one time in sixth grade i did my math homework and then because i was excited that i had grasped the lesson so well, i did the next day’s homework too
the next day in class i told my teacher, and she looked constipated for a second, and then said dismissively, “well, then you’re not very good at following directions, are you.”
#I identify strongly with this#I got reprimanded on multiple ocasions for reading ahead and/or already having knowledge
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Cause tags are truth. Maaan ,that one time a teacher stole my encyclopedia cause it proved her wrong.
when I was eight and in public school, we could do a report based on any historical character who had a book about them in the school library.
I picked Harriet Tubman because Harriet Tubman, and I wrote about how her master had thrown an anvil at her head, leaving her with a permanent dent in her forehead. I know that the anvil part was definitely in the school library book.
My teacher circled the word “anvil” and took off points.
“I HAVE SPELLED ANVIL CORRECTLY,” I roared in tiny confrontation.
“No,” she said, and it transpired that she didn’t know or care that “anvil” is a word or that “anvils” are a thing.
And so despite my helpful attempts to explain what anvils were, including references to blacksmiths and the Roadrunner, I had points taken off OH MY GOD.
YES, I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS TWENTY YEARS LATER.
FUCK YOU, LADY. YOU ARE DOUBTLESSLY DEAD BY NOW AND I HOPE YOU KNOW YOUR STUDENTS STILL HATE YOU.ANVILS ARE A THING.
From “Daring Greatly” by Brene Browne:
“…85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves as learners.”
I think about this quote a lot when I think of school.
Sometimes you just see a combination of posts that really crystallizes something for you. thank you spcsnaptags for putting these thoughts together this way.
In second grade I used the word “boon” in a composition and my teacher marked it wrong because, she said, it was not a word.
I brought in the Chambers English Dictionary the next day to show her.
That was the same school where even after I had demonstrated to them that I could read by READING A PAGE OF A BOOK OUT LOUD IN FRONT OF THEM, I was judged to be in the somethingth percentile for learning to read. Boy, was that a fun two years in the American public school system.
I had an english teacher tell me that she was one of the smartest people I would ever met when I corrected her on the definition of gaslighting
Wow, @elodieunderglass and I apparently wrote the exact same Harriet Tubman paper.
I lost points on a third grade spelling test for answering “chaise,” because I had known how to spell “chase” since I was four and could not fathom why it would be on my vocabulary list at eight.
My 5th grade teacher tried to tell my father not to do my work for me, because I did a project on how similar the moon landings were to Jules Verne’s books on going to the moon, and she didn’t believe I had actually done the work.
I was so angry at her. My father and I traded off reading pages of those books, and I had just finished From The Earth To The Moon.
This is the same teacher that tried to tell me that ‘ion’ wasn’t a word and took away privileges for getting up and getting the dictionary and showing her that it was too a word.
One time my English teacher put me in detention because I corrected his pronunciation of Pompey, which he said like “Pompeii”. I raised my hand and he apparently didn’t like being corrected, and said I was getting detention for disrupting class.
I didn’t like that, because I knew he was saying the word wrong. So during study time I went to his desk, and I backed up what I was saying by showing him the pronunciation guide in the text book. He said, “No one likes a smart aleck.” And the detention was extended from a day to an entire week.
That was about when I decided not to listen to teachers anymore.I had an English teacher spend the entire English lesson tallying up our year end grades. Everybody in the class was to take all our term papers and essays scores, average them out in the complicated equation she devised. And if what you got and what she got doesn’t match, she spent the next 10 minutes abusing you. I got called a r****d because in my nervousness and stress I failed to round up to 1 decimal point to her satisfaction. The next day, when the entire class expected her to apologize for her truly bizzare behavior, she only said that “she will not apologize because she did nothing wrong.”
In fifth grade we had to do a creative writing thing and I had a character say “I’m ever so lonely.” I also had a dragon “take wing.” The teacher circled both of those phrases and told me that they weren’t English. ?!?!?! That was the year I realized that teachers weren’t tiny gods and didn’t actually know everything.
I still remember the day my high school English teacher told me “entranced” wasn’t a word and I must have meant “enchanted.”
Yeah, she didn’t like the dictionary trick either. Especially as I was using the word for writing fiction and also explained to her the nuance between the two. Pfft.
(With that said, I had better English teachers in the end, like the one who, after I read the novel we were studying long before the rest of the class, got me the two sequels we weren’t studying, had me read those, and gave me stuff to do in class that took all three books into account instead of just the one.)
When I was in first grade, I got marked wrong on a spelling test for capitalizing “North Pole.” Not because it’s wrong – it’s correct if you’re talking about the northernmost point on the planet, not the north pole of any old magnet – but because we “weren’t supposed to have learned that yet.”
My brother got in trouble when he pointed out to his physical science teacher that aspirin was, indeed, an organic chemical.
I am 41 goddamned years old and I am still bitter about my 7th grade history teacher who took points off of one of my papers because he refused to believe that plethora was a real word. He didn’t appreciate the dictionary gesture either.