My 10th grade French teacher.

The very first day of class, she stood up and stated clearly that everyone already has their grade for the year. No matter what we did, if she had already put an “A” that was the grade we were going to get. If she wrote down an “F”, the same. Me being an ugly awkward boy that had the temerity to take her class, of course, received an “F”. I did all the work, studied hard for the tests, but she always found a way to fail my work. I forgot to put an accent aigu, or grave somewhere on the work… Fail and she would defend to her last breath to the administration, who ALWAYS caved to her. (EDIT: If I missed just ONE accent mark on the entire work, she would fail then entire thing. )

Of course who got the “A” grades in her class? The cheerleaders and pretty popular people.

Toward the end of the year, I inadvertently got massive revenge on her though. All throughout the school year she would talk about her dog. It was like her child. We got every detail of how that dog ate, pooped, and did any little stupid thing. She was OBSESSED with the thing.

What I didn’t know what that she lived near one of my friends. I had visited my friend and was driving out of the neighborhood. I was not speeding. I was driving my car in a very safe manner. When a small dog darted out in front of me and I slammed on the brakes and saw the dog run back into the yard. I never felt an impact, as I was driving a 1970 Impala that probably weighed in at 4500 pounds (2050kg for my more civilized friends). So I didn’t stop, didn’t feel an impact and the dog went yipping back up into the yard, so I thought it was OK.

Well, I was wrong.

The French teacher was out for the next two weeks. No one knew why, until she returned looking like a shadow of herself. Apparently a huge green car came screaming through the neighborhood at a very high rate of speed and veered up onto her lawn to hit her precious dog…

And killed it.

At first I didn’t connect the dog I thought I had almost hit to her dog, until I spoke to my friend. He said that she came out to find her dog dead in the middle of the yard, obviously hit by something very large. He said her screams could be heard all over the neighborhood. Which occurred about two minutes after I left his house and the only description of the car was a very large and old green car.

Yeah, my car was green and this was 1986, so my car was 16 years old at the time.

I feel terrible for the dog. Its death was a complete accident. I didn’t even know she lived in that neighborhood until she came back to school and told everyone what happened. It is not in my nature to hurt animals, so even if I had known it was her dog, I would have still done my best to avoid hitting it.

Definitely not the method of revenge I would ever use of my own volition. It happened and there is nothing I can do about it.

No, I never owned up to it and do not feel I need to. What I did do, was focus on my driving skills, awareness and make sure my car stayed in its absolute best mechanical shape to avoid a repeat. A habit that I continue to today and one I am teaching my oldest child who has just started driving instruction.

I passed out during a test and my teacher told everyone it’s okay, I’m faking it. I woke up all confused and asked to go to the nurse, and Teach said “you think I’ll let you make up the test you’re skipping?”

I went to the main building (weird school, I believe I was in 9th) and to the nurse. I dunno what happened from there. Suddenly I was in a doctor’s office and they took a drop of blood from my finger. That hurt and I don’t like needles.

Then they took SOOOO MUCH BLOOD. Like three vials. I was so confused.

I guess my hemoglobin count, or whatever, was like seven? Apparently that’s pretty bad. They took all that blood to test for leukemia. Negative, luckily. I had to take iron pills that turned my poop black.

The teacher let me re-take the test once I had more oxygen in my brain.

—

My college graphics design teacher called us all “butts” and wouldn’t let us use computers for the week.

…we were butts.

Accused me of setting fire to the school (I didn’t do it), and repeatedly ‘interviewed’ me trying to get me to admit to it. I was off-site at the time at a music exam (my mum had picked me up, it was all arranged formally in advance so the school were aware) but despite this they doubled down on trying to blame me and even got the police involved. All because I had a reputation of being a bit of a pyromaniac (I was/am interested in pyrotechnic chemistry/fireworks but have never committed arson!). I layer found out they discovered who actually started the fire but did nothing about it for reasons.

I was in class in high school, and I found a pen under the desk. Not an ordinary cheap plastic throwaway pen, it was one of those expensive metal pens that telescoped together to pop in and out, with gold trim and enamel cloisonne all along the barrel, the sort that you would give someone for an expensive birthday present. Eager to do the right thing, I put my hand up and told Mr Schulz, asked if I should take it to the lost-and-found at the front office. “No,” said Mr Schulz, “give it to me and I’ll keep it in my desk here”. It occurred to me that he uncharitably thought that I was going to get “lost” on the way there or back, instead of sitting in his lesson; I thought that he would hand it in to the front office on my behalf.

The policy at school was that if no-one collected an item from the lost-and-found, you could go and claim it. So a few weeks later, when I asked at the front office, I was surprised that the pen hadn’t been handed in. I asked Mr Schulz about it, and he took the pen out of his drawer, and used his Swiss Army Knife to etch my name into it, saying that I might as well keep it, because no-one had claimed it.

