she still does, actually). Nothing that dramatic, just from medium brown to honey blond. But I HATED it. It seemed like lying to me, and was just… phony. I vowed from a young age that I would NEVER dye my hair, and I’m 48 and I never have.
The list of insults and names that my older brother called me (when he wasn’t just beating me up) would have filled a book. When I complained about it to my mom, her reply was “oh, he only does that because he knows it bothers you.” The message that conveyed didn’t really dawn on me until years later. It was more important that my brother get to do whatever the fuck he wanted than it was for me to feel like anyone gave a damn about my feelings.
No offense, but how was she supposed to know you were listening? Maybe she shouldn’t have like, screamed at you, but it’s really not totally her fault.
I was an artist as a child. Even as a 4-5 year old I was drawing realistic proportional human and animal figures with muscles and joints in the right places, etc. Some of the other kids my age were still in the circle on top of a stick phase. Anyway, years later my mother told me that at that time she took some of my drawings to an art professor, who was impressed. She said she asked what she could do about my talents, and was told to just keep an eye on me. In other words, nothing.
As I grew older as a child I always kept up with art classes, but it was never something I considered primary, just something to do for fun. I never had any sense of it as a career choice. So, I never really developed past my own efforts, and was never given any additional coaching beyond regular school art class. Art isn’t part of my adult life, beyond being an appreciation.
So, my irritation is not technically “as a child”, but irritation about something I learned that was about my childhood.
I have the ability to do all sorts of math in my head. And I have an eye-hand coordination problem that makes handwriting difficult for me.
My 7th grade math teacher refused to believe I did all my homework by myself. She had my two older brothers and sister in her class, and she was sure they did my homework. Even after I showed her I could do the problems without writing the sequences down, she insisted I do so.
Mary Ledger (great name for a math teacher) I still hate you.
Irradiated? I was incandescent.
We moved between grades when I was a kid. I was always good at English and grammar because my mom and dad insisted on it at home. I didn’t, however, know the names of the parts of speech. I knew nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. That was as far as we’d gone in old school. Plopped into new school and we’re talking prepositions, participles, intransitive verbs-- I was lost. I got a D on the first test. I had to get my mom to sign it. She was unhappy with me, but she went over the test with me. " Would you say went or gone? Is it have or has?" Questions like that. I knew the correct answer, just not what it was called. Then she saw the bonus questions written in the teacher’s hand (purple memo sheet): What does adjectives do? What does adverbs do? My mom signed the test alright and added a long note of her own about how a teacher of English should be able to speak and write it correctly, etc., etc.
The crowning insult came when the teacher hauled me out in the hallway to find out if my mother drank or was abusive. She didn’t understand why mom was so angry.
That is so hurtful. I feel bad for you and don’t blame you for not quite forgiving. A promise to a 6 year old is an unbreakable vow.
“Enrichment” in public school.
I was one of the smarter kids so they’d send us for “enrichment”. Being singled out was bad enough, but there was nothing “enriching” about this extra work. One year (grade 4 I think) we did something involving flat plastic shapes - something about making new shapes with the existing shapes and giving them weird names. I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. If anybody remembers this let me know. It was weird.
The same thing happened to me (though my fifth grade teacher claimed that there were 33 unnumbered years (!) - almost makes me think he was testing the class to see who would fall for that), though my teacher let me show him in a dictionary what A.D. actually meant.
In the early 1970s, my older sister had a fountain pen (the kind that uses an ink cartridge). It really used to irritate me that when she wrote with it, she did not put the cap on the end of the pen like a normal person. She just wrote with the cap off the pen.
Are you thinking of Tangrams? Seven flat pieces of triangles and squares to be rearranged? (Sometimes known as tantagrams). I didn’t use them in school, but I remember making my own from directions in a puzzle book when I was about that age. I can’t imagine spending more than a few hours playing with them.
Similar - these were plastic shapes and we had to make little characters with them. The characters had goofy made-up names. The characters I think got more complex the further you got on the worksheets. I still have no idea what the point was.
Reminds me of the exercise in first grade (1965) when we learned about “word shapes” by drawing outlines around words. My parents and my grandmother thought it sounded incredibly stupid and pointless when I described it to them, and I agreed. Decades later, I realized that learning to recognize words by their shapes (as opposed to sounding out each individual letter) is the foundation of speed reading. If that was the intent of the lesson, though, it wasn’t presented well.
When I went to international school in Moscow, my teacher taught me short division, a method of dividing large numbers into larger numbers-- I could divide 8-digit numbers by 5-digit numbers-- with no subscript, known as “long division.” I learned this method in the fourth grade, and I don’t remember there being any limits to it stated, like “It only works up to 7-digit numerators,” or anything.
In fifth grade, we learned long division-- or, the rest of the class did. I did a page of long division problems in half the time of the rest of the class using short division. My teacher lectured me on how I had to learn long division, because eventually, the numbers would get too long for me to be able to use short division. I said “No they won’t,” so she gave me a five digit number to divide into a much longer number, and I did it very quickly. She was momentarily nonplussed, but finally asserted that eventually the numbers would get to long to use my method. I had to learn long division, and that was it. (FWIW, electronic pocket calculators existed, but people still believed that children should learn to do all math on their own and understand the process; calculators were maybe for college, but not for public school.)
The upshot is, I learned long division, but I now cannot remember how to do short division, and it bugs the heck out of me when I think about it.
I looked up short division Short division - Wikipedia and it looks pretty cool.
When I was in the hospital as a kid, I learned how to do long multiplication and when I got back to school, the teachers were just introducing multiplication of multiple digit numbers, and were teaching a method that used a lot more paper than long multiplication did - so I insisted on doing it the better way. Fortunately when I proved that I was competent in doing the method that the other kids were eventually going to get to, I was allowed to skip the silly, paper wasting way.
Short division? Why would you need to know that? Knowing 16 divided by 5 equals 3 remainder 1 isn’t a useful life skill. I never understood the point of it given it’s not a real answer anyway.
To Mrs. Johnson of the sixth grade: I really did say “Shoot!” when I dropped my pencil. I have never forgotten the unjust accusation of profanity.
On a more serious note, I will not forget how Carolyn in the fifth grade lied to Mr. C and said I called her a n*****. I had gone to my earlier grades in a small northern farming community where that word hadn’t reached my ears, and it was nothing I had ever heard at home.
Mr. C ignored my protests and gave it to me with both barrels–I was punished for allegedly uttering a word that I had never heard in my child lifetime.
It’s very possible the photographer’s motives were benign. I take a lot of photos of corporate seminars – events that are amazingly static and boring. I’ll look through the viewfinder for two minutes waiting for a spontaneous grin or a strong hand gesture. The photos will still be blah, but will be better than a speaker just looking at an audience.
A kid playing piano with a neutral expression is a lot less interesting than a kid grimacing, or biting their lip. I’ve never taken fast sequence shots of someone coughing, but it’s very possible it might produce some – seemingly – intense expressions.
I can’t think of a likely reason a professional photographer would be trying to make you “look bad”, but think it’s very likely she was trying for an striking expression.
Which reminds me: to the bitch of a babysitter I had when I was about 4: I was scratching the inside of my nose, NOT picking it and there was no need to freak out, haul me upstairs into the bathroom to forcefully wash my hands then shame me in front of the other kids. Even if I WAS picking my nose, which I wasn’t, good lord every little kid picks their nose.