Bad school memory- from light to heavy

Parent Cafe
21

<p>My baby sister was in kindergarten, and the teacher passed out some sort of coloring page, but said they weren’t going to be using it for a while. My sister (being 5) did not know that patience is a virtue and began to color immediately. The teacher proceeded to scold her loudly in front of the class and my sister started to cry. The teacher announced a quiet reading period type thing, and my sister wrote a note of apology to the teacher (you know “teacher i sory” kind of thing). She brought it up to the front of the room and handed it to her, and the teacher ripped up the note in front of my little sister.</p>

<p>The sad part? This was 2000!</p>

22

<p>These stories are very sad, and I wish I could write something that would soothe the wounded children in them.</p>

23

<p>My third grade teacher was absolutely evil. My sister had just died about five weeks before the start of that school year and I was, understandably, fragile, and a tiny person. I had been a preemie with other health issues, so I’ve always had a smaller-than-normal bladder. She knew that. One day I asked to go to the bathroom and she said no. I couldn’t wait. Had an accident and she wouldn’t let me go home. The entire year was like that. She was nice to me exactly once. My dad sent in a note about something and signed with his initials, wihch happened to be “DR” and her face lit up “your father is a doctor?” which he wasn’t. Never spoke pleasantly to me again.</p>

<p>She lived in the neighborhood though, and I ran into her and my wonderful second grade teacher not too long ago in a pizzeria. The second grade teacher had kept in touch with my mom, so she knew who I was and told the witch. She smiled and said it was good to see me. I told her that she had given me nightmares for years, explained how an 8-year-old who’d just had a death in the family could have used some compassion but she couldn’t find any for me, and told her that I hoped that the misery she gave out came back to her ten-fold in her life and that she would then rot in hell forever.</p>

24

<p>I had a mean , old lady teacher in the third grade. She was scary. One day, she went thru the desks and decided that mine and another student’s were too messy.We were not warned ahead of time. We just showed up for school one morning to find the entire contents of our desks dumped in two boxes in the front of the room. Then she announced that we we were pigs and couldn’t have a desk all week. Everytime we needed something , we had to be humiliated in front of everyone. The kicker was that she made us stay after school to explain the reason why she did this to us. I distinctly remember her telling us that she did this because " she loved children so much "
There was an even meaner teacher that my sister had in fifth grade. I recall my mother had to go have a meeting with her and try to get to the bottom of the problems, but she left feeling just as victimized by her.
Many yrs later, her husband was accused of molesting a child and took his own life before he was tried.
My youngest had a hateful 1st grade teacher…old mean and crabby. She cried every morning when I woke her to go to school. I tried to transfer her out of that class and the principal wouldn’t let us. I later found out that every year, here are a few mothers that also try to remove their child from her class and it never happened ( a least while this principal was there ) I cannot undersand why these teachers worked with such young children who cannot handle that type of treatment</p>

25

<p>Jasmom: your teacher was half right… at noon, a rainbow is round! I’ve seen one. Very cool.</p>

<p>All these mean teachers make me very glad I went to a Quaker elementary school where TLC was practiced (and we were ridiculed for that by the public school kids!). I remember my third grade teacher with some affection, because she noticed my boredom with the math she was teaching and sent me to take math with the fourth grade. The next year, several of us took math with the fifth, and in sixth, we had our own teacher for our little group.</p>

<p>We did have a slightly mean fourth grade teacher who would make you miss one of the three recesses (and each of them 30 minutes long!) if you were not paying enough attention. If you missed recess, you had to help her clean the room–sweep, clap erasers, that kind of thing. It wasn’t that bad. On really awful days, the whole class stayed in and helped clean.</p>