Of course, within a few days one of the other boys saw me using it, and decided that I had stolen it from him. Before I could find Mr Schulz to get him to verify my version of events, he and several of his friends caught me in the corridor between lessons and beat me black and blue. Two black eyes, and so many bruises that I couldn’t walk properly or stand up straight for weeks. My parents said “You must have done something to deserve it”, took no action against the school, and made me go back to school the next day anyway.

I was summoned to the deputy headmaster’s office. He told me that since I had stolen this pen from the other boy and put my name on it to make sure everyone thought it was mine, I was a disgrace to the school and would be put on detention (picking up litter before and after school, and at lunchtime, no canteen privileges, no excursions) for the rest of the year. I protested my innocence, so Mr Schulz was summoned, he promptly denied all knowledge and involvement, and straight up called me a liar.

Word had got around to all the teachers; by hearsay they also all decided that I was a thief and a liar, and gave me extra work to punish me, on top of my regular homework. I was now doing homework from the moment I got home until way past midnight, and in the mornings at 6am when my parents woke me up until 8:30 when I had to ride my bike to school.

I pretty much gave up on schoolwork, because if the teachers were going to lie, there was no way to know if what they were teaching was the truth, and if I asked questions about the problems I was having, especially in maths and physics, I was told to stop disrupting the class, because they had decided without evidence that I was a “juvenile delinquent” and not worth helping.

I had several serious bicycle accidents riding to and from school during this time, and I’m absolutely certain that it was because I fell asleep from pure exhaustion. I still have scars from those accidents, and I’ll always remember how I got them.

I left school at the earliest opportunity, left my parents and lived on the streets for a few years, and thanks to a charity helping street kids, got an apprenticeship and a place to live. A few years after that, I sort-of-almost reconciled with my parents, who still believed the teacher’s version of events, because “all teachers are good, honest, respectable people”.

Throughout my own children’s education, I always had anxiety attacks when I had to take them to school, or go to school for parent-teacher meetings etc, even though they attended a different school and we now live several states away.

That was over forty years ago, and I still feel like Mr Schulz both derailed my education, and ruined my plans for further education.

On the first day of school, my world history teacher singled me out as someone who is lazy and won’t do my work. I was crushed because I loved studying ancient history on my own until that very moment. She was right because I completely checked out even though I knew the entirety of the syllabus. I could have aced the class but I was too hurt to care. Fuck you Miss Couvillon.

When I was in middle school I began to have terrible GERD related symptoms and none of the doctors I saw back then ever gave me medicine to deal with it or the anxiety I was getting from it.

It was so bad that even raising my heart rate would sometimes cause my stomach to pulsate in pain. My anxiety made it worse and I would sometimes get excused from gym class because I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day in agony.

My gym teacher took this personally and gave me shit the whole time. He wouldn’t lose a chance to get back at me the whole year. Once I came into gym class with him yelling at me in front of the whole class for putting my clothing in the wrong locker & then getting pissed since he had to break my lock to get my stuff out of there. I knew for a fact it was my locker as he was the one who showed me it at the beginning of the year.

I once had to miss school because I was at the doctor’s getting what I think was an X ray scan of my stomach. My gym coach was so pissed I wasn’t there that he started giving a whole speech to our class about “What the measures of a good man are” and kept giving me as context to them as what wasn’t a good man.

Then there was when I had to quickly leave his class one day because I had to go to the bathroom from GERD related shit again. This got him so mad that he forced me to stay after class so that I had to run a mile by myself as he yelled at how bad I was doing when I started throwing up.

I fucking hated that guy. I was dealing with so much misery by just trying to get through the days back then and had to deal with that antagonist prick who hated me when I was 12.

This wasn’t malicious per se, but I had an English teacher/school counsellor who suspected I had some sort of learning disability and treated me like an idiot because of it, but like in that sort of “poor you let me help you” way that’s like really condescending that ended up really hurting my self confidence.

If I struggled with something for any reason, I was given something easier. If something I did conflicted with what she thought was correct, she would sit down and “help me correct it” because I think she seemed to think it was I guess an autism thing or something, which meant she spent a lot of time (usually taking me out of lunch break) trying to “correct” whatever she thought I was doing wrong. Which was exasperated by the fact I was an expat from the Commonwealth and she was an American so half the time they were just, cultural things. My dialect? Incorrect stop being non-rhotic and dropping your Ts. Handwriting? Oh dear this isn’t D’nealian you’re going to have to relearn this. Needed something repeated because I didn’t hear it? Let’s sit down and go through each step one by one in simple English so you can understand it. Social issues were the worst because she’d try to explain how to be friends with someone like I was five and try and push me into other people’s friend groups when I did not want to do that.

I know she wasn’t being malicious and like, she was right - I did have a neurological disorder, and she was the only person who noticed before it actually started affecting me negatively. But oh my god she was so condescending and made me feel like I was so stupid and absolutely fucked my handwriting. Also people noticed the attention she gave me and made fun of being for being “retarded” which was fun.