You know Candid, I’ve been seeing a whole team of mental health professionals for about a year now. Does two count as a team? Anyway, I’ve been talking about stuff and I’ve been taking meds and I’ve gone over all of the horrible things in my past that keep me from being happy. And I’ve learned something.
It’s all my fault.
Oh yeah, it is. You see. Imagin that on the first day you were driving, the person teaching you suddenly screamed “TURN LEFT” and you did. Now twenty years later, you only turn left. If you want to go right you make three left turns. That is a stupid way to drive. And you know. Living your life by the way some stupid thing someone said twenty years is a stupid way to live your life. On top of that, it is YOU that are DOING IT TO YOUSELF. When was the last time you saw that teacher? How long ago did this happen? Yet, it continues to rule over you. Do you think that teacher has any idea what she did? No, because she didn’t do it. You bring her voice to your mind. You hear the snear in her voice. You’re like Billy Pilgram, time traveling to the worst points of your life when you could be on another planet in a biosphere with Valerie Perrine. (Slaughter House 5)
The stuff people said to me in my past did hurt. And on one level that is why I do or don’t do somethings. Now, years later, it is ME. I bring up those old memories and fears and I do it to myself. It’s hard to break that training but it’s worth it. Take responsibility for your actions or inactions. Take responsibility, and control of your life.
I had a great teacher in the first grade and didn’t have another good one until I was thirteen. When I became a teacher, I knew for certain how mistaken they were in handling situations and students as they did.
Our first mass exposure to adults other than our parents is with teachers. It seems reasonable that that is where we are going to find the most obvious flaws.
Given the impressionable minds of children, though, it does seem such a shame that we can’t afford to set higher standards for teachers.
At no time did I assert that I was unhappy. You tried to attribute my lack of enthusiasm, incorrectly, to the calming that comes with age. That doesn’t fit the facts, and I called you on it.
So, you are happy that you can’t emote, never show enthusiam, or volunteer?
Or was you OP more of a joke thread?
And can you point out to me where I said that your calming came with age? Because I don’t see it, nor do I see you ‘calling me on it’.
Man, this thread unlodged a memory I kept repressed for years.
In third grade, my teacher was a harpy named Mrs. Courson. Ugly as hell, black horned rim glasses, puckered lips, mole on cheek, the quintessential stereotype of the evil manipulative teacher out of children’s horror tales. She lived in a gingerbread house, baked children in the oven, that sort of thing.
One day she had us solve addition problems on the chalkboard. Usually, they put the larger number on top, but in my case I was adding a two-digit number and a three-digit number. Something like 85 + 347. I did the “write down ones digit, put the ten mark above the next column” deal, which resulted in me putting a 1 over the 3 in 347.
Mrs. Courson said “Eric, ah could whoop yew. Not only did yew write down the wrong numbahs, but yew added them wrong too!” Snif. I was too mortified to understand what she was talking about. She thought I wrote down 185 + 347. I just stood there shivering and withering under her soul-sucking gaze and was too frightened to correct her.
I think she was just mad because a house fell on her sister.
I don’t recall many problems with overstarched/abusive adult authority figures when I was a little kid (got my share of them in later Elementary). The people who humiliated me and taunted me were most often my peers. It was particularly bad when we moved to Georgia when I was a 2nd grader. I transferred in mid-year and looking back on it I think many of those kids had their share of being yelled at and humiliated by adult teachers and parents and so they were inclined to attack anyone who seemed safe to attack.
I remember a cluster of kids circling around me at recess calling me names and chanting mostly-meaningless sing-song insult songs (“A hunting he will go, Ahunter sucks his toe, hi hoe the fairy,
in his diapers he will go”) until I’d get mad and yell something angrily back at them (“You’re just like a pack of mindless chimpanzees, why don’t you all go climb a tree or something?”) which would delight them because then they’d singsong back at me whatever I’d said (“Mindless chimpanzee, go climb a tree!” Mindless chimpanzee, go climb a tree!").
It did seem like lots of the kids took pride in how stupid and immature they could be. I was embarrassed to be a kid, embarrassed in front of the teachers and other adults to perhaps be thought of as like the other kids.
All my early elementary school teachers (females, without exception) liked me. The few teachers who took a dislike to me happened to have other classrooms and I only ran into them on accidental occasions, like when the teacher across the hall came into our 1st grade classroom when our teacher was out, and I told her it wasn’t her classroom and she shouldn’t just enter without knocking like that and she gave me a dressing-down for speaking to an adult that way.
Those formative years of ours often have incidents which seemed traumatic at the time. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I certainly wasn’t moaning about the events, merely sharing. Looking back now I can see a young boy confused that a person responsible for nurturing and protecting him, chose instead to ridicule and harm him.
But I got over it. And it made me who I am today. I’m not saying I would like those events to occur exactly the same way if I had to live it over.
Those experiences did, however, show me that not everyone in the world wants to be my friend, that adults are not infallible, and to never take on blind faith what an authority figure says, no matter how omnipotent they seem.
I reckon those are some important lessons to learn, and if the end result has been for me to be a little less trusting, a little more cynical, a little more skeptical, then so be it.
In Junior High (8th grade, to be exact), there was Mrs. J. Mrs. J taught English, ordinarily, but I had her for ‘Enrichment’ class - basically, every six weeks, you would have a different Enrichment class. Hers was ‘Speech’.
Right off the bat, we’re at a bad place - Speech is not my friend. Nevertheless, I soldiered on. But the problems with Mrs. J were numerous - she played clear favorites with the girls of the girls basketball team, with which she was involved; she allowed students’ grades to be based on evaluations written by other students in the class - wonderful for a popular lad such as myself; and then there was the big one.
You see, West Virginia has a little competition for 8th Grade Students, called the Golden Horseshoe. It’s a trinket and title awarded to students by the state legislature for performing to high standards on a test in West Virginia History. As one of the school’s resident brains, I was given the chance to prepare for the test - I think it was a couple sessions a week - which happened to conflict with Enrichment class.
Mrs. J steadfastly refused to allow me to make up the work from those sessions, where I was off participating in an official school-sanctioned academic activity. I actually even won a Golden Horseshoe, and was knighted by the State Legislature. Still wasn’t allowed to make up the work.
The icing? Years later, she bumps into my Mom, and relates how happy she was to be part of my educational development. Bitch.
