The first is someone I'll just refer to as English Teacher 1. She was my 10th grade English teacher (obviously), so I had her the same year as I had Computer Apps Teacher. I liked her class even less than Computer Apps Teacher's, because at least in Computer Apps I could dick around in Paint and I actually could access one of the forums I was a member on - the school blocked most sites it detected as forums, but this one didn't really use a forum-like setup, so it wasn't blocked, and I'd use my time to write stories or fanfic chapters and PM them to myself.
Couldn't do much of anything except draw pictures in English Teacher 1's class.
It was 10th grade Honors English, so we were - presumably - supposed to be a higher-level class than standard. In practice, though, English Teacher 1 didn't give a shit about anything and while we read things, she did an ass-horrible job of actually making the material interesting or memorable, and the result was a pretty terrible semester, educationally.
At the beginning of the year, I liked her the most because our assigned summer reading was one of those books about the girls who defy the Taliban by making underground schools - this one was My Forbidden Face, I believe - and on the first day of class we all quickly came to the realization that the book hadn't done much for any of us (and I strongly suspect at least 50% of my class hadn't bothered to read it: I was a rarity in that I always did everything that was assigned, on time), so she just decided we weren't gonna discuss it, or have a test on it, or anything. I first interpreted this to mean that she was a perceptive teacher who was willing to have a little flexibility for the class. I realized much later on that, no, she was just immensely lazy and didn't give a shit about the book, so she just decided we weren't gonna deal with it.
My first actual realization that she was a shitterrible teacher came when she had briefly mentioned, though not officially assigned, some project involving magazine clippings. One day a week or so later, the class was being unnaturally loud about something or other, and she responded by angrily saying, "That's it - I'm canceling the project!" as if that was somehow supposed to make us behave. She
canceled a project as
punishment for a bunch of 15 year olds. As long as I live I will never understand the reasoning behind this.
But she was just terrible because she inspired very little enjoyment of the materials in students. In pretty much every other English class I've been in, I've found
at least one book to read that I enjoyed (To Kill a Mockingbird and Into Thin Air freshman year; In the Heart of the Sea junior year; Hamlet, Fifth Business and In the Lake of the Woods senior year) but I just couldn't get into
any of the materials we studied in 10th grade, because she just made it so boring and bland. We read Julius Caesar (the Shakespeare play), Oedipus Rex, and select portions of Dante's Inferno. I remember absolutely nothing about any of these works now because she just had us read, and annotate, and made no effort to see that we enjoyed or were even
paying attention to these works.
Story time: We were "popcorn" reading Oedipus Rex, which meant the teacher would pick a student to read a section of the work, and then after a short passage, the student would randomly pick a classmate to continue reading - randomly, like popcorn popping. We'd been reading Oedipus for two weeks. A student sitting near me got called on to read, and he hadn't read before, so he immediately started out by pronouncing Oedipus' name as "Oh-odd-i-piss" at which point the teacher shrieked "It's
OEDIPUS!" Like, on one hand, I always found the fact that he had completely failed to pick up on the correct pronunciation of the main character's name hilarious, but on the other,
the teacher inspired in him, and the rest of us, not a single reason to care.
Also, I lied when I said I didn't remember any of the content of Oedipus, Julius Caesar or the Inferno. I do remember one thing about the Inferno: English Teacher 1 going on a tirade about how Brutus and Cassius didn't deserve to be in Satan's mouth alongside Judas, a tirade that was completely unwarranted and kind of really funny to us because of just how worked up she was getting about Brutus and Cassius while simultaneously failing to make
us care about Brutus and Cassius.
Most of my issues with her can actually succinctly be summed up in
the letter I wrote to administration complaining about her in March. Yes, I went that far! It was the first and only time I've complained outright (though I'm considering doing something similar for my current piss-poor ethics teacher) about an educator at any point. I actually met with administration about this (though nothing changed). I showed the letter to just about everyone in my class before sending it and they all understood. And I still have the letter. It's five years old and I was fifteen, so I presume you'll understand if it's a little cringe-worthy, because I certainly think so now, but the incidents described are all perfectly real.
To Whom it May Concern,
My name is [Silver]. I am a sophomore here at [school]. I am writing this letter to bring to light some unsettling facts about a teacher of mine, [English Teacher 1].
I should point out now that I have no proof of the events detailed below. I know that as a teenager, the administration will be inclined to believe a teacher’s testimony over that of a student, especially considering the lack of evidence. I completely understand why this is, and I understand that you will naturally be suspicious of me. However, I ask that you do not dismiss what I have to say entirely. I do not lie. If you doubt what I have to say, you can ask any of my classmates; I believe they will all back up what I have to say. I am in [English Teacher 1]’s fourth block A-day English honors class.
