(This is probably the worst piece of writing I’ve ever written. I don’t care. Fuck this woman.)
I saw my third grade teacher in a magazine the other day. It happened while I was reading a small-ish article about random acts of kindness. The piece was about how the author had been trying to get a shopping cart from a cart return in a rainstorm. It cost 25 cents to rent a cart, but a stranger had given the author one for free. At the bottom of the article was a short bio of the author, and lo and behold, ’twas my teacher.
I was a bit shocked to see her picture in the magazine, and much more shocked that it was a modern picture. I had thought she was dead, honestly. You know that whole “parallel universe” hypothesis that hit the news, the one that proposed some people were from a different dimension because they remembered the name “Berenstain” incorrectly, or they thought Nelson Mandela had died in prison? It was like that. My third grade classmates and I had this alternate history in our heads where our teacher had died somewhere around 2011, so it was a bit jarring to learn that, not only was the witch alive, she still possessed the motor skills necessary to drive to a store.
I hated that woman. I hated her with every fiber of my body. And she hated me, too. You can try to call me a liar, or say I’m just being hyperbolic, but I guarantee that she had it out for me. Why did she hate me so much? I “disrespected her authority,” “talked back to her,” you know, just the normal excuses you hear from a woman with an inferiority complex.
Now, granted, I wasn’t the easiest student to work with. To tell you the truth, I was a little shit in elementary school. But if anyone deserved my sass, it was my third grade teacher. It wasn’t just that she was mean (though she was plenty mean). It wasn’t just that she viciously over-punished me and my friends for trivial rule infractions (which she did). It was the fact that she was an idiot.
Back in elementary school, I was “the smart kid.” Yes, I’m entirely bragging. I mellowed out and took a level in humility once I got to middle school and met kids vastly more intelligent than myself, but back in my elementary school days I had a bit of a know-it-all/smarty-pants reputation. It was something I was very proud of. So since I was “the smart kid,” I tried to play the part. I’d ask questions, engage the teacher, etc… But this woman was just a special breed of stupid. She’d structure her lesson plan around lectures, only lectures, and she’d basically just talk at us until we absorbed the information. Like any up-and-coming nerd king, I’d always raise my hand and ask some semi-relevant question, like “What do grasshoppers eat?” or “How exactly does the president veto bills? Like is there a little box that says ‘check here to veto’ or something?” But the woman would never know the answer. And instead of saying, “I don’t know, that’s a very good question. I’ll look it up,” or any other semi-reasonable answer, the insecure little prick would yell at me for “asking an irrelevant question.” And I’d respond with “I thought that question was very relevant. And even if it wasn’t relevant, it was interesting.” And then I’d get yelled at for “talking back” to her. Time after time the woman would hold me back after class and lecture me on “respecting adults” and how I needed to “cut the sass and be a good student.”
So of course I decided to make her life a living hell.
Case in point: one time, on a test, she had written this question: “True or False: Children are never allowed to drink alcohol.” And as the good little Catholic boy I was, I was like, “Bullshit. Children are allowed to drink alcohol at Communion. Duh.” So I put false. Coincidentally, I was the only child that chose false, so the woman called my parents in to have a “discussion” about how I was “heading down a dangerous path” or something. My mother, to her great credit, looked at the test, looked at my answer, and said, “He drinks alcohol for Communion. His answer is right.” My teacher, flabbergasted, continued to argue with my parents over my “poor behavior” until she gave up and marked my answer right.
Another time, my teacher held my friend inside for indoor recess, and told him he could not leave his seat. She then told him that during indoor recess he would be cleaning his desk. So my friend waited for my teacher to bring him cleaning supplies, but my teacher, eternal imbecile that she was, forgot. My friend knew if his desk wasn’t spotless when my teacher came back she would freak the fuck out, so he got up out of his desk to go grab cleaning materials. It was at that moment that my teacher walked back inside the room, and, true to form, screamed her head off at him. As you can imagine, 8-year-old me was pissed. I jumped in front of her to argue for my friend’s sake, and ended up getting quite a few punishments myself.
Our classroom had a pet rabbit named Oreo that sat in the back of the room. The one week, Oreo was really sick, so my teacher, in her infinite wisdom, fed him a diet of purely Rice Krispies. I voiced my concern to her that if Oreo wasn’t fed a healthy diet, he would just get sicker and sicker. My teacher snarkily replied that I didn’t have a pet rabbit, so how could I possibly know how to care for one when it was sick?
The next week, Oreo fucking died.
Flashback to a month or two before Oreo’s death. This kid in my class (we’ll call him Jeff) accidentally knocked over the tray that sat beneath Oreo’s cage, spilling rabbit feces all over the carpet. My teacher hadn’t cleaned the tray in months, so a fuckton of poop was scattered across the floor. What do you think my teacher did? Did she maybe call the janitor, or move the students to another room? No, she made Jeff pick up each individual piece of poop out of the carpet with his hands and throw them into the garbage. Now now, don’t think badly of my poor teacher. I mean, she did give Jeff gloves, so while she may have been a bitch, she wasn’t a heartless bitch.
I still have friggin’ Nam-esque flashbacks to that classroom, man. Fucking hell on earth. Jesus.