26

<p>My awfullest memory is actually my brother’s. My brilliant brother is very dyslexic and dysgraphic. He had the misfortune of having a 7th grade teacher that I had also had. She was a pathogenic sadist. She decided to “cure” him by making him stand up and spell things in front of the class and read out loud to the class and then horribly mock him. She publicly told him that since I had done so well, he was just lazy. It destroyed our relationship for decades (we’re over that now). I can’t even think about it without feeling violent toward her. She lived in my mother’s neighborhood and I must admit it was quite a relief to me when she died and I never had to run into her again. She has been one of the hardest people in my life to forgive.</p>

27

<p>Gosh, these stories are so sad. My teachers ranged from adequate to fantastic. I can happily say that the worst thing that ever happened to me was getting really, really bored listening to other kids haltingly read from our very boring reader. I’d read ahead and then wouldn’t know where we were when it was my turn. I don’t think the teacher ever got to mad at me though. Thankfully my kids teachers basically had kids come up to her desk one at a time to read.</p>

28

<p>I have a frustrating story and a funny story.</p>

<p>In fifth grade, I caught pnemonia and was out of school for two weeks. When I went back, the teachers were told I was not to go outside for PE (still winter in the great Pacific Northwet.) Well, this was a Catholic school, and the nun teaching my class would have none of it. She was practically to the point of hauling me outside until one of the lay teachers walked by and told her to lay off me.</p>

<p>The funny story. My S is advanced in math so, while at the middle school (which is next door to the high school) he needed to walk to the high school to take his Algebra 2 class. MS was on a block schedule and HS was on a regular schedule, so there was some adjustment but my S and the other two students liked him handled it well. The problem was at the beginning of the school year, when they discovered they were in the regular class and not the honors one. Well, the Three Musketeers took it upon themselves to walk into the HS prinicpal’s office and announce that they needed to be placed in the honors class.</p>

<p>No assistance from teachers, no intervention from parents, they just got it done. I didn’t find out until several days later when I mentioned the teacher’s name and S said he had another teacher and explained what had happened.</p>

29

<p>When I was in 4th grade, I had a teacher who really had favorites. Unfortunately, I was very sickly & not among them. She gave me an “F” for every spelling test I missed (there are many of them because I had frequent strep throat & the doc notes & antibiotics to prove it). She failed me out of her gifted & talented program so I was “demoted” to “regular” English where I was isolated because I didn’t belong. The good thing was that I had a WONDERFUL and very compassionate 5th grade teacher who helped me feel less isolated and more included. She read us the “Hobbit” and worked very hard to help me be accepted.</p>

<p>My D had teachers who would ask her in front of the entire class if she was eating properly or anorexic (though she was about the same thin size & weight of most of her peers). She would also be asked other personal health questions in front of her peers and her friends would be interrogated about her health–this was as recently at 2005! Talk about HIPPA violations!</p>

<p>The good thing was that it made D & her friends stronger and closer. She & her friends & their families were very protective of D and her health and incensed that the school was not more supportive of her chronic health issues. The school had been a lot more understanding and less intrusive of her older brother (who had also had similar chronic health issues), which made it even irritating. To this day, the school has the nerve to send us info about contributing to them!</p>

30

<p>My story is from 4th grade. </p>

<p>I was given a pen as a gift (not expensive, but a very distinctive design). I had the pen in my desk at school, and one day it went missing. Imagine my surprise when I later saw the pen in classmate “R’s” breast pocket. I confronted R, told her that I knew she had my pen, and demanded she give it back. R starts crying and tells the teacher.</p>

<p>The teacher calls me to her desk for a little talk. I tell her my side of the story, I know the pen is mine, and accuse R of stealing it. The teacher’s response was “R is sick. She has a hole in her heart.” My response to the teacher: “I also have a hole in my heart. That does not mean I get to be a thief!”</p>

<p>I would have loved to see the look on that teacher’s face when she confirmed my heart issue with the school nurse (who also happened to be my grandmother). I will admit that R’s heart issues were much more serious than mine, but I never did quite get the teacher’s logic that being sick allowed you to steal! (and I never did get my pen back)</p>

