Bad school memory- from light to heavy

Parent Cafe
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<p>On a thread there is a discussion going about school projects, and its interesting to read what parents remembera about their own and how it still is so fresh and annoying!!</p>

<p>It led me to remember something else from my school days:</p>

<p>We were asked to make easter bonnets to wear in the easter parade…mine was soooo cute, picture large cirle with hole cut in it, with little bunnies, chickens, candy, flowers…</p>

<p>any it was big so the teacher put it somewhere until the parade…parade day comes and she can’t find it…she looks around…looks at me, and says, oppsy, guess you either didn’t bring it in OR someone threw it out…</p>

<p>I was crushed, in the parade, all the other kids walked around in their little hats, someone with a hat half as good as mine won a prize, and I looked like my mom didn’t care about me because I was hatless…</p>

<p>Anyway, at the end of the year, cleaning the classroom, on top of a cabinet, there was my hat, all covered in spiderwebs and dust…it was awful</p>

<p>The teacher says, here is your hat, you were right, you did give it to me</p>

<p>40 years later, I still remember that moment in 2nd grade vividly</p>

2

<p>Ouch, citysgirlsmom. I’m feeling the pain! LOL</p>

<p>During the first month of kindergarden my DD was turning 6. When I picked her up she had the strangest look on her face upon leaving the classroom. As she approached me she ran into my arms and began uncontrollably sobbing because the teacher had spanked her 6 times.I can only imagine how her wildly creative 6 year old mind processed this as she was singled out, brought to the front of the class and spanked by this very old, scarey looking K teacher. She was determined to never go back to school again.</p>

<p>She never believed me when I tried to explain this was supposed to be “fun.”</p>

3

<p>My sixth grade year was horrible!!! My science teacher definitely had some serious psychological problems and enjoyed watching her students suffer. After every test, she would have everyone stand around the room until she made up her new seating chart, which was based on one’s test performance. From the top grade to the lowest grade, she called out our names one by one and seated us in that order. Those poor kids left standing for the last row…</p>

<p>Then, she had the “messy desk” punishment. If you left so much as a pencil on your desk at the end of the school day, you found your name on the board the following morning and were required to carry all of your heavy textbooks (there were at least six of them, and no one used bookbags back then) home every day for a week. Most of us walked home from school every day at least a mile or two, so that was a painful journey!</p>

<p>Whenever anyone got braces, she made fun of them! She even made fun of people’s clothes, and some of them could not afford better ones!</p>

<p>My language arts teacher that same year was too old to still be teaching and often recorded grades wrong. We had to take all of our spelling tests in ink, and if you scratched out a word and started it over, it was automatically counted wrong. She once gave me a “B” for my spelling grade, but my mom had saved all of my old tests and knew that I had a strong “A” average. It turned out that she had recorded a huge unit test as “89” instead of “98.” When my mom made an appointment to see her after school on this, the teacher offered to change my grade to an A-. My mom replied, “No, that won’t do, because she has at least a “98” average in spelling. Therefore, if you can’t change it to the right grade, then just don’t change it at all!”</p>

<p>I was totally stressed out that entire year and am glad that my children have not had a similar experience.</p>

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<p>I had a horrible 5th grade teacher. She would have students work math problems on the board and when they couldn’t do one, she would ridicule and berate them in front of the class. They were never allowed to sit until she had reduced them to tears. </p>

<p>I told my mother about this behavior. My mother came in for math one day, stayed in the cloak room (remember those?) until the teacher started in on a little girl. My mother exited the cloakroom and confronted the teacher, also proceeded to have the teacher work a math problem of [mom’s] choice on board. When the teacher had problems doing it, my mom took the chalk and said, “maybe you know how these students feel now”. Then she calmly walked out of room. The blackboard terrorizing stopped after that.</p>

5

<p>Yay for strong-willed moms! Mkm, your mom and mine would have been great friends, I’m sure. Mine was all about fairness and professionalism, and she never hesitated to confront teachers if necessary. Some of our teachers (there were 4 kids in my family) probably hated seeing another one of us on their class rolls for a new year!</p>

