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telegramsam
2009-06-12 03:47 pm UTC (link)

Oh lord I hate shitty public school teachers. Not the good ones who, you know, actually SUPPORT their students and ENCOURAGE them. But there are so many of them that still have the same grade-school playground mentality as their students, it makes me want to fucking break things.

I had teachers like that, like the one in the 3rd grade who tried to force my parents to get me put on Ritalin (nevermind I'd never been diagnosed with ADD), and the 5th grade one who didn't want to deal with me so she shoved my desk facing the wall and told me to go sit there, which I did for months until my family moved out of that crappy ass neighborhood. I've got more stories than that but it would take all day.

Just makes me appreciate the small handful of good teachers I had that much more. This woman should be driven to the edge of town, told what a nasty little asshole she is and dropped like a sack of potatos on the curb, let her see how she likes it.

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	fern_on_fen 2009-06-12 04:52 pm UTC (link)
	I had to sit with my desk facing the wall for the entirety of Kindergarten. I would be yelled at if I turned around. That's when I taught myself how to read. All by myself. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	telegramsam 2009-06-12 05:02 pm UTC (link)
	Don worry, I feels ur pains. clings (Reply to this)(Parent)

yoritomo_reiko
2009-06-12 05:29 pm UTC (link)

It's not just public school it happens in, either. I started my schooling in parochial school. The sisters made my parents keep me back in kindergarten because I wasn't 'socially mature' enough to go on to first grade. (I liked playing by myself, for the most part.)

Of course, in first grade, when I finally started coming out of my shell? I was almost permanently at a desk by myself so that I wouldn't talk to other students.

My parents finally took me and my sister out when the sister in charge of the school tried to get them to hold my sister back, too. Their reasoning? She would start writing on the right side of the page and switch hands in the middle. And when drawing a sun, she drew the rays by starting at a point outside the circle and coming back in rather than starting on the circle and drawing out.

They were told later that a year or so after we left the school that the sister in charge had sent a letter to the parents telling them if they couldn't raise their children to the school's standards, don't bother sending them to the school.

On the other hand, I was lucky and got great teachers through my schooling in public school, so I tend to prefer it overall. It just sucks that there are so many awful teachers out there.

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	rosehiptea 2009-06-12 05:56 pm UTC (link)
	I had some lousy teachers in private schools (parochial and non-) myself. To a large degree I think my parents wasted their money. (Reply to this)(Parent)

telegramsam
2009-06-12 06:05 pm UTC (link)

At least with private schools you have the option of taking your children out of that school and sending them elsewhere if the teachers are shitty. Parents who don't have the money to send their kids to their school of choice are stuck either living with what they are handed in the public school they live near or physically moving to another place, which is ultimately what my parents had to do for myself and my brother and it was not an easy thing to do (I ended up living with my verbally abusive grandmother for 2 1/2 years until they were able to sell the old house and buy a new one elsewhere).

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bobafeis
2009-06-12 07:45 pm UTC (link)

I feel you. When I was little, I moved to a new state. My new teacher couldn't understand my (not really that strong) Southern accent, and recommended that I be put in a special needs class because of it. The principal, who had seen my test scores and my grades and who had been asking if maybe I should be put into a sixth grade class instead of fourth, went along with it.

Fuckers. Even when they moved me into the advanced class after two days (because the special needs teacher got pissed that they sent me there to take up time and resources I didn't need and she couldn't spare), all my new classmates had seen me in the other one, and the teacher made sure to mention just which class I'd been moved from.

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	alienist 2009-06-14 05:38 am UTC (link)
	Oh, god. I was in special needs math for several years before they finally realised I didn't need it. By then, of course, I was dreadfully behind the other students, but they just plopped me into a fifth grade class. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	deadwood 2009-06-12 07:45 pm UTC (link)
	I really can't understand this kind of thing. I always had really good teachers and didn't get crap ones until high school and I still turned out kind of weird and socially awkward. How the hell would I be if I hadn't had good teachers? When you've been put in a position to protect a group of society's young, you DO NOT do things like that. (Reply to this)(Parent)

hallidae
2009-06-13 12:04 am UTC (link)

I was the only left-handed student in the class when I was in kindergarten, and the teacher, who was batshit insane at the time, would constantly berate me during writing practice for being stupid, annoying, and difficult because I wouldn't break down and just make myself learn to be right-handed ~~so she wouldn't have to teach me properly~~ like everyone else. After I finally cracked and admitted to my (also-left-handed) dad why I never wanted to go to class, he got pissed and went to have a talk with her. Which resulted in her switching over to berating me for "always hiding behind my parents".