31

<p>We’ve shared our school stories with kids. They can not believe them. Things are different these days. Thankfully, I don’t think my kid has had one bad teacher. Some have been less impressive than others, but no rotten ones.</p>

<p>For years the boys on the grade school playground chanted in unison “NO Girls Allowed!” They only let the best one or two girls handle balls in gym. Why did the female teachers let them get away with this?
Sis had the mean 2nd grade teacher, who would rap a ruler on your knuckles and knock on your skull with her knuckles.
About one third of our school was Jewish. I remember this because those kids were absent for a Jewish holiday, and our teacher said it was unfair that they didn’t get their holidays off as we did. The next year my teacher said nothing about the Jewish holiday but assigned a freakish amount of homework that day.
3rd grade teacher berated one classmate for doing more worksheet problems than she assigned, and for buying an exchange gift that cost a little more than she stipulated.
4th and 5th grade teachers were bad news. 4th screamed at me several times for doing things I swear she never told me not to do.
5th handed out endless worksheets while she ate avocados in front of the class or walked down for a break in the teacher’s lounge.
7th grade art teachers “team taught”, spent a huge portion of every class chewing somebody out, wrote detentions for the whole class one day when a boy (bigger than everyone, obviously held back a couple of years) shot a rubber band and no one would finger him (why??). I got kicked out of class that day for laughing uncontrollably at their inability to maintain order.
7th grade teacher read aloud a note passed from a boy to a girl that must have been extremely embarrassing (he’d started to shave; whole class laughed).
7th grade science teacher had a paddle with holes for better effect. Only boys got paddled. I can still hear the swack that paddle made.
8th grade teacher (an alcoholic) didn’t show up for several of our first-in-the-morning classes. I can still see the look on another teacher’s face when she discovered our class just sitting there teacherless, and I can still hear the sound of a classmate being slammed into the lockers by that teacher.
8th grade cooking teacher issued quarter grades after 3 weeks of class - for our ‘kitchen’, one A, one B, one C and one D, though we had literally done nothing for a grade. They just looked at old report cards and made those grades up. I still feel bad for the D girl.
8th grade English, worked hard to get a B, but even though I read at a higher level than B students and teacher hung my A report on the wall, I still got the C.
HS counselor would not even let me see the catalog for our flagship, where I obtained my BS after 4 years.
Junior year HS, physiology teacher almost never taught, instead blabbed about coaching. He handed out textbook tests.
Senior year (!) our math teacher singled out three of us to not take the math contest test that we honors kids had all been taking for years. She claimed our math grades at the flagship would not vary from hers by more than one full grade. I nearly beat her by a full grade at flagship (she graded unfairly). Years later, Dad played music at a teacher party; he saw this witch accidentally pushed into the pool. How I have enjoyed this mental image!</p>

<p>Some of those teachers back then were really BAD. To this day I can’t imagine wanting to be a teacher.</p>

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<p>I had an elementary school teacher who put gum in a boy’s hair to punish him for chewing it in class. He had to get a crewcut, and it was not the style at that time. I always thought that if this happened today, she would be fired. She always played favorites in her class, and I knew that I was not one of them. She also told us umpteen times that we were not as good as her previous year’s class. What a piece of work.</p>

<p>In first grade the teacher did not let a little girl go to the bathroom when she asked, so the girl peed on the floor. What great training for working with little kids she must have had, and she was an experienced teacher (to me she seemed like a hundred, but she was probably the age I am now.)</p>

<p>I was embarrassed by my home ec teacher in junior high. I was talking when I shouldn’t have been, and I had to stand on a chair and give some kind of presentation while everyone else sat at the tables. The funny thing is that I liked her, and even though she embarrassed me, I never resented her personally for doing it (unlike the elementary school teacher above.) The home ec teacher was only there for a year anyway. I guess it just wasn’t her thing.</p>

<p>I really did not like the female gym teachers in junior high. I think they could have moonlighted as prison guards. The gym suits were hideous, and this also did nothing for morale. Luckily the high school gym teachers were actually all nice.</p>