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<p>Yes, memie, and they were before their time. Today it wouldn’t seem that unusual for a mother to speak out on behalf of her children or in criticism of a school policy, but in the early 60’s in was pretty rare!</p>

<p>This same teacher had a drinking problem and came to school with AOB. (of course I though it was mouthwash odor as a 5th grader) My mother and father (reluctantly) went to superintendent of schools about the teacher. They were told that it was hard to get rid of a teacher with tenure unless it was for “immoral” acts. To my father’s great embarrassment, my mother quickly offered up his services.</p>

<p>My father was so proud of mom for her crusades, but really wanted to remain in background!</p>

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<p>Anyone remember “Dunce” caps? My first grade teacher had me sit on a chair in the corner wearing a big cone paper hat. It was because I was “fiddling” with my hair. I was mortified. I heard recently (40 years later!) that she later became a professional clown (I am not kidding!).</p>

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<p>LOL Primtimemom. Bet none of her students felt the calling for clown school.</p>

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<p>If my sixth grade math teacher didn’t think the class performed well enough on a test, he started what he called his “merry-go-round”. The class would have to walk around the perimeter of the classroom while he stood in one spot and swung his paddle of choice (he had several of various thicknesses and one with holes drilled in it) as we walked past. He never varied the height of his swing so the paddle hit you where it hit you. I was tall so it always got me in the back of my thighs.</p>

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<p>^^^
Can you imagine the lawsuits today over practices like that? After reading some of “hazing” threads—maybe we felt a bonding experience with our classmates?</p>

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<p>I remember a teaching punishing a boy in around 4th grade, give or take, he was told to stand in the front of the room and hold his arms out straight and the Weekly Journal bundle of newsprint was placed in his hands…he held them for the longest time until he started to cry…it was awful to have to sit there and watch him slowly crumble…it was sooo mean…</p>

<p>but I also remember a story my HS boyfriend told…in the 3rd grade, one of the kids in the class was terrorizing their teacher…started running around the classroom, with the teacher close behind, when all of a sudden, the kid yelled “sayonara” and jumped out the 3rd floor window…the teacher almost had a heart attack and died right in front of the class…the kid apparently knew there were massive hedges under the window and was 100% fine… I always thought that was a GREAT story…</p>

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<p>My grandfather was kind of a character. He told me that the full moon was to help drunks get home safely. I announced this to my first grade class with great pride. The teacher reported it to my parents, who were mortified. The same year, we were discussing our ancestry. My ancestors came over on the Mayflower. I wanted to be different, so I said my grandmother was Chinese. The teacher said, “Well, we’ll have to look at you more closely!”</p>

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<p>I had a 3rd grade teacher who claimed that a rainbow was really round. While we saw half, people on the other side of the world were seeing the other half (even in 3rd grade, I knew that claim to be weird). Fortunately, I left the country a few months into the year. Fourth grade, I had a teacher (in a Dept. of Defense school) who read stories (Blackbeard and other such tales) and sang to us. When he wasn’t reading and singing, he just instructed us to practice drawing loops or he told us to read our textbooks (no particular assignments). Fortunately, I was moved to another classroom.</p>

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<p>mkm,
Sure I remember the cloak room, but for all the wrong reasons. In kindergarten the teacher locked me in the cloakroom because I refused to take a nap! (I never have needed much sleep) Can you imagine what would happen today if these occurrences being reported on this thread actually happened in 2006?</p>

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<p>What horrid examples of petty tyranny. (Except for sayonara! and out the window…that is hilarious. Wonder what that guy is doing now?)</p>

<p>My kindergarten teacher made me sit under her desk for talking too much. but I loved her and she appreciated me. I took my 6-year-old D back to meet her at her wonderful farm.</p>

<p>My nightmare teacher was my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Siepp. Rhymes with tripe and swipe. She was old and mean and she didn’t like smart little girls who were reading in the back of the stupid reading book out of boredom. We had a nightmare art project making flat paper umbrellas with a pattern and coloring them. I drew a house with flowers and a rainbow on mine, and she said umbrellas couldn’t have a house on them and I would have to make another one during recess. I threw the offending umbrella in the wastebasket and then she scolded me for not putting it in the scrap paper drawer. I truly wanted to throttle her by then. She wrote a note to my mother, which I brilliantly deposited in the outside trash can on my way home.</p>

