I lost it completely. Three hours I’d been working on that piece, and I was actually feeling okay about it, considering I’d been out of school for months at a stretch dealing with my own life falling apart. The art teacher glanced over my shoulder and said, well, that’s not very good, you’re not doing it right, and walked off. I screamed.
I demanded to know what gave her the right to say something so hurtful and unhelpful, how she’d made it this far in her career without once actually helping a student, where she got off telling kids their work wasn’t good enough while never lifting a finger to teach them anything. The back-and-forth went on for a solid ten minutes, my rage pouring out of me in a flood. To picture it properly, I was a chubby, four-foot-eight, bespectacled white girl who’d maybe had two detentions in her entire schooling. The teacher was a pale, fragile ghost of a woman, and her voice couldn’t match my fury.
Eventually she sent me out. The whole class was stunned. Nobody jeered at me on the way out. A couple of people let out quiet whoops of support, which felt amazing.
At that school, when you got kicked out of class, a roaming teacher with a walkie-talkie would find you in the halls and deal with you. I went and sat in the stairwell and sobbed for a good twenty minutes, anxiety screaming through every pore. By sheer luck, the teacher on duty that day was my dry, cynical science teacher. His eyebrows shot up when he saw me crumpled on the stairs, and he sat down next to me while I cried some more.
He asked what the hell had happened. Between angry tears, I explained the whole situation. I’m still grateful for his response. Yeah, she’s a piece of work.
You did good. He stayed with me for the next hour, just letting me vent. I think he knew something about my home situation, or at least understood there was a real reason I’d lost my temper so completely. Having an authority figure confirm that it’s okay to question authority when it’s failing at its job helped more than I can say.
I still walked out on my last day of school when another teacher started screaming at me for forgetting a file on my way to English class, but by then I understood something important. You don’t have to take crap from people who use their power to hurt you. You deserve respect as much as they do, and they need to learn that first. My graduating class had fewer than fifty kids.
We all knew each other, and we all knew the teachers and administrators personally. I was the mom friend to a group of bullied kids, the one the administration called the golden child. I never talked back, never acted out, I was the salutatorian, and I sat in the front row at every assembly. During one assembly near the end of senior year, the principal came on stage and announced a seven-week anti-bullying program.
Fine, I thought. Probably won’t do anything, but whatever. Then she launched into a long speech about how she knew bullying wasn’t a problem at our school, and this was purely preventative. She wasn’t being sarcastic.
She genuinely believed it. My best friend had gone to a mental hospital because of suicide attempts less than two years earlier. The bullying had been a constant part of it, and the administration had known and done nothing. I spent the entire assembly glaring daggers at her.
At one point she looked down and noticed me. We held eye contact for a few seconds before she looked away, clearly uncomfortable. The golden child disapproved, and she knew it. When the head administrator got up to close the assembly, he gave the same speech about how bullying wasn’t an issue.
He got the same glare and the same reaction. I met with the principal later that day, and as calmly as I could, I laid out my complaints. She kept spouting the same nonsense from the assembly. Eventually I just stormed out.
For me, that was dramatic. I hated her. In middle school, there was a kid who couldn’t play his saxophone. Not one note came out right.
He got called out a lot at first, so eventually he just started fingering the notes silently to avoid the humiliation. I played drums, so I watched all of this happen right behind him. The band teacher either never noticed or didn’t care. Then one day, out of nowhere, he cared.
He made the kid play something on his own. Surprise, the kid couldn’t. The teacher stopped everyone and made him try over and over. Fifteen minutes in, the kid hadn’t made it past three notes, and he started crying.
It wasn’t even that hard, and I probably could have played it by then. It went on even longer, the whole room quiet and miserable. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I said, hey kid, can you play that?
He shook his head. If we sat here the rest of class, would you be able to figure it out? He shook his head again. Do you promise to go home and practice and try again tomorrow?
He nodded. Alright, I said, then leave the kid alone and move on. The teacher lost his mind. His face went red, he started yelling at me, called me a name, and made some vague threat about consequences.
His wife had just been fired from her elementary school job for taping a kid to a chair. So I said, what are you going to do, tie me to a chair? Silence. A few seconds later, one of the girls next to the teacher started laughing her ass off.