<p>I had a couple of really nice teachers in elementary school too. I will never forget them. It saddened me to find out that they both died of cancer. Neither one lived too long after I graduated high school, so they were relatively young.</p>

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<p>Oh yea, I forgot the amazing teacher who gave an “F” for a student who had always had an “A” in the class because she was ill & turned in her project (handsewing a pillow) on the Monday when she returned to school & the teacher refused to accept it even tho the child’s family had called the school about the illness & asked if it would be OK if the child brought the pillow in when she returned to school!</p>

<p>The same middle school had deficiency notices (grade D or F) for about 1/2 of the school, even tho nearly all of them had been doing excellent work in grade school before coming to that middle school. Neither the principal nor the counselor saw anything wrong with this or thought it had any reflection on the middle school! When you tried to make an appointment with the school to talk with the teacher and/or principal, you were told there was no need & couldn’t make an appointment because there was “no problem” even tho your child who had always been on the honor roll was now getting at least one or more “D” and/or “F.” It was definitely a challenging environment.</p>

34

<p>i really enjoyed spending 20K a year for a witch who taught math to say that no matter what he did or how hard he worked my son would never amount to anything in math (he just recently got one of the highest math scores in the state in 7th grade-who cares, but that just goes to show what she knew!)
another (math) teacher told my younger son that he was not smart and could never do word problems (why not teach them then??!) he is ranked in the state in math as a 6th grader
thank goodness for our wonderful public middle school teachers who take teaching as a profession, not just a job…</p>

35

<p>I can relate to the poster tha was told that her class was not as good as last years. My 6th grader has told me since the first week of school about the teachers that have announced that theirs was the worst behaved ever…then on back to school night, those same teachers beamed at how wonderful this class is…uh huh, tenure and waiting for retirement has no effect on your ability and willingness to continue doing your job, I am sure.
When I was in high school, I had a male biology teacher that didn’t like me and didn’t hide it. Yrs after I graduated , he worked a summer job with my best friend’s sister and told her that I " would never succeed in anything "…the shame is, I really liked science and was totally put off of it after having him as a teacher. If I had a better foundation, I may have pursued a different career, but he shattered my confidence.
On the other hand, I have encountered more caring teachers , particularly with my own kids. It is a shame that the bad ones come to mind and have as much of an impact as they do.</p>

36

<p>I guess I was lucky to have good or at worst mediocre teachers throughout school. But my traumatic experience came in 8th grade with my piano teacher. I had been taking piano lessons for 8 years, loved it and was even thinking about a career as a music teacher. My teachers was an elderly, childless woman who only taught classical. For her, music stopped in 1920. </p>

<p>We had monthly repertoires, as she called them, and a yearly recital at a local church. In 8th grade, I wanted to play something, anything modern. I asked for “Love is Blue” which was popular at the time or something else. I was not asking for the Beatles or Jimmy Hendrix. She refused. </p>

<p>There were about 30 students, mostly girls. I can only remember 3 boys. I’ll never forget the moment Donald got up and started to play—“Born Free.” Fortunately, I had already played, because I don’t think I could have after that. I was so furious, I never went back. I have no idea what, if anything, my mother might have told her. Needless to say, I never again considered music as a career, although I did go into teaching.</p>

37

<p>My fourth grade teacher (Mrs. Levy, I still hate her and hope she sees this), tortured us with math, going up and down the rows of the class expecting each child to get the answers correct. And she got pretty nasty if you got it wrong. She was mean as a snake. If we talked too much before a vacation such as Christmas or Easter she would give so much homework it would ruin the week. Amazing how we don’t forget.</p>

38

<p>DD had middle school english teacher give her B+ on many essays and in the class, okay that is fine, but then the teacher told me she was doing it because DD focused too much on the grade and needed to be okay with not always getting As, that the essays merited an A! :Eek: But even worse, those teachers gave an award at the end of the year to any one with a 4.0 which should have included DD, but did not due to the object lesson!</p>

