Someone Dropped The Ball… So Freaking Hard

This started the year before my high school graduation (around the 2000s) and continued into my graduation year. In my English class, the teacher had a student teacher from Finland who did the best she could. She was not marvelous, just a normal, nervous student teacher.

Halfway through the year, we got the message that our teacher had had an accident and can’t come in for a while. She had sliced off the tip of one finger of her left hand with a cheese knife. We were horrified but quickly reassured: no, not the top, the tip. It was just a tiny slice and would heal soon enough. However, the incident had been so traumatic, she had to take a break from work and [Student Teacher] would take over. She couldn’t take over all the classes, so our classes were halved.

After about a month, we started wondering when [Teacher] would come back. Hadn’t her injury healed? When we asked about it, we were told she couldn’t handle the chalk and dust from our blackboard. And she couldn’t write with that hand.

Wait… wasn’t she right-handed? And she always just used an overhead projector with sheets; she never wrote on the blackboard. But, [Student Teacher] did, so maybe that was it?

After three more months, [Student Teacher] let us know she would stay for another two months instead of going home to Finland. However, she couldn’t take over all the missing classes. There was one other qualified English teacher… who had been home with burnout for two months already.

So, better than nothing, I guess? I have no idea what the school board was thinking. And our own teacher was still home sick after that incident with the cheese knife? If you don’t explain what’s going on, teens start making up their own stories, which luckily all ended with “she just wants extra vacation”.

Two months before the end of the school year, [Student Teacher] had to go home… and there was no replacement teacher. At all. And the school seemed okay with it.

They also seemed okay with the fact that we had no English Teacher at the start of the next year. [Teacher] hadn’t recovered and [Student Teacher] was way back in Finland. [Burnout Teacher] was still home sick.

It took until halfway through our graduation year before [Burnout Teacher] recovered enough to take up some lessons. And his lessons were: “Here’s some text. Read it and fill in the multiple-choice questions.”

So, for almost a year, we had little to no English classes, which were supposed to prepare us for our national exams.

I do not know which deity was bribed by whomever, but we all passed for some reason.