I hated my kindergarten year. Thank God my first grade teacher was a perfectly adorable woman, or you couldn't have gotten me to continue going to school without a cattle prod being involved.

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	veleda_k 2009-06-13 12:07 am UTC (link)
	Which resulted in her switching over to berating me for "always hiding behind my parents". ...While you were in fucking kindergarten? What did she want from you? Should you have had your own apartment and been paying your own bills at the time? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

hallidae
2009-06-13 12:17 am UTC (link)

The adults around me would later blame her being fucking crazy (she went after me for being left-handed and "hiding", but there were several other students in my class who got yelled at constantly or otherwise emotionally abused for little things like squirming at naptime or a speech problem) on the fact that she was also pregnant. Supposedly, she's been sweet as pie to all the classes that came after her son was born. But for those of us who had her that year, she was a fucking terror, and frankly, pregnancy is not an excuse for that.

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	ruffwriter 2009-06-13 01:15 am UTC (link)
	Oh man, I had a first grade teacher who put me through dozens of behavioral tests and punishments for, like, telling someone once to "hold their horses" (l-lol what), and tried to get me held back a year because I was socially awkward. I wasn't the only one she tortured, either. (Reply to this)(Parent)

ahiru
2009-06-13 03:03 am UTC (link)

Most of my teachers were good, but I always remember my third grade year because that was my one really terrible teacher. She threatened multiple times to have me held back...because my handwriting was messy. Never mind that I had some of the highest grades in the class, I had messy handwriting! And I liked having good grades so this pretty much terrified me and kinda pissed off my parents (especially my mom, who has bad handwriting herself). She also wouldn't let me draw in the margins of my papers and would yell at me if she saw me doodling on my own notes. And it wasn't like I wasn't listening to her or anything (again, one of the smartest kids in the class) she just said I shouldn't be drawing. Drove me nuts, because I got antsy when I didn't have anything to do with my hands and every time I just started idly drawing I'd stop, terrified that she was going to yell at me in front of everyone again. And I was a really painfully shy and nervous little elementary schooler to begin with, so having a teacher constantly yell at me when I wasn't causing trouble -- and oftentimes she yelled at me more than boys who were troublemakers, it was pretty well known she liked boys better than girls -- did not help. The teacher always acted like she was just trying to help me, but seriously, who thinks that the best way to help painfully shy little girls is to hold them up in front of the rest of the class and berate them for tiny things? (Who really helped me were my fifth grade teacher and student teacher who were awesome in every way and encouraged me to draw and write and express myself.)

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	telegramsam 2009-06-13 12:37 pm UTC (link)
	Ugh, yea I had a few like that too, my handwriting was terrible and I loved to doodle. I had a language arts teacher in the sixth grade who'd actually snatch paper off my desk if I was drawing on it, crumple it up, give me a sneer, and throw it in the trash can. I hated her guts. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

northen_light36
2009-06-15 03:10 pm UTC (link)

I can sympathise. Not with drawing, but I was always a reader and writer as a child. However, I couldn't spell or do multiplication. All through my last three years of primary school, I had the same teacher, who would make a point of announcing at every math and spelling test we had that "No one needs to worry about being on the bottom. North digs a new low every lesson."

The fact that my reading level was about 6 years ahead of my grade level annoyed him and his wife, who was the only other teacher (very small school), so they told me I was banned from reading anything at school until I "stopped actting the idiot and my spelling and maths were as good as my reading". None of them made any attempt to learn why I struggled, only made a daily show of forcing me to stand in front of the class and fail to spell screamed words or answer shouted times tables correctly.

Wasn't until year 9 that someone finally clued into the fact I could not only recite any page from a book I'd recently read by memory but also [i]spell[/i] most of those words. Then people figured out that I'm a visual and contextual learner. I see words in my mind like I'm typing them, and for them to stick, I need to see them often and in a logical sentance, such as "The elephant lives at the circus and eats peanuts". Once I was encouraged to read and write stories a lot, my ability to spell improved.

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