Then everyone lost it. Even the kid was laughing. I realized I’d said that out loud around the same time everyone else did. That first girl to laugh eventually became my wife.
Our best man told that story at our wedding. She says that’s the exact moment she realized I didn’t give a damn about anything, and also that I existed. She was a foot taller than me when we first met. Our twentieth anniversary is in January.
I only blew up at a teacher once in high school, and I was a jerk about it. We had a Spanish teacher who loved Spanish culture in the most inauthentic way possible. She was one of those people who visit foreign countries just to see how bad locals have it, then come back to the States and openly trash them. Immigrants especially.
Being Mexican, this pissed me off, and we got into heated exchanges constantly. She had this program called Pesos that was worth twenty-five percent of our grade. Earn so many over a span of time and get a certain grade. She pushed it as participation-based, but it never felt fair.
After one of her racist rants, I stopped arguing and started documenting. Every day for three months, I wrote down every point she gave out. The person, what they did, the time, how much they earned. I kept the records detailed enough that I could calculate final grades.
You could plainly see she only boosted favorites to raise their class rank. The tipping point came at midterms. Our exam was a semester-long project we’d already completed. With two and a half hours left, she made us watch a movie.
I had an AP chemistry exam the next period, so I quietly studied in the back. She saw me and demanded I put my stuff away. I tried to reason with her, pointed out the exam was important and we weren’t doing anything anyway, but she wanted an excuse. She sent me to the principal’s office.
The principal asked for my side of the story, then told me I must not be telling the whole truth. I said I was, then reached into my bag with the biggest grin I’d had all year and presented my notebook. I walked him through every single point over the past three months. The guy was flabbergasted.
He asked me to make copies, told me to hold onto the original, and said I needed a parent at school tomorrow morning. He let me finish studying in his office. The next day my dad and I walked into a conference room. The principal and the Spanish teacher were already seated.
We went through the situation, and the principal started grilling her. Was there any paper trail on these grades? Had she noticed she was giving more opportunities and higher totals to students in her clubs? She got defensive.
My dad and I had no idea why we were even there. Then she suddenly turned on my father. Your son is targeting me. I’m the victim here.
This was all organized, and I want to know if you had anything to do with it. It was absurd. Then she started crying in front of all of us about her sister dying six months earlier and how hard the year had been. My dad just sat there, unsure what to do.
The principal ended the meeting shortly after the tears started. In the car, my dad laughed. It turned out she was put on administrative leave. Her entire curriculum and grading system went under review, and her senior-level classes were put on hold.
The best part came when those classes were conditionally approved and she needed a minimum number of students to sign off. Guess who was the last qualified student she had to ask. I said no. An English professor made the entire class hunt down New York Times articles because she’d once won an award for doing that.
We had to cut them out and paste them into little diary entries. If you were missing even two of the thirty-five entries, you failed that grade. Didn’t matter if the other thirty-three were the best ever written. Miss two, automatic F.
This was college-level English, by the way. A computer science professor, the head of the division, ran an online course where he waited until two weeks after the semester started to finally show us the two different websites he’d set up. One had hardware questions, the other software questions. On top of that, we had the college app that let professors announce new assignments.
I went through the entire class, it was easy, and he kept announcing jokes to the whole class. I took the bait, bought some green shirts he joked about, kept working. Then I got my final grade. An F, for apparently no reason.
He’d been using those joke announcements to bury the news of a major project worth over thirty percent of the grade. I never had any way to learn about it. I failed the class. A philosophy professor, also the head of his division, wanted two hours of essay writing for every hour of class.
Annoying but manageable. Then snow days hit, and he demanded four hours of essay writing to make up for them, which was illegal in my state. Then he decided to give a final early and wanted over six hours of writing per hour of class. He wasn’t my only class.
I had four others. His midterms and finals were all essays graded randomly, and he’d give pop quizzes on his personal preferences about Socrates. He’d kick you out for taking out a notebook. The English department at my first college was staffed by people who were, by and large, the worst people I’ve ever met.
Their idea of a writing workshop was emailing the assignment to the teacher, then paying at least ten dollars to print enough copies for the entire class. We had online message boards built into the school system, but no, we had to pay for paper. The teacher made it clear he didn’t care about his students at all and clearly never read anything beyond a basic skim. He drove one student to a panic attack on the last day by micromanaging her story like a creep.
