Unfiltered Story #254535

During my sophomore year of high school, I had a particularly difficult time in my algebra honors class. Our teacher had a tendency to provide notes and assign homework that rarely matched the assessments given in class. There were often questions that looked nothing like the problems we had practiced, meaning that we typically found ourselves stumped.

Matters weren’t helped by the fact that our teacher was not very receptive to students that asked for help during work time in class. She would usually say something almost identical to what she had said during lessons (which was often precisely what students would ask about for clarification) and then not elaborate any further. Most of the time, she sounded frustrated and vaguely irritated that students would ask her for help. As the year progressed, students stopped asking her for help altogether and tried to band together when stumped by a problem or concept.

She also seemed to be annoyed whenever we expressed our frustration with the tests, saying that we needed to study harder and apply ourselves more. Our teacher said that the class was supposed to be challenging, and implied that perhaps we weren’t able to meet those challenges.

I became increasingly distraught as the year continued. Math is not my strongest subject, but I’ve always worked and studied very hard to make up for my lack of talent in that area. Learning that the majority of my studying was meaningless in the face of completely different (and often more difficult) problems was very discouraging. No matter how many detailed notes I took, or extra homework problems I attempted, I barely managed to score above a C on most tests. I only scored higher on our projects, which most of my classmates disliked. I didn’t mind them as much because I could use them to more accurately demonstrate my understanding than on the baffling tests.

At the end of my sophomore year, she announced to the class that she was moving to a new city and thus not teaching again at our school next year. I was privately relieved, but otherwise thought little else of her departure.

It wasn’t until earlier this year when I learned from some old classmates that there was more to the story. Apparently, a large number of my peers became upset with their grades on one of our aforementioned projects and wanted to hear our teacher’s reasoning. (I was unaware of this because for once, I was actually content with my grade and had no desire to change it.) So many students approached her that she said she didn’t have enough time left to listen to all of them, and asked for them to return tomorrow. They agreed to this plan and left.

When they approached her the next day, she informed the group that this day was the end of a marking period and that their project grades were now locked in. She couldn’t change them anymore.

Understandably, my classmates were ticked. This incident set off a series of events that snowballed into a meeting in the school auditorium with administrators. Students and their parents finally aired all of their complaints towards our teacher, both regarding this specific incident and what had been occurring in class all year.

The end result was that our teacher was asked to leave at the end of the year and seek a job elsewhere. While learning this knowledge hasn’t undone all the damage from that year, it has made my frustration feel both validated and recompensed in some sense. If she is still teaching, I hope she is doing well for herself and that she changed her teaching methods after that experience.