I should also point out that this may seem at first like a simple plea for help. However, if you will bear with me, I will write about some things that make this email into more than a simple petty complaint. I worry about my grade in her class because of such things.
Several weeks ago, [English Teacher 1] gave us a prompt to write a definition essay for either individuality or integrity as practice for the tenth grade writing test. My essay was on individuality. She gave us the class period to type up and print our first draft of these essays. We would then have the essays reviewed by peers a few days later. We were supposed to use the peer comments to revise our essays. Upon receiving my essay from [English Teacher 1], I found that all three peer comments attached gave me perfect scores on the essay; as such, I did not revise the essay very much. I reworded a couple sentences and changed a few things, and then handed the essay in.
[English Teacher 1] did not grade our first drafts herself. She left the comments up to our peers and told us to revise our essays based off the peer comments. However, upon receiving a graded final draft from [English Teacher 1], my grade was a 78. Given that I did not feel there was much wrong with this essay, I did not understand why I received such a low grade; I asked [English Teacher 1] about it, but her comments did not help me any and as such I am still unsure as to why the grade was so low.
I feel that it was somewhat negligent of [English Teacher 1] to leave comments up to our peers, when they are not as experienced as any English teacher and - as shown by my own comments, all of which gave perfect scores - are mostly unable to tell where the essay is lacking.
Here is another example: On March 10, I asked her if she would sign a band permission form for me. The permission form would grant me permission to miss class on March 16 and 22 in order to attend a combined band rehearsal for the upcoming concert and the contest we will be attending after that. The band is split into two groups: one which meets fourth block on A-days, and one which meets fourth block on B-days. As such, we rarely get to rehearse together, so [band teacher] has to schedule days in which we must miss our fourth block class in order to attend such combined rehearsals. However, [English Teacher 1] refused to sign my permission slip. When asked why, she responded by saying that the two days in question are too important to miss, and that if I chose to miss class anyway, she would not give me the details of what happened during class that day. I am biased, but I must say that I feel it is more important to attend a band rehearsal than to attend a day of continuing Julius Caesar, because I could just as well read Caesar at home, whereas I could not make up the band rehearsal in any conceivable way. I have talked to [band teacher] about this, and he has said that he will send her an email about this. However, I doubt she will allow me - or any of the other five band students in the class - to miss class for the rehearsal, given the reasons for her refusal.
On March 12, I asked her again if she would sign my form. She refused, and I pressed for more details: She told me that Caesar was too important to miss for a band rehearsal and that, if [band teacher] wanted to allow us time to practice together, he should schedule a rehearsal outside of school.
[Retrospective Silver note: I've never once had a teacher refuse to allow me to miss class for band or orchestra rehearsal at any other point. It is especially poignant considering that we were literally just reading Julius Caesar; it's not as if I (and the other band students) would be missing a test. I don't know how this ended up being resolved, though - if we went to rehearsal anyway or not.]
On March 8, [English Teacher 1] was trying to help us review for the writing test. At one point in the class, she challenged us, saying that she doubted any of our essays (mentioned farther up this email) were grammatically perfect all the way through. I took great offense to that; I felt she was unfairly stereotyping the class as a whole. It is not the first time she has made such remarks, either; she claims that we are not very good at writing, that we are not very good with grammar, that the entirety of the class does not pay attention (this remark was made when the entire class protested that we hadn’t covered a topic at that point, and she claimed that we had) and other such unfair remarks. Like I said, I feel insulted by such remarks, and I feel that it is inappropriate for someone of her caliber to say such things.
I do not know what the administration can do about this. I am only alerting you because I feel it is time for the administration to know what goes on in this class, and I hope you will consider what I say here.
Sincerely,
[Silver]
The part where English Teacher 1 complained about the class being shit at English and not paying attention is significant because of my actual response to it, which I failed to mention in the e-mail. She started talking about how our essays were all grammatically incorrect somehow, in a very condescending fashion. My response to this was to
immediately put up my hand (I was personally offended by this because I consider grammatical accuracy one of my strongest writing points) and sit with it there for nearly five minutes because she continue to rant and failed to notice or care that I wanted to say something, until all my classmates slowly began to realizing I had
something to fucking say and someone got her attention for my sake (I sat at the back of the room). My angry response was "You want a grammatically perfect essay,
I've got one right here!" and - just like with Wiccan Kid the year before - this caused the class to start applauding me. Again. They hated her enough that my anger toward her was worth clapping. I took my paper up there and she briefly glanced over it before pointing out some grammar error (which I later realized she was correct about), but without looking, I just said "My mother has a Master's in English and she has not identified any errors in this document." and her response was to raise her eyebrows in that kind of "if you say so, sure" way that made me think she was skeptical of my mother's (who has spent most of her adult career in journalism and is married to a newspaper editor, I should add) credentials. This didn't continue further, though, and I just went back to my seat and class continued.