39

<p>Yea, I had a social studies teacher that gave me the only “C” I got in HS for a similar “object lesson.” It broke the long-standing string of “As” & I really had been doing A work but he was trying to prove something–could never quite figure out what.</p>

40

<p>I can only think back to one occurrence where I had a truly horrendous teacher.</p>

<p>The debate coach for my high school debate team started working the same year I entered the school in 10th grade. For the first year he wasn’t too bad - a little chummier with the students than I would generally deem appropriate, but nothing too horrible.</p>

<p>However, my junior year he really began playing favorites with the team. When the time came to elect new captains for the following year, he was not happy that his three favorite students were not elected (all of whom happened to be some of my best friends). This coach then terrorized me and the other two captain-elects for the remainder of the year, telling us that had he been given the choice, he would not have elected the three of us, that our leadership and debating skills were weak, and that we were required to attend debate camp that summer. My three friends stormed out of the elections (good losers they were) and refused to talk to me for half the semester, likely because the coach told them that he knew it was unfair that they weren’t elected when they should have been.</p>

<p>My senior year of high school, this coach undermined every single thing the three of us, as captains, tried to do to help the team. He made his favorites co-presidents of the non-existent chapter of the National Forensics League and wrote letters of recommendation for them that detailed their leadership as captains of the debate team</p>

<p>One day he pulled me aside and asked why I was still friends with his favorites. He claimed that my friends talked about me behind my back and said truly horrible things. He told me that I was like a battered wife who kept returning to her abusive husband. </p>

<p>This coach had the audacity to claim I was the weakest debater on the team (despite placing in the top 8 teams at state both sophomore and junior years). He refused to pair me with a partner and as a result, I think I only debated in two tournaments that year. I attended all of them. He claimed he could not justify to the parents of the other debaters on the team why I should be debating over their children because I had the worst record (which was again, not true as evidenced by my success the previous years). He told me I didn’t have what it takes and that I should quit (and that maybe he’d be wrong and I would come back in ten years and be successful and say I told you so. Which was just bizarre.). He often made anti-Semitic comments (I was the only Jewish person in my grade of 800+ students) and spoke poorly of me and the other captains to the rest of the team. He was downright emotionally abusive.</p>

<p>Unbeknownst to me at the time, my mother went in to speak with him after becoming fed up when her normally strong and confident 17-year-old daughter come home from school upset and often in tears most days that semester. Not only was he downright rude to my mom (who was at least a good fifteen years his senior), he either denied what he said or attempted to convince my mom that I really was the worst performing debater on the team (even though she spent over an hour looking through score sheets from the previous year and was unable to figure out how that conclusion could be made.)</p>

<p>That being the last straw, my mom and I went to the principal and told the story, provided evidence that he was writing letters of recommendation that contained false information/lies, and detailed the effects this kind of abuse had on my emotional well-being. The best the principal could offer us was to fire the coach after the end of the season. No apology to me and the other captains by the coach, no acknowledgment that any wrongdoing ever occurred, nothing. The principal cared more about several smaller indiscretions (the coach allowing students to use his computer instead of the debate computers, which compromised student privacy, or watching movies in the debate room with students during class time) than the situation that had been ongoing for the past year.</p>

<p>In the end, the teacher was fired as coach of the debate team (but allowed to keep his positions as history teacher and JV football coach). He never had to reveal he was fired. Instead he stood up at our end-of-season banquet and announced that he was going back to school to get his masters degree and didn’t have time to coach debate anymore.</p>

<p>This was five years ago. It took me a long time to regain the self-confidence I lost during the course of that year and a half. And while I can’t use the words I would like to describe him, that <em>insert word of choice here</em> can rot in hell.</p>

<p>Sorry for the long post. I guess the anger still hasn’t completely left my system.</p>