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by Mischief Maker 08/03/2012, 3:21pm PDT |
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I'm pretty sure I've shared these stories here before but what the hell.
1st teacher: young choir teacher. I've got a great singing voice and I was very active in the drama club throughout HS. My freshman year I got a lead role in the musical. After the musical was over I tried out for her swing choir. I got in. Later, setting up my sophomore schedule, I found I couldn't fit both swing choir and jazz band. I told her I was going to have to drop swing choir for jazz band. Not as suave at 15 as I am now, I told her the truth behind my decision, which was that singing came naturally but I had to work to learn the trumpet. She did not respond to this explanation well.
I never got any role in any other musical for my 2nd and 3rd years of high school, despite having lead roles an all the regular plays. My senior year I was finally given a role in a musical: the only non-singing role. I imagine she meant that as a little exclamation point to cap off her 3-year campaign of revenge.
I didn't know it was her until late senior year when, during homeroom, this wormy kid (who was in the swing choir) was being an ass. In retrospect this wormy kid was probably a closet case. He was a social climber who was constantly putting people down to build himself up and liked to call them Faggots. My standard response to him was always some variation on, "someone as effeminate as you probably shouldn't be accusing other people of being gay." This particular time the wormy kid was talking about how swing choir was superior to jazz band and I made some comment back about the glittery gold vests they wore. At the end of the day, I was going to my locker near the choir room and the choir teacher asked me to step into her classroom a moment. I thought she was going to ask me to help move a piano or something. Instead she started screaming at me and bitching me out for what seemed like 5 solid minutes about how dare I diss the glittery gold vests and she doesn't need to prove anything to me and blah, blah, blah. Then I knew it was her.
2nd teacher: My AP Psychology teacher, quite possibly the most incompetent teacher I ever had in my K-12 schooling. Case in point: our daily assignments were short multiple choice quizzes at the end of each chapter in the book that we would correct in class. Unfortunately, the Teachers' Edition he used to supply the answers was a different edition than the texts we used, so the answers didn't match up. His solution? Take the highest score in the class, determine how many points it was short of a perfect score, then add that many points to everyone's score across the class. We soon learned that we had as much chance of getting a good grade picking answers at random than by actually trying.
Anyhoo, he liked to give examples of the psychological phenomena of the day by making up stories about himself running into someone with this illness and responding to it with his psychological know-how. Sadly for him, he laid it on a little thick in his favor and the stories became downright masturbatory in how awesome he made himself compared to the ignoramuses he dealt with in these stories. One day I took it upon myself to draw a 1-page cartoon of his most implausible story, featuring him with his glasses and ratty little mustache mounted on a big muscular superhero body in tights and a cape with a huge crotch bulge. My classmates loved the cartoon and it was passed around for a few days before I got it back. I assume he got his hands on it at some point and did not react well.
The school year ended about a week after the AP tests at my school, and the AP teachers all took the remaining extra week to roll in the TV and let us use the period to watch Ghostbusters while running out the clock on the semester. Not this teacher. He had us do an incredibly elaborate writing assignment that required all sorts of draft materials on top of the paper itself, including bibliography notecards. I was a computer savvy nerd and got my research done without needing any notecards to write down sources. I handed in my paper with a full bibliography, but without the notecards! *GASP* He responded by giving me a "D." Not on the paper, on the entire class. Even though I got a perfect 5/5 on the AP test itself, which most teachers just treated as your final exam score.
I've had some great teachers, but those two would give Tom Chick pause over their abuse of authority. |
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