A middle school social studies teacher of mine gave me detention on numerous occasions because I refused to take notes in his class.
Partway into the year during parent-teacher conferences, where parents met with teachers to discuss their children’s performance in class, the issue was brought up.
“Pixelscript is having some difficulties in my class. He is not taking notes during lectures. I’ve given him detention several times.”
“Well that’s strange, it says on his report card that he has an A in the class.”
“Well, yes, he does extremely well on homework and tests, but you see, he doesn’t take notes…”
“…Are you kidding me?!”
The greatest irony of the situation was that on the few occasions he forced me to take notes, it lessened my comprehension, because focusing on writing in real time during the lecture actively harmed my understanding of the lecture. God forbid a student actually listens to what you have to say…
I think people learn differently. Most lectures I have to wait for the instructor to finish their slide or something and then begin copying notes. If they’re going really fast I don’t understand anything, at that point it’s just writing them down as fast as possible in order to study later instead of learning in class.
I had a similar experience with a high school biology teacher. I always took very scarce notes (just what i knew i needed to write down). She insisted we take thorough notes and later copy them over neatly into another notebook. I refused. Nevermind that my handwriting has always been abominable. She based some part of our final grade on turning in these copied over notes, and I consequently got a poor grade despite doing well on tests. I took great pleasure in telling her about my 5 on the AP test at the end of the year. (It was a national test, scored 1 to 5.)
It’s a classroom management thing.
I didn’t understand this until I was a teacher but unfortunately, “if I let you do it, I have to let everyone do it” ends up being pretty true. Kids will absolutely point to other kids and say, “but you let Joey put his head down and listen.”
My response can’t be “but Joey is passing my class.” As much as I would like it to be.
It’s also a respect thing and I don’t mean that like you might think. I don’t demand unearned respect from everyone like an asshole. But one thing that happens is, if you let kids skirt classroom expectations and let them avoid doing things you ask them to do, they learn that your rules/expectations are actually just suggestions. Everything becomes negotiable.
Sorry dude, I would have made you take your notes too.
I’m sorry but you’re wrong here. Kids need to learn that everyone is different and everyone is not treated the same. The oft liar is never trusted. The fat kid is probably the one that stole the candy. The nerdy kid probably did most of the group work. If you get good grades, the teacher gives you more slack in some areas.
And your example sucks. Putting your head down and “listening” is not the same thing as sitting up and paying attention to a lecture but not taking notes.
Don’t get me wrong. I see where you’re coming from and agree generally, but on academics, there’s too many different ways to learn. Whatever someone figures out that works best for them should be left to that if their marks are good every evaluation.
Much as I’d like to agree with you, you’re clearly talking out of your arse.
Teachers are hamstrung by administration nowadays. If we could treat kids differently, we would. Alas, terrible admin+awful parents means differentiation isn’t even remotely possible.
That’s all very highly regarded
Who said anything about putting heads down? I wasn’t pissing about reading a book or playing games on my laptop during lecture, I was paying attention. Head up, eyes locked, watching.
“Classroom expectations”? The only reasonable expectation here is that I pass the class. Whether the teacher thinks patting my head, rubbing my belly, and jumping up and down whilst doing so is the ideal way to acheive it is irrelevant. Especially so if it is demonstrably to the contrary. Literal data for this exists in the form of grades displaying the trend.
My response can’t be “but Joey is passing my class.” As much as I would like it to be.
Maybe my anecdote is no longer reflective of modern institutions where teachers are increasingly restricted and scrutenized over dumb factors they don’t even control, but I find this quite a strange take, because a different middle school teacher of mine in the same school played this exact card to great effect. It is not immediately obvious to me why you couldn’t.
EDIT: Sitting on that response for a moment, it seems that to some degree you read it as if I was being disruptive in class, or otherwise not paying attention and setting that example to my peers. In these cases I would take your side. You have a responsibility to teach students the soft skills of proper attention and listening comprehension.