They also had this weekly requirement. Every English major had to gather in the campus chapel on Thursdays to listen to someone read their work aloud. They called it creative writing common time. It meant sitting silently, no laptops, no phones, no books, while someone read work that had been rejected from a lit magazine.
Miss one session in a semester, fail the class. And you had to do this for four semesters to pass anything. By the end of the first semester I’d already had enough. I missed a session, and the makeup assignment was just as bizarre.
Find an audio recording of an author reading their own work, then analyze how they read it. On the last day of the semester, undergrad students got to read their own work, and either nobody vetted them or they vetted them terribly. A student read a graphic depiction of a rape and murder, and the teachers just let him. Several students left the building.
I almost did too. I dropped out of the English program and transferred to a university where the English department wasn’t staffed by psychopaths. It cost me an extra year of school. I don’t care.
It was better. A couple of weeks into senior year of high school, the president gave a speech about the importance of education. All the teachers had to set up projectors so we could watch. My math teacher couldn’t figure out how to get the projector working.
Being the nerdy kid, I offered to help. She had a fit, started screaming about how she wasn’t stupid, and told me to sit down and shut up. A few minutes later, with the projector still not working, she pointed at me and ordered me to fix it. I said fix it yourself.
She told the whole class to go next door to watch the speech in another teacher’s room. As I got up to leave, she pulled me aside and told me I’d be standing up when they returned to apologize for being rude to her. I refused and walked out with the rest of the class. She spent the rest of the year making my life miserable.
She told me several times she was going to make sure I failed her class. Sure enough, I failed her class. The only class I ever failed. My parents tried to report her.
The administrators didn’t want to touch it and said it was an issue for the math department head. The department head turned out to be a close friend of hers and took her side. Since the class wasn’t required for graduation, and it was the last semester before I was done with high school, I stopped caring and moved on. I’d turn in homework and she wouldn’t grade it.
The school didn’t allow students to keep copies of tests for fear of leaks, so she could give me whatever grades she wanted, and I couldn’t prove anything. The school’s policy for disputed test grades was to have the department head regrade the test. As I mentioned, the department head was her friend, and every disputed test came back, miraculously, graded correctly. I never got to see them, so I’ll never know if they actually were.
In seventh grade, there was an old English teacher who shouldn’t have been around kids. She was in her mid-sixties, completely miserable, and took everything out on her students. Everyone walked on eggshells, terrified of being her target for the day. One day I did something small to upset her.
I honestly can’t remember what. It must have been insignificant. But I remember exactly how she treated me afterward. She walked around handing out an assignment.
When she reached my desk, she looked at me, gave me an evil smile, and kept walking. Knowing I’d take a zero. I raised my hand. Excuse me, I didn’t get a paper.
Don’t talk to me, she said. I told her I needed the paper to do my work. She said the same thing. Don’t talk to me.
I went off. I told her it was extremely unprofessional to tell a student not to speak to her and to prevent him from learning. I told her she was disgraceful, and that I was going to the principal. I walked out, marched straight to the office, and filed a complaint.
The principal called my mom, and she came down right away to formally file it. Apparently it wasn’t the first complaint against that teacher. But she had tenure, so it was practically impossible to fire her. She resigned at the end of the year.
I assume it was somewhat forced. Either way, good riddance. As a mature-age student working on a second degree, I ran into an external lecturer who treated my class like we were fifteen-year-olds. The youngest person in the room was twenty.
She had a big name in the local industry, so I sucked it up as best I could, no matter how condescending she got. The first time I lost my cool was when I made a soft joke to a classmate and she laid into the classmate for somehow inciting it. My classmate hadn’t even responded to me. I tried to point that out.
She brushed me off. It’s done, we’re moving on. The second time was a few days before the final. She’d had us practice drills a very specific way in our classroom, and she was incredibly particular about it.
Then we moved to the actual venue for the final drills, and everything fell apart. We were all stressed out of our minds, trying to recalibrate to the new space while she berated us for every tiny change she didn’t like. She stopped me mid-drill and asked, very sarcastically, why I chose to do what I did. I answered, Because that’s how we practiced it in the classroom.