Julius Caesar was due near the end of the semester, annotated. I didn't realize this until the day it was due, making it one of the few times in my
life I've had to scramble on an assignment. And by "scramble", I mean "I copied off the kid next to me because he let me", making
that the
only time I've ever copied off someone. We both got 69s, failing grades. Whatever, it's better than a 0.
I let the kid copy off me on the final exam as a trade for letting me copy his annotations. (Or rather, he just admitted to me afterward that he'd copied me and I didn't give a single shit.) Had it been any other class, even Computer Apps Teacher's, I would have given a shit and maybe even told the teacher, because I'm a moral creature that doesn't mind being a tattle-tale. But in this case, I felt more solidarity with my classmates (none of whom I was close with; I didn't have many friends in 10th grade) than loyalty toward the honor code of the school, because I was like, "I'm one of the few people that paid even the slimmest amount of attention. [The kid who copied was also the kid who mispronounced Oedipus.] You might fail otherwise.
No one should have to retake this fucking class." So I went against my own moral code and just shrugged when he told me he copied my test answers.
Speaking of, the final exam was something like 130 questions long (more than any test I've had before or since, afaik). Literally half of them were on Julius Caesar.
I counted. Most of the Caesar-related questions were quote or character attribution, like "here's a quote: who said it?" or "which character is like this?".
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAD "E. NONE OF THE ABOVE" AS AN ANSWER CHOICE. Again, I counted. That is just
cruel if you ask me. Again, maybe it's because I'm a spoiled millennial - it could have been worse: it could have been "fill in the blank" with all the same questions, and then I would have been fucked - but, again, that's not how teachers
did things, and it just struck me as fucking
mean to have ~65 questions all have
that as an answer choice. Especially when we barely reviewed, especially when there was no postlude to the annotations grades. There was just nothing to warrant it other than being an outright
dick.
But there was the funny part to the exam. After we finished Julius Caesar, we were given some book about like the Mexican Revolution or some shit that was called like The Underdogs or something idk and we were supposed to read it. So, like a good, studious student, I did. But we never talked about it in class, and someone joked, "I bet [English Teacher 1] hasn't even read the book." This was basically confirmed when there were *only* 3 questions about the book on the final -
and all three were answerable by reading only the prologue. This was what finally convinced me that English Teacher 1 had been lazy about My Forbidden Face.
That's the final exam, so you'd think that's the end of the story - but no, I have a couple more stories. Such as the meowing.
When I was reflecting on that year in my mind to prepare for this post, I recalled a specific day, during the days near the end of the semester - can't remember if it was before or after the final exam, but we weren't doing anything in class, and that's the point - where I acted up because I was having fun with the people around me, and I actually almost had security called on me for being a little obnoxious, but managed to "sorry, I won't do it again!" my way out of it. I was thinking about what I had done to warrant the warnings, and remembered the final straw being laughing too loudly at a joke someone made about English Teacher 1 being a relic of the Revolutionary War, but before that, I semi-quietly roared like a bear at a classmate's request - a response to the meowing.
I don't remember how this started, or when I did it, or how long it went on for, but during the "useless" days at the end of the semester, I just started meowing, every couple minutes, in gradually increasing loudness, that most of the class could hear and the people around me thought was hysterical. English Teacher 1 didn't notice. She didn't notice when she was standing at the front of the room, but she also didn't notice when she was sitting in her desk which was
right behind me, because I guess she was just that deaf. (She was an older woman.) The meows got louder and sometimes she'd say something but I'd start it up again after not too long. I managed to get away with fuken meowing in class because she just gave no shits.
I said earlier that I was trying to contact a friend for her stories about English Teacher 1. I haven't heard back, but I do independently remember one. This friend had English Teacher 1 the year after I did, and during the year English Teacher 1 just up and lost like all of the assignments said friend had turned in and refused to admit she was responsible. Just fucking
lost the stack of assignments the friend had turned in.
That spring, the year after I'd left her class, she quit. In the middle of the semester. In the middle of school day. In the middle of
class. From what I hear, she just was fed up enough that she just went and
left in the middle of some fourth-block class and didn't come back. They had to get some temp teachers to finish teaching the classes she'd left behind.
I feel a little bad for her, honestly, because I think that she may have actually meant well - but she was cranky enough and boring enough that it was never imparted on the students, and she was definitely lazy and had a terrible memory, which are terrible things for teachers to have. Hope she's doing better wherever she went after quitting, I guess. Our school didn't miss her, though.
next to the clipping. I wish I could say I'm joking. I really wish...
