After graduating with my BA, I have thought about the possibility of going back to school, but something has always held me back.
I have a weird history with teachers. Maybe if I put them down on paper you will see what I mean. I will not highlight all of them. That would take an entire book and crush my soul.
The first teacher I had when I moved to Texas was my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Barret, who I referred to as the Evil Carrot because I was nine and only had rhyming skills to hurt people’s feelings with. She would threaten to beat us with planks of wood she kept in her supply cabinet. That is all.
My attempt to learn Spanish was soon crushed with my freshmen year teacher. When I walked into class the first day I tried to explain that my schedule had been moved around and I was new to her class. She stared back and said, “It’s assigned seating”.
I again explained how my name wasn’t on the list and she told me to sit in a corner. I sat criss-cross-applesauce until she noticed me during her lecture and yelled at me to take an assigned seat based on the chart. I would then start the explanation all over again. By the next class, I knew well enough to just pick a seat.
Throughout the year she would randomly teach us French as if she had forgotten what class we were taking. She would also scream and hide under her desk while playing Shakira music videos. There was also the problem of her counting backward from ten to make the voices go away.
The next year we were told she had left teaching. Part of me worried for her, either way, it definitely made second-year Spanish quite difficult.
My sophomore World History teacher used a walking cane and threatened to beat anyone with it who referred to it as a “pimp stick”. Apparently, this was a touchy subject for him as he was incredibly worried someone would assume he enslaved young women for sex. A lot of his lectures had nothing to do with world history and everything to do with the life of a pimp.
A boy I had a crush on told me I had beautiful eyes, but the moment was ruined when my history teacher interrupted the moment to explain to him that a woman would prefer to be told, “You have cow eyes”. Have you seen the eyes of the cow? Beautiful. At 15 I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about my self-esteem that day.
My sophomore year I had two Chemistry teachers. The first semester the teacher decided to start the class by proving something about having a decent amount of budget for the STEM department. He demonstrated this by throwing glass test tubes across the classroom and watching them shatter.
A boy with a glass eye (from a similar incident) cringed with each toss, worried he would lose his other eye. We covered him with our textbooks and cardigans like good peers.
He continued to walk us through the procedures in case any of us spilled toxic chemicals on ourselves during a lab experiment.
“Take off all of your clothes and stand under this showerhead,” he said. “Don’t worry I will be here to hold up this blanket so no one will see you naked.”
He unrolled the blanket to reveal a giant hole cut from the middle.
“I’ll fix that! We have the budget for it!”
The second semester was a woman who was very insecure about her relationship with her girlfriend. I don’t blame her. Texas is a harsh place. However one day she came in with brownies and exclaimed that if we didn’t eat them then we hate bisexual people. The brownies felt hostile but tasted pretty damn good. That’s when I became a fan of bisexual brownies.
My physics teacher in Texas claimed to be Commanche but was just a white guy who grew out his hair. He told us how his dad used to beat him and never taught us physics because it was too important to teach us about life. I still don’t know what I learned from him, except the concept of cultural appropriation.
My second semester of junior year I was living in Arizona and had an equally interesting physics teacher. He was clearly on steroids and threw stools across the classroom in rage when he wasn’t participating in Iron Mans.
My government class was only one semester and our teacher made us draw our notes and then graded us on our artistic abilities rather than the content itself. You would think he was a very calm soul, but once made a girl with diabetes scrub each desk after class because she had to eat a snack. Great guy.
The other semester was economics, the teacher of which made us invest in stocks, and encouraged us to cheat on our tests. He would turn his chair around to face the whiteboard and tell us to take out our individual internets (our cell phones). There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
My senior year of high school I took a dual credit English class taught within the high school. I clarify this because my teacher forced us to refer to him as a professor when he clearly was not. On the first day of class, he made us watch him slowly eat a grape and described it as orgasmic. I learned so much.
When I finally started college my first year I took a political science class. On the first day, there was a slideshow playing photos of a teenage girl. The professor started class explaining that the girl in the photos was his daughter. And she was murdered two months prior. We then spent the rest of the class watching news clips.
I fell in love with creative writing and had a wonderful creative writing professor. When I googled her name I found out she was a disgraced journalist because she made up people for her columns. I guess you could say she found her place in fiction. I still love her.
As part of my degree, I had to take an internship class. As part of the curriculum, we had to attend a lecture held by a self-published author. He was the Boom-Boom guy, some form of an inspirational speaker. All I remember is someone in the audience answering one of his questions and then screaming as a t-shirt was thrown at her face while he yelled, “YOU’VE JUST GRADUATED FROM BOOM-BOOM UNIVERSITY!”. Poor girl.
And last, but not least, I received a mentor as part of a school organization I was a part of. He was a nice guy, but completely and totally sexist. Almost all of his sentences started with “You girls always…”. You know, the way people liked to be lumped together?
Anyways I had to invite a guest speaker to my professional program and I thought he’d be good to invite. He was an odd guy, but he worked in the industry. Bad mistake.
Immediately he started yelling at my peers to stand up and give him their elevator speech. No one knew what he wanted and one girl started panicking. After we calmed her down I escorted him out.
AND THESE WERE JUST THE HIGHLIGHTS! Every year my whole life I have had the strangest people teach me the basics. I wish I could say I wouldn’t change it for the world… but a shiny private school might’ve been nice.
Maybe fewer threats and more learning. That should be their tagline! Did anyone else have weird teachers? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?