I was not violating this. My whole debacle was very specifically the putting pencil to paper part. In my view, notes are strictly an assistive tool. If I demonstrably did not require this tool to perform (evidenced by grades), and even moreso performed worse with it (further evidenced by grades), I do not agree that I should be forced to use it, specifically at a time where students are arguably old enough to start making choices like study strategy for themselves.
And I am not sufficiently convinced that this specific kind of selectivity is sufficiently toxic to your teaching position that you have to cast aside your better judgement to not rock the boat. But perhaps things really are that dire now. If they are, well, I guess that’s just a bummer for both of us. :/
“I gave you a 98 because I don’t give out 100’s.” Even though I got everything right, I couldn’t get the grade I deserved because of some high school health teacher’s ego.
I had a university professor give me a 99 on a written exam because “only Jesus is perfect”.
I didn’t really care but it’s also something I may never forget because of how bizarre I found it
When I was about 13 I was spending a lot of my lunchtimes in the library working on programming a game. One day I logged on and saw all my code had been deleted. I assumed I’d done it by accident and pulled the latest copy from git. The next day I was called into the assistant head’s office because “games are not allowed on school computers”. He then for some reason told me that the graphics I’d made myself were bad and that my game was buggy and that if I continued to do that in school I would be suspended. He did, however, say that I could do it at the computer club which was on every Thursday night. Great, except there was no computer club.
Omg this is mad. Nice that you had everything in git! Pretty badass.
My primaryschool maths teacher taught us roman numerals and one of the tasks we got was to write out the current year in roman numerals.
I came up with MCMXCVIII … to which he smugly replied that it’s wrong and the romans were a lot more clever and it’s just IIMM (take 2 off 2000).
Years later I learned that he was quite wrong about that and my answer is in fact the only correct one.
TFW your school insists you learn something utterly pointless and then the teacher teaches it completely wrong.
IIMM just looks so silly. If that were allowed, then why would the Super Bowl roman numerals be so long in the 1900s?
(I don’t even watch football.)
There is a modern normative convention but there was never an official standard, and the Roman’s usage actually had a lot of variation. Your teacher may have been right that some Romans actually wrote IIMM, but he certainly wasn’t right to claim you were wrong.
4th year in college in a 3rd world country. Final exams. Last exam. About to graduate after an agonizing year of microbiology. I don’t remember exactly what I did, but he saw me and thought I was cheating off of another student. I was not. Starts yelling at me. I start yelling back. Fails me on the last test on the very very very last day of the last year of college and I was about to go on with my life. I had to repeat the whole year because of him. College is different in my country. You fail one class, you fail the whole year. I still hate him to this day. When he dies, I’ll go shit on his grave.
Pity you cant make his life one year shorter. Make it a decent shit
Oh I’ll make sure I’ll have taco bell beforehand.
This one made me literally lol
😂 glad you got a laugh out of it.
Elementary school we has televised morning announcements where 2 different kids were randomly selected each week to read the script as the “hosts”. I got selected one week and while the camera was turned to the flag for the pledge of allegience, the other kid and i quietly, under the desk, started fighting with hand puppets that were on set. We stopped when the camera got back to us, but the music teacher, who was in charge of the whole schtick, decided afterwards to get angry and take me, specifically, off of morning announcements.
That’s not even the part I’m still mad about though. When it was time for music class that day, since it was entirely floor seating, I positioned myself under the lip of the teacher’s desk to sulk, like is a normal response for a 6 year old who feels like they were unfairly singled out. The music teacher then proceded to pour a glass of water on my head, in front of the whole class.
I can’t even remember his name but I hope he had a shit life afterwards. What kind of teacher does that to a child.
From grades 1 to 4 (6 to 9 years of age) we had the same teacher. She was fine for the first 3 years but somthing must have happened because during the last year she completely changed.