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<p>Holy Moly, some of these accounts are perfectly Dickensian! CGM, I can understand how this memory is still so painful. When I was in third grade, my art teacher was the source of two of my most traumatic elementary school experiences. I’ll never forget how she took it upon herself to “improve” one of my art projects. One day, we were all given a lump of clay to sculpt however we pleased. By the end of class, I had sculpted what I thought to be a wonderful duck family, Mama Duck and five beautiful little ducklings. I was so pleased and proud of them. When I showed them to the teacher as she walked down my aisle, she proceeded to pick up my Mama Duck and declare that it needed feathers, at which point, she started to gouge markings into my precious and change its shape. I was horrified! It looked hideous (at least to me :D). I tried to “fix” it back, but when I couldn’t return it to its former glory, I proceeded to burst into tears, and could not be consoled. I was so heartbroken, my parents went to the school and confronted the art teacher for her presumption and insensitivity. I was given another lump of clay and the opportunity to try again, but the “spark of brilliance” had passed. I could not “sculpt” another Mama Duck with which I was even slightly pleased. I almost laugh out loud remembering it now, but back then, being a very high-strung and hyper-sensitive child, I was devastated.</p>

<p>I’ve already related the story of the first time this teacher hurt my feelings in another thread, so I won’t retell it here.:D</p>

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<p>"Being able to go home during the week to see my family was like a rainbow. "</p>

<p>Raeann—thats the sweetest thing I have read for ages. Thanks for that.</p>

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<p>Wow, these are fascinating stories. </p>

<p>My sixth grade teacher use to make us do seances and I recall one afternoon we had to do levitation- we crowded around and had to try to lift him off the ground with our fingers.</p>

<p>I also recall a really pervy french teacher in 8th grade that used to slip in suggestive words, to have conjugate them for his amusement. Being rather clueless, we didn’t know the difference between say real french verbs and his pervy words like butt or boobs. So he’d shout out the verb “butt”, we’d dutifully conjugate. “je butt, tu butt…nous button, vous buttez, …” and he’d burst out laughing. Doofus.</p>

<p>Oh I could go on and on…</p>

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<p>When I was in 2nd grade, I had a teacher who made a student wear a pretend diaper & dunce cap all day because he did something that displeased her. Another teacher who was morbidly obese would sit on the male grade school students in PE & make them do pushups.
My daughter had a kindergarten teacher who always insisted anything anyone did to hurt anyone else was “an accident.” She started being afraid to go to school & hubby spent the weekend teacher her to hit back from bullies who had started hitting her. I accompanied her to school & she quietly told the teacher that she was not going to take being hit any more and would hit back. The teacher was upset & told her that if she hit back she would NOT get a valentine from the teacher. Sure enough, as soon as the class lined up for lunch, the largest bully came up & shoved D who shocked him by hitting him back & he said in an astonished voice, “Teacher, she hit me back!” She stopped being bullied thereafter but the teacher (who had been a friend of mine) told me it caused her a real professional crisis.</p>

<p>S had a teacher who complained that S was reading the newspaper in class. I asked her if she wanted him to read or NOT read the paper & she said she couldn’t decide. I asked her to please let me & S know when she decided so we could get him to act accordingly.</p>

<p>D politely asked the principal to allow her to withdraw from the gifted & talented program. The principal asked why & was extremely surprised when my 9 year-old daughter admitted that she stuck it out as long as she could but she could no longer tolerate the teacher making all the students burst into tears every day because she had such poor teaching skills.</p>

<p>I’ll stop here, but have many more.</p>

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<p>I despise all teachers, mine and my children’s, who show obvious favourtism. As a pro you should be beyond that, but instead some seem to buy into the BMOC group. Others show the opposite and if they don’t like your parent they take it out on the student. As a school board member there was one teacher who was sneaky and walked a fine line, but really did some nasty things to my kids, just what she could get away with, not too obvious. I was validated by other teachers and old friends of hers who told me she hated SB members, so I could at least warn the kids not to take it personally, but what an immature wench she was!</p>