(In elementary school, our computer teacher starts off class every year with keyboarding practice. She does this by calling out each letter a couple of times followed by, “space” — for example “A, A, space” — which we then have to repeat as a class as we type it. We’re up to the letter P.)

Teacher: “All right. Everyone always wants to laugh when they hear me say, ‘P, P, space.’ So, if you’re going to laugh, do it now.”

(She actually gave us thirty seconds to laugh and get it out of our system before continuing with the lesson. And you can bet we did.)

(In my sociology class we are talking about social conditioning. My teacher asks for any examples of having been corrected so many times you automatically do or don’t do something. In the class we have [Student] who always has some bizarre story to tell.)

Student: “Ms. [Teacher], I have something. In my Pre-K class, one of the teachers used social conditioning.”

Teacher: “What, [Student #1]?

Student: “She had a blown-up pufferfish hanging from the ceiling. Every time someone would do something wrong, she would yell to them, ‘I’ll stick a pufferfish down your pants!’”

(Silence, then laughter.)

Student: “She would stand under the pufferfish and tap her foot, and we automatically knew to shut up.”

This story is part of our Teacher Appreciation Week roundup!

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(We are in cooking class. We have eaten the main dish we made that day, and one of us is bringing the pie in to the table. I turn my head a little to look at it, and my teacher loses her s***.)

Teacher: “Just like you, always hawking for the first slice. You know what? This time you won’t have any!”

(Usually everybody takes one or three pieces and the rest is given to the teachers, but this time our teacher made the other students eat the entire pie while preventing me from getting any or leaving. This teacher also stopped making us cook any actually good food after our class became 100% girls; all we got was “healthy” BS, like salads and soups, and the emphasis was on how it looked and the decoration. When there were boys in our class, we often made pancakes, pizza, and the like, but the teachers stopped it when the boys got their own class. Just to be clear, in Finland the housekeeping classes are compulsory to everybody.)

(This story takes place in my high school, during history class. We have just finished the topic of World War II and Adolf Hitler. As we all enter class and sit down, our teacher is going around class, asking us one by one, who could be an “icon” of a certain thing or time. He gets to me.)

Teacher: “So, [My Name], who could be an icon?”

Me: “Adolf Hitler is an icon of the Holocaust?”

Teacher: “[My Name], that is completely inappropriate of you to say. I don’t know why you would even bring that up out of nowhere. Go to the office right now.”

Me: “But we literally just studied this—”

Teacher: “I don’t care. OFFICE, NOW!”

(I grab my things and head out of the history room to the office, where I am greeted by our principal.)

Principal: “Oh, [My Name], you’re here? What did you possibly do?”

Me: “[History Teacher] was asking us who an icon of a certain thing could be, and considering we just studied the topic, I said Adolf Hitler could be an icon of the Holocaust, and he sent me down here.”

Principal: “Oh. Um… Well, just stay down here for this period and you can head to your next class.”

(And that’s the story of how I got in-school-suspension for one class period because of our foolish history teacher! Spoiler: he was fired not too long after this.)

I am in sixth grade when this happens and we are doing end-of-year testing in our first-period classes. I am very happy with this because my first-period class is Intro to Spanish, which is taught by a very nice teacher. The first day of testing goes by without any problems, but when I get to class the second day, I find out that my Spanish teacher is gone and my math teacher will be supervising us in her place.

My math teacher that year is not overly sadistic, but he acts like he knows everything and that the people who taught us math in elementary school are idiots. He is also the type who picks favorites, gives us only three bathroom passes per trimester — using any more gets you a lunch detention — forbids any socializing at all during regular class time — for example, if you turn around in your chair you get lunch detention –and gives you lunch detention if you needlessly disrupt class more than three times a week. His classes can be fun sometimes, and he does teach useful stuff, which makes me feel kind of guilty for disliking him, but I just do not like him at all.

During the time period where everyone is working on the huge test we are fine, but when everyone is finished, he decides to turn on a movie. The movie that he chooses is one that I have recently seen and I am terrified of because a scene involves something I have a phobia of, so I go to ask him if we can change the movie because I’m scared of watching it. He refuses. I keep asking him, but he keeps refusing and turns on the movie. I get multiple questions about why the movie scares me on my way back to my seat and I simply answer by saying that there is a scene that really scares me. Fast forward a bit, and we’re almost at the part that terrifies me. Because it’s close to the end of class, I ask to use the bathroom and get permission to leave the classroom. I spend the rest of the class in the bathroom. Faith in humanity crushed.

The next day, my Spanish teacher is back and, since the class is done with the test, she goes to turn on a movie. I ask her if we can switch to a different movie, and when she asks me why, I explain and some of my classmates explain how scared I looked while the movie was on and how I had to go to the bathroom to calm down. This catches me off guard because middle schoolers aren’t usually the kindest and because I’m probably the least popular person in the class. The teacher agrees to not watch the movie and chooses a different one, which I enjoy.

Then, when class is about to end, I am handed a small hall pass that is only issued for when students need to serve lunch detentions. I see that the room I’m supposed to go to for lunch detention is the one my math teacher’s class is in, so at lunch, I go in and ask my math teacher why I have lunch detention. He tells me that it’s because I used up my three bathroom passes for his class for the trimester and that I used a fourth the day before. He gave me a lunch detention because I used the bathroom in a class that wasn’t even his. Faith in humanity crushed again. I serve the lunch detention and go on my way, wondering how my math teacher could possibly think this was acceptable, but as I write this I wonder if he gave me lunch detention because I didn’t want to watch the movie.