ADVENTURES IN EDUCATION

Teachers are heros.  Most of them are truly devoted to our kids' social and academic growth.  Teachers are not compensated anywhere near where they should be.  (Full disclosure: Both my parents are retired elementary school teachers.)

Yet there are always some bad apples.  For all my great teachers, it's the truly weird, crazy teachers that I remember the most.

1. There was the teacher who threatened to have me fail first grade if I didn't learn to jump rope 100 times in a row.

2. There was the nun that told us that memorizing and reciting paraphrased portions of the Catechism were the best way to learn because that's what she did as a child.  She would also playfully slap you on the behind if you were kneeling up in your chair and justified it by exclaiming: "Temptation!"

4. My favorite crazy teacher was in middle school.  She just wanted to be liked by her students, which of course meant no one respected her.  She drank coffee each day until she would start to shake.

This was a Catholic school and at the beginning of the year she sent home a note explaining her impending divorce, that she was reverting to her maiden name upon the finalization of the divorce, and then she would legally change her name a word that meant "soldier for truth" on such and such date.  So over the course of the year we were to address her under one of three names depending on when.  Why she wanted to be addressed by her married name up to the date of the official divorce finalization, I don't know. 

Of course, everyone just called her by her married name the whole year except me.  As little I respected her, I figured people should be called what they want.

One day Mrs./Ms. I/H/A brought in a hamster cage to give to a student who had a hamster at home.  The plastic top of the cage was caved in as if it had been melted.  She explained matter-of-factly to the class that her daughter had given the hamster a bath.  Worried that the hamster would catch a cold, she (the teacher) put the cage under a heat lamp.  Then the family went shopping and forgot about it.  The hamster had crawled to the furthest corner and was long departed by the time they discovered the mistake.

Mrs./Ms. I/H/A also wanted us to learn about art.  She had us for several years and asked the class of poor farmkids how many of them have been to museums in Europe and was surprised that only the student from Germany had.  She showed us so many slides of nudes that all of my classmates objected to seeing tones of naked pictures.  The next day, showing more slides, Mrs./Ms. I/H/A stopped at a nude portrait and explained, "Oops! I didn't mean for this one to be included.  I'm sorry seeing naked pictures makes you uncomfortable because your bodies are all changing.  "  After a minute she switched to the next non-nude slide.

She attempted to teach us the evils of drugs.  She was going to school to be a counselor and had "clients" even though she wasn't licensed.  We got to hear how she confiscated drugs from her substance-abuse clients.  "How about I bring in some drugs so that you all can see what they look like so you can avoid them?"

The poor principal got a couple dozen phone calls that night.  All of us thirteen year-olds knew no good could come from her showing a bunch of kids illegal drugs.  The next day, Mrs./Ms. I/H/A was astonished.  "Did you know that it is illegal for me to just show you those drugs?  I was told I should get rid of them so I flushed them down the toilet."

Mrs./Ms. I/H/A reflected that it was probably just as well.  Her young daughter had found an envelope with what looked like powdered sugar stuck in a library book and gave it a few licks.   Mrs./Ms. I/H/A called poison control and was told that her daughter would probably be fine even though she licked "a little bit of cocaine."

or ?

I just hope that my daughters fare with better teachers than I had.