In second grade, as part of my school district’s gifted and talented program, I was cast in a play that was probably some terrible learning experience with no story, but I was very excited at the time. However, nobody ever thought to tell me when rehearsals would be, and one time I recall my regular teacher running out of the school and flagging down the bus taking the other kids to rehearsal so I could get on it. I learned every stinking one of my lines for that play, and it was never finished, performed, or mentioned again. I almost forgot about it completely until today.
In third grade, I was given a book to do a book report on. I seem to recall that the other kids got to pick their book while I didn’t, but I am willing to admit I might be wrong about that. When I filled out the little worksheet, my answer to “Why did you like this book?” was “I didn’t like this book, because I didn’t choose it.” Note was sent home. Don’t recall Mom & Dad being angry about it, but I sure as hell was.
Fourth grade, we had a witch of a teacher, who already didn’t like me because my brother had been somewhat problematic. (For example, he talked sometimes, and she didn’t like that. To be fair, he had also been part of a group that had vandalized a pet project of hers, but he willingly paid the price even though everyone involved said he had been there, but not taken part.) As a result of her problems with my brother, Miss Williams had become acquainted with my mother, who has never been a glad sufferer of fools. The many and varied indignities I was made to suffer at this teacher’s hands still make me furious to this day, but I am usually mollified when Mom takes out copies of her correspondence with both the teacher and principal that year (which includes the memorable line “I hope that someday soon you take pity on the children of Cedar Grove and retire.”).
Anyway, being of a higher reading level than most of the class, I was given extra enrichment work. At one time, I was supposed to find a poem I liked in a big book of poetry that she gave me and write a short essay about it. I found one about children playing hide-and-seek in a graveyard that ended kind of morbidly by saying that someday they’d be dead too (Google is failing me on finding it, but that was just a quick search). Apparently, this poem was unacceptable. I had to do the project again. So I found a poem about Charles II (which I don’t believe was the one by the Earl of Rochester, but it’s all Google is finding me). This second choice led to me being kept after school and berated for at least half an hour until my mother appeared in the window on the classroom door. Miss Williams, with her back to the door, did not see her and continued finger-shaking and brimstone-spewing. I looked at my mother, kind of shrugged and made a face, and that set the teacher off even more. “WHAT are you making that ridiculous face for?” Admittedly, the smug tone in my voice as I calmly pointed out my increasingly-fuming mother standing outside the locked classroom door probably did not make the teacher like me any more.
So yeah, shitty teachers still piss me off. I’ll not bother with the story of how my ninth-grade geometry teacher had the school nurse call me in and try to find out if I was narcoleptic because I kept falling asleep in class.
ETA: Looking back, this thread was supposed to be about unusual things that irritated you as a child, and nothing I mentioned about could probably be considered unusual. But I already typed it all and got retroactively mad about it, so I’m not deleting. 