School Principle Overreacts

[LadyAndreca]

I may have told this story, but my sister came across a substitute like that in third grade.

This woman went on a total power trip on a helpless class of third-graders. She screamed at them if they asked if they could get up to go to the bathroom or sharpen a pencil. She held them in class at the lunch bell so they didn't get to the lunchroom until halfway into the lunch period, and when questioned said they were misbehaving. She screamed and threw chalk and terrorized them until kids were crying. And then...she held them in class after the final bell rang.

They were in there long enough that I got bored waiting to walk home with my sister. I walked the four blocks home, caught holy hell from Dad for leaving my little sister to walk alone, and got three blocks back to school before meeting up with her. This took NEARLY AN HOUR. All the bus students, about half the class, missed their bus, and parents had to be called to get their kids. MILITARY parents. Who were very pissed about the whole thing.

The teacher kept insisting the class was so horrible that she had to keep them under control. According to my sister, everyone had been so terrified of her that no one dared to move. My sister told me what happened (we told each other everything back then) but refused to tell Dad because she was too scared of this woman.

The only reason she was ratted out was because one of the kids, when let out, ran crying to the fourth-grade teacher--her mother. The teacher got her calmed down, got the story, and went straight to the principal.

Rumor was that the woman served some time (I can't remember if it was jail or rehab), and was never allowed to teach again. Another rumor going around said she eventually reformed and became a daycare assistant. Even as a kid I was horrified at the idea of someone like that around really little kids.

[LadyAndreca]

Myself, I can only think of two incidents, both with otherwise good teachers. Most of my complaints generally involved everyone insisting that if I didn't get straight As, I might as well be failing. It took me until I was about 27, my second attempt at college, to finally believe that Bs and Cs were, in fact, acceptable passing grades.

In fourth grade, I was a complete know-it-all, and competing for the top grades in the class. One day, some of the rough kids were completely misbehaving, so the teacher made me stand up, then told them "One day you're going to be working at McDonald's, and she is going to drive up in a Porche, and she is going to LAUGH at you because you never made anything of yourself." I felt completely horrible, like I'd yelled at those kids myself.

...now that I think about it, I have been fairly desperate to NOT work in fast food. Every job hunt I've ever done, I've never applied to one. And I can't stand Porches and the stereotype of the entitled people that drive them.

The second happened in twelfth grade, when the otherwise-cool senior English teacher made fun of me in front of the whole class for writing a bad essay. I was SO embarassed to be called out in front of everyone--and it was the only bad essay I'd written in all of high school. My terrible, horrible, criminal grade that earned me this public humiliation? It was an unacceptable B-.

For years I couldn't write essays without choking and second-guessing my writing. My last English professor made me start taking my work to the Writing Center because I couldn't stop making drastic revisions. It worked, a bit, in that I decided by the end of the semester that if I had better writing grammar than the people paid to check mine, maybe I didn't write so horribly after all.

[rageaholic]

Yeah, I've found that it's best not to worry about getting straight As. Sometimes "good enough to pass" is all you need.

[Snowbird]

Wow, this brought back some memories, not the good sort either.

First grade, Detroit, MI, public school, I already had some tough home stuff going on, and I was still muddling through with a smile, but I was a daydreamer. The teacher didn't like that and instead of calling me back to pay attention(I was holding hands with a friend of mine across the walkway between desks), she cracked both of our hands with a metal lined ruler. It got our attention alright, it also left welts.

This is the same teacher who, a short time after, decided that it was perfectly ok to strip a male, 6 year old student, down to his underwear and beat the snot out of him with the same ruler, in class, behind a screen, where we could all hear him howling and sobbing. He had done some bad stuff before, he once called my house looking for me, and told my step-Dad to 'put the bi*ch on the phone', but he didn't deserve that. No kid does.

She didn't work there much longer after that, thankfully.