When I was a theater tech for my high school’s plays back in the 1990s, we had this little telephone room where the students could call our parents to let them know we were done with rehearsal and we needed to be picked up.

One day, I made my call, and while I did, the door closed behind me… and locked. I didn’t realize until I hung up. This was before cell phones, so I couldn’t get ahold of my dad once he was on the road. (My parents were divorced, and my mom lived further away.) I pounded on the door like crazy, but in the chaos of cleaning up the auditorium and getting ready to leave, no one heard me.

My dad arrived, but no one knew where I was. Someone finally heard me and was able to let me out.

I think they took the lock completely off after that as there was no point in having the room lock to begin with.

Unfortunately, things can often get screwy with small rural churches. The thing is, everything is basically being worked on by volunteers, and those volunteers are not necessarily professionals. There can also be very little oversight or built-in accountability and generally iffy organization. So, you get the occasional person who in other locations might be the petty HOA board tyrant and tries to throw their (nonexistent) weight around, people who feel proprietary because they’ve been with the church so long, etc. And because it’s a social community instead of a business, people get leery of calling people out because it’ll cause drama (or at least pop the top on all the preexisting simmering drama).

I went to a tiny private high school that was affiliated with a nearby church. Some guy died, and in his will, he left some money in the trust of the church to be used for the school.

A decent amount of the congregation decided that the money should go to the church instead, and apparently, the church meetings got spicy.

I didn’t go to the church, but I got to school and even my unperceptive self could recognize the palpable aura of people being pissed off. (School staff had been at this meeting, and a decent amount of other students did attend this church. I mostly got details from a friend and my dad since he was part of the school board.)

Then, to make it worse, the church treasurer’s mother for some reason had access to the church safe. She took out the inherited money, which was for some reason physically in said safe, and had herself a shopping spree.

That didn’t de-escalate things, but it did get a lot of the details hidden from us students since there was now a question of pressing charges, so I’m actually not sure how it ended.

For reference, I’m blind. Partly because this high school is rather fearful of a lawsuit, and partly because I’m unable to navigate without assistance (for several medical reasons), I’m required to have someone take me from class to class. The usual person who does this goes on lunch at a rather poor time, right before a class, and so someone else comes in to fill in for her.

This interaction happens a week or so into school. I’m in the room several instructors use, where I make up work, etc. There are several devices on a table.

Aide: “What’s this?”

Me: “What?”

Aide: “This thing sitting on a desk?”

Me: “Umm… Describe it, please?”

Aide: “It’s black.”

Me: “Black? But… what does it look like?”

Aide: “It… looks like a black suitcase?”

Me: “Umm, is it a device? It might be the notetaker I use for braille?”

Aide: “I guess?”

She walked over to me with the item. It was, in fact, the notetaker. It doesn’t resemble a suitcase in the slightest; picture a tablet with a braille pad that slides up to reveal a visual screen.

I’ll never understand how, after ages working with various teachers and aides, it’s so difficult to describe an item to me.

There was also the time she walked me smack into some form of metal structure, didn’t tell me, and caused me to knock it over and send lunchroom decorations all over the place. Guess what? She couldn’t describe that to me, either

I ran cross country in high school in the early 2000s. One year, we had an exchange student from Germany on our team. She was friendly, polite, and soft-spoken, and very easy to get along with. She was also very, very good — in fact, she was the only one of us girls to qualify for the state championships. We other girls went to the championships to cheer her on. The state course has a notorious hairpin turn on a hill, which can be tricky to navigate during the 5km (3.1 mile) race.

Our teammate ran well, clocking in a time that was fast even for her. We all met her at the finish line to congratulate her.

Teammate: “How was the hairpin turn?”

Exchange Student: *Still catching her breath* “It was s***ty. F****** horrible!”

She noticed our immediate awkward silence, clapped her hand over her mouth, and lamented:

Exchange Student: “Oh, no! I said it in English!”

I worked in a high school outside of Washington DC. It was a school with a rougher reputation; on more than one occasion I was asked if I felt safe there, even from colleagues at other schools in the district. It was my first or second year of teaching and I was a general education teacher. What this meant was that sometimes I was a student’s only teacher who was not in the special education department, and I was often pulled for IEP (Individualized Education Program) or similar meetings. 

I was summoned for a meeting about a student in one of my classes, a female sophomore. The teacher running this meeting discussed the student’s home issues and gave the opportunity for others to discuss how she was in class. Her attendance was an issue, amongst other things. My heart broke due to her situation, and I was shocked by everything I heard because that was not my experience with her. This girl was absolutely wonderful in my class; she showed up and participated, and she started a silly tradition on one of my whiteboards. (That tradition was eventually transposed into a notebook that I still have in my possession fifteen years later, long after ending my teaching career.)  

There were only four classes a day, and I had this student during the last class period of the day, which started around 12:30. On a day I knew she was absent in the morning, I saw her during a time between classes. I said something to her about being late. It was probably sarcastic, which was the beauty of teaching teenagers.)

Student: “I only come for your class.”