A Bullet Dodged in High School

Exercise in memoir

My high school experience was a refreshing departure from the hell of middle school, as I’ve written in this forum. Like most three and four year stretches of life, these periods were not just one note. As awful as middle school was, I had some good teachers there. In high school I had some bad ones and bad experiences. I’ll not glorify the past, as both middle and high school were oppressive, yet middle school was so much worse. My high school experience was not wrought with fear and violence as was middle school. Writing about only the best of either is a bore and not instructive, however. Let’s dish on the inept.

You can be mean, or you can be a bad teacher, and under the right circumstances, that might still be ok. You cannot be both. I’d had mean teachers before. Some of them I really liked, though their meanness was not of bad-Spanish-teacher variety. They could be mean, but they knew how to teach. I’d had teachers that could not explain the concept of snow to the Inuit, yet with kindness, empathy, and a lot of understanding from them, one might learn the material. This lady was both a terrible teacher and mean. This doesn’t even touch on her racism and other personal failings. I knew a few days in I should not be in her class, yet held out hope. Another error on my part. Her inability to teach and her meanness and unsupportive nature were more obvious and more hindrance to learning with each passing period in her classroom. Furthermore, the time for changing classes had elapsed.