That last year is still burned in my mind. She would verbally and physically assault us at the minimum mistake. For example, when she was delivering tests she had us go to her to pick it up and the ones with average or bad grades would get a knuckle punch to the forehead (it hurt like hell).
Slapping was common occurance, as in several times a day. She also once broke a plastic ruler on a girls head for speaking out of turn and banged another girls head onto the blackboard several times because she was writing with too small letters.
One of the worst things I recall involved the special needs kid. I don’t remember what condition he had, just that he had no understanding of social rules and also had trouble reading. One day this kid decides to climb on the toilet and look at a girl that was peeing (the closed toilets to the classroom were unisex). The girl came crying to the teacher and she proceeded to grab the kid by the ear and twisted it hard. While he was crying is hear out, she pulled down his pants and underwear and slapped his ass several times. He was quite never the same after that…
The worst part? Telling my parents about this and them thinking I was crazy because there was no way a teacher would behave like this.
Luckly that was the last year and I moved to another school but the memories remain.
If you’re still alive, fuck you Lena.
That’s sickening, fuck Lena
I was reading a book in class, and after finishing it my Earth Sciences teacher asked to read it. He never gave it back and swore for years I never lent it to him. It was a book one of a series that my dad had given me.
Princess of Mars, book 1 of Edgar Rice Borroughs’s Barsoom series. The edition from the 70s. I just recently found new copy of the missing book at the used bookstore so I could complete my shelf.
My kids know this teacher’s name, and call him my nemesis.
Had a teacher tell me my father was in hell because he lost his battle with mental illness. Catholic school was scarring.
It was my final exam. Everyone , including the president (or whatever it’s called), but one said I was great and all, and we were chilling talking about my future. I said I wanted to get a CS degree, to which my math teacher replied with “People like you can only be good as carpenters”
EDIT: just to point out, I got the highest grade lol
I was 12 or so, rather depressed, in a new school which was crappy, and dealing with a difficult home life with my mother who has BPD, and I was doodling shitty things in my notebook in class, I didn’t feel like I had many friends so I wrote stuff like “Anna looks like a poodle with her perm” and 'Jennifer looks like a banana in her yellow jacket", just petty stuff but it was getting me through a bad day. The art teacher noticed me writing, took it away from me, and read it out loud to the entire class. I literally had zero friends after that. It was a pretty harmless thing for me to do and I was just trying to blow off a bad mood, obviously, but she decided to wreck my life out of spite.
I wasn’t right to do that, don’t get me wrong, but I was just a kid and didn’t deserve public humiliation for simply getting some feelings on paper.
My dad was in construction (ran an excavator, mostly) when I was a kid. He found a large megalodon tooth in amazing condition at work and gave it to me. I brought it to school and my teacher took it from me. I never saw it again.
It’s especially infuriating now because I know the value of teeth in that condition and size
Had a woodshop teacher steal my dad’s hat exactly like this.
I had a teacher who had us read a certain amount of books on our own per semester. We could choose pretty much any book.
I chose a book in the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy series.
He would check that we’d actually read the book by sitting down with us and turning to a random page, reading a bit and then asking us what was happening, who the character he’d read about was, that kind of thing.
Well, yeah if you’ve ever read HHGTTG books, you know it can go on random tangents. My teacher read one of these random tangents about a character never seen before or again, and which had no connection to the rest of the story at all except as a setup to talk about something else that did have to do with the story.
My teacher could not wrap his head around this. He read a couple more random selections and I did explain those, but his assessment was that I had only hastily skimmed the book instead of properly reading it, and therefore lowered my score on what was normally an easy 100% assignment.
mock me in class constantly cuz i was born in and brought from a village to city
soon almost every classmate just bad mouth me for the same reasons as if its okay cuz the teacher did it
What the hell
Oh another one, when I was 8 or 9 one of the first grade teachers threatened me with expulsion for making a fart sound in the hallway. Cried for hours, the wicked bitch. She’s dead now though!