I apologize that I can’t read your mind on how you’d like to adjust it, but I’m doing my best. Silence stretched forever. She moved on to berate another classmate. Then she came back to me.
Don’t you dare say you can’t read my mind. Just do your work and actually try. I stood up straighter and said I was trying very hard. We all were.
It was difficult to adjust to the venue without any guideline, and I would have liked her to provide one. She told me to get out. I burned that bridge real good. I hadn’t been doing well in calculus all year, but I was trying and just drowning.
My teacher was one of the cool ones, laid back, joked around, friendly. I think he thought I wasn’t putting in effort, and he was as frustrated with me as I was with myself. One day he made a passive-aggressive joke at my expense, something about how I’d do better if I just tried harder. He said it quietly, not even in front of the other students.
Just to me. I was so done with him thinking I wasn’t trying that I stood up and walked straight out the door. I went to the school counselor’s office. I would have been sent there anyway for walking out, so I figured I’d get the process started early.
She was really kind and talked me down. That was a Friday. I didn’t see my calculus teacher again until Monday. I’d hoped we could just pretend it never happened.
No such luck. He pulled me into the hallway to talk, and he genuinely apologized. He offered to adjust his office hours to times that worked for me and gave me extra help. He ended up helping me pass the class.
Barely, but I passed. I wouldn’t have graduated without it. Looking back, talking to him openly from the start would have been the more mature thing to do. But I was an awkward, self-doubting teenager who didn’t know how to ask for help.
That experience taught me how to advocate for myself. I still hate calculus, though. Eighth grade science class. For this one, let’s call the teacher Mrs.
B. Early in the year she assigned a science fair project due in January. We got several class periods to work on it. My project was building an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program.
It worked properly, but that’s beside the point, because the assignment required twenty testers, each playing three rounds against it. That would have taken entirely too long, so I asked Mrs. B if I could run fewer trials. She agreed and allowed me to do seven people.
I got those done shortly before Christmas break, about a week and a half before the due date. I made sure to thank her for letting me do fewer, because I never would have made the deadline otherwise. She turned to me with this confused look and said, I never said that. You have to do twenty trials like everyone else.
I was beyond furious. I even had a witness, a classmate who’d overheard her give me the lower number. Both me and my witness ended up in detention. I got the project done, but barely, and it was rushed to hell.
I still think about it sometimes and want to punch a wall. In high school, a girl completely lost it on my math teacher. The class ran the same way every day. He’d write the assignment on the board, spend the first twenty minutes teaching new concepts, then give us thirty minutes to work while he sat at his desk answering questions.
I liked it. Some people didn’t. This girl really didn’t. About three-quarters of the way through the year, she snapped.
The class was no different than any other. He explained the new material, did some examples, then said, Anyone who needs individual help, just line up at my desk and I’ll be happy to help. She lost it. What do you mean, that’s it?
I don’t want to wait in line for twenty minutes. Help me now. This is bull, bull, bull, and you. The angrier she got, the calmer and quieter my teacher got.
She got even angrier. He said, calmly, I understand you’re upset. How about we go into the hallway and talk about it? She screamed, No.
Help me with this here and now. He said, there’s no need for that kind of language. We can discuss this civilly. I’m happy to help you any way I can.
She got even louder. You, this bull, this school, everything. He stayed calm. I’m sorry you’re so frustrated.
What can I do? She was screaming at that point, pure incoherent cursing, when the principal walked in and took her out of class. The teacher stepped out to talk to the principal while we all heard her screaming every expletive in the book all the way down the hall, all of it directed at him. When it was over, he walked back in, stood at the front, and said, Well, does anyone else have a problem with me?
I’m happy to discuss it if we can be civil. Nobody said a word. Okay, he said. Then anyone who needs help, come see me.
Class went on like normal after that. In every possible way, that teacher handled it like an absolute pro. I never saw that girl in class or in school again. Something must have been going on to set her off like that, at home or at school, and I’ll never know the backstory.
I only know what I saw in class. That math class was probably just her last straw. I’ve worked as a teacher and substitute for nearly a decade now.
I’ve never seen a student go off like that before or since.