Everyone has their fair share of sexist, biased, and overall unfair teachers, but in middle school, I had a teacher beyond what you should expect. Now, since I went to a private school, the school had grades 1-8. Starting in 5th grade we would start having Spanish class. My 5th grade self thought this would be the coolest class because I would be able to learn a foreign language and boy, was I wrong. The teacher, who I'm going to just call Senora, was from the Central American country El Salvador. Now, I'm not sure if her strange behavior was because of her cultural difference or something else, but I'm going to tell this story anyways. Ok, now that I've set some background, let me tell the story. I don't remember much of my classes with her in 5th grade, but I must've gave her a really bad first impression. Not much happened the first 2 years that is significant enough to remember. All I remember is her making us do really shitty class work that didn't even teach us anything. "Oh well Ivy, she might be setting you up for something that she will teach you later on!" Bullshit. There's so many times where she made us do and make things she said we would use later but never did. Fast forward to 7th grade, where shit started happening. This is the year where we learned Ser and Estar, the "TO BE" verbs in spanish (at least that's what I was told they were). Now, when I say this is the year we learned Ser and Estar, I'm not lying. "Well why is that significant Ivy?" Well, I forgot to mention that Ser and Estar was literally ALL we learned that year. 180 days, Spanish class twice a week, and we learned 1 thing. When we would finish learning it, she would test, and everyone would fail. So we repeated this nearly all year. Now, when I say we all failed, we all failed except like 2 in the class. I'm pretty sure this wasn't from our lack of attention, I'm convinced it was because of her inability to teach us. I tried so damn hard to pass that class, payed attention in every class, but her teaching made no sense to any of us and her notes on the board lacked any actual purpose. We all asked questions, and she would reply with empty answers. "Hey uh Senora so when do I use the verb form 'soy'?" She would simply reply, "oh, yeah we went over that." Besides her exceptional teaching skills, this is the year when I remember her start to bully me and a few others. I sat next to a kid born in Hati, who spoke great English but had a thick accent, and he and I were harassed class after class. She would mock his accent, in her own accent, when he would try to ask a serious question, blame me for trying to be silly when I didn't know the answer to a question (I can't even count how many times this happened), and assign us punishments for doing things like checking the clock, and sitting there doing nothing. Not just me and this kid, a lot of boys in the class experienced her bias first hand. When we would always fail, she blamed it on our constant talking and "lack of respect for the Spanish language. The one time we were learning adjectives and everyone in the class got an adjective to describe them. Everyone got a nice one like "tall or "pretty" and I got lazy. When the year finally ended, I had learned 1 skill, and had 20 little nick nacks she made us craft that we never used. I told myself "one more year, you can make it through this." 8th grade, the year I remember the most from middle school. Again, we learned one thing, the verb "TO KNOW" saber and conocer. He bias to me was so great and she would punish me for no reason or for little pointless things so much, I would be lucky to last 2 weeks without a detention. Now trust me, I wasn't one to fool around in class, so don't think that's why. All of my class mates even agreed she had a "special" hatred towards me. So, one memorable moment was around christmas time. I went to a Catholic school, so talking about religion was allowed and commonplace. Its a tradition in her country to bake a little Jesus Statue in a cake, so we did that. Then, she said that whoever gets the jesus had to make another cake and bring it in. I got the Jesus, and simply told her "I'm not making a cake, I don't have the time" So she said. "Oh Mark, you need that Jesus" in a very rude tone. She would also make us do these really dumb Spanish "skits" and would make us bring 5 props as part of our grade. When bringing your props, she would say "oh no you can't use that as a prop randomly to people, so I came prepared. I brought in 7 props because I knew she would pull some bullshit. So, She let me use a check because it was a restraunt skit but not a credit card. Great logic, I know. So I went through all of my other props as she denied all of them just so I wouldn't have my 5/5. When we did the skit, she said it was a practice, so when we were doing it I messed up my line so I stopped it and started talking not in character. Because she said it was practise I assumed this was fine, but she decided that since all of my other group members did fine I would get grade for my stop in the middle of the practice. I didn't do well on that even though I was super prepared for the project. Another instance was when we had to do a project on a Spanish - speaking country. I got "Brazil" and I politely told her, "Uhh Senora, Brazil's official language isn't Spanish, its Portuguese." She also tried giving a kid Puerto Rico, and I told her that it wasn't a country and it was part of the United States and she replied, "Well my people consider it a country, so you call it a country." So basically, she was teaching us misinformation. Anyways, this was close to the end of the year, and I was reassigned to Nicaragua. When we finished our dumb little projects, we were expected to present them, and surprise surprise, I had to go first. I presented my project, and she said she was going to use me as an example for grading, and started reading off the rubric. "Hmm neatness... 4/10, etc etc." and then continuing to grade me in front of the class, basically laughing at the project I put work into. It was the end of the year in about 2 weeks, I was pissed off, so I told her how I felt. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was filled with compassion, and I didn't hold back. My classmates related with me, because they knew how nuts she was and how rude she's been to me. After I was done she simply replied with "Orly, ok" She always never confronted kids directly to give them a detention. She would always give them to your homeroom teacher for some dumb reason because she was too scared for my counter-argument. Anyways, after class, everyone was congratulating me and giving me high fives. Sounds corny, but I swear its true. Some of this may sound like her reacting to my 12-14 year old self but I swear, ask anyone in my grade, this teacher, was beyond insane.
This story is a little all over the place but there was a lot to write so I tried to keep it organized.
