At my sister’s high school, two girls accused the speech and debate coach of “inappropriate sexual behavior” on the way home from a tournament. This was, of course, after she had yanked them both from participating in the tournament for completely legitimate reasons.
My sister, who had long graduated by then but who knew the teacher well, offered to serve as a character witness for her. In this capacity she sat down and (with my gleeful assistance) wrote a letter to the school board that effectively ripped the girls’ story into shreds, then set about on a little well-deserved character assassination of the girls themselves.
When it became clear that the school administration wasn’t buying their story, the girls played the next card in their deck – racism. Because obviously if nobody believed the girls, it must be because they (the students) were latina and the teacher was white. Certainly it couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that both girls had a long (and well-documented) history of vindictive behavior. Or that a tape recording had surfaced on which the two girls could be heard admitting that they’d made it up to get back at the teacher. Obviously that had nothing to do with the curious refusal of the administration to persue disciplinary action against the speech coach.
Thankfully the whole thing blew over and the teacher’s career suffered no ill effects. But just thinking about how much damage those two little bitches might have done to an innocent person’s life, and for something so petty…it still makes my blood boil.
I have two stories. The first was my freshman year in English class in a fairly nice private school. The teacher was a very sweet middle-aged lady. A guy made it his mission to make her cry each day. He would pretend not to understand and when she went to pains to explain it to him he would tell her she was a bad teacher and none of what she was teaching would be of use to anyone anyway. He did other things to mess with her like jimmying the lock to get into class early before she came back from lunch and unlocked the door. The saddest part was this was a guy who I know was picked on by others as a bit of a geek and he was pretty insecure about himself. He just smelled blood in the water one day I guess and took it from there. Eventually several of us, including me, told him to knock it off or we’d kick his ass. Sadly this was more because we were tired of spending all period listening to her cry instead of any real empathy for her. Not one of my finer moments, but he did stop picking on her.
The second was in public school in my senior year. I found out some guys had a running “gag” with tormenting one of the Spanish teachers. She was a nice, but not terribly bright, lady who loved Mexico and had, at one time, a handmade wooden or clay, I never found out, pencil holder in the shape of a frog she aquired as a souvenier on a trip to Mexico. She brought it to school and named it “Pancho Villa”(not terribly bright, remember). Well, before I even transferred to that school someone had stolen it. It passed from the hands of troublemaker to troublemaker and each would take it and hide it in various places, and take pictures which they would slip under her door. Sometimes they would deface it or knock little chips out of it and write little threat notes along with the photo. They would also, when walking past her door, call out “Pancho Villa!” and when she would come out and question them they would act like they didn’t know anything about it.
This went on for YEARS, and for all I know could still be happening. I never knew any of the people who posessed the frog when I was there. I’d like to think I’d have tried to recover the frog for her, but I never got the opportunity so I don’t know.
Count Blucher, creating a fake student is brilliant. Did you ever managed to get him paged over the PA?
It’s not up to those standards, but my junior year, my high school class technically had no senior class president and nearly had no student body president; I put up campaign posters for Chairman Mao and Fidel Castro, respectively. Everyone knows that class officers really have no powers, and everyone likewise knows that it’s all a giant popularity contest anyway, so more than half the student body voted Mao, and the administration was forced to put the person who’d recieved second most votes into office.
But as to really cruel things to teachers… I suspect my English teacher in 7th and 8th grade had some pretty terrible things done to him, but I can’t recall any. My 8th grade science teacher was brand-new as a school teacher, but she’d been a teacher at a science museum for years. Practical upshot was that she had no idea how to control kids who didn’t want to be there, or run a whole unit, rather than just one lesson. People skipped class pretty regularly, talked right over her, and generally ran the class themselves. She quit at the end of the year, but I have to give her credit for sticking around that long.
In 11th grade at a swanky prep school in American history class the smartest girl in my class annouced to the rest of us that “Tomorrow is Mrs. V’s birthday and the weekly “pop” quiz and I have not read the chapter yet.” We all had to bring chocolate something because Mrs. V loved chocolate. She proceeded to deal out cooking assisgnments to the rest of us. I was assigned chocolate chip cookies. The next day there was cake, cookies, ice cream, drinks and we threw a party. Then admitted it was to get out of the quiz. I am still not sure if it was mean, nice, or what. So we did get an extra day to read the chapter