To get an electrical engineering degree at my university, all students were required to take an upper-level course on electromagnetism prior to branching off to their sub-specialty concentrations. The course in question was taken after all the “weed out” courses, so it was expected that everyone taking the course was in it for the long haul and would pass the course even if they didn’t do overly well in it.  

Two days before classes were to begin, we were informed that the well-respected professor scheduled to teach our section was unavailable, and the class would be covered by a substitute they sourced for the semester.

Things did not get off to a good start. For the first few weeks, she had a very difficult time teaching the material, often making obvious mistakes in class both with the material and with simple arithmetic. We tried to give her a chance, hoping that it was just nerves in her first big solo teaching gig, but then came the first big exam.  

The class as a whole bombed the exam with the average score around 40%. There was no curve applied, so pretty much everyone was failing. A few people went and complained to the Dean at that point, but nothing was done. Not until we actually got our exam papers back, that is.

The next class, several students publicly asked her to explain how the answer to a specific problem was achieved because none of us had gotten it right and we had mostly all gotten the same wrong answer. Her response?

“I don’t know, that’s just what it says on the answer key.”

She hadn’t even written her own exam and didn’t understand the exam she was giving us. 

That’s when the rest of us marched into the Dean’s office and demanded that something be done. I don’t know what the outcome of the high-level discussions were, but I do know the following: 1) the scores on the first exam were normalized on a curve so that most people passed, 2) the following exams were much easier, and 3) her name never appeared on the teaching roster in following semesters the entire time I was at the school.

When I am twenty-two, I decide to get a license to drive the second-largest motorcycle, which is the best I can do at the time. (A2, for you EU-citizens out there.) In drivers’ ed for a normal car, I had teachers that I would classify as “meh” at best, but for the motorcycle lessons, my teacher is awesome and knows exactly how to motivate his students.

While I love the driving lessons, the thought of taking the practical exam makes me very nervous as I failed several times when getting a license to drive a car. My teacher has already asked which spot I would prefer for the driving exercises as he has the possibility to make a suggestion to the examiner — unofficially, of course.

One thing that I am scared of most is one of the basic exercises: driving in a perfect circle. It’s not that I can’t do it technically; it’s just that the radius isn’t marked on the ground and I am terrible at guessing how many metres I am from the centre. This goes for motorcycling, biking, or horseback riding — I just can’t do it.

My teacher knows this and tries to calm me down by explaining that the examiner can choose from several exercises but he can only choose one, which means that if I am tested in, for example, stop-and-go, I won’t have to do the circle. I am good at stop-and-go, so I really hope we will do that one.

Fifteen minutes before the exam, we stop at a gas station to fill up and check the tyre pressure. Nervous as I am, I do something stupid and fall down with the motorcycle, hurting my knee — but not so bad that I couldn’t continue — and breaking the clutch lever! I can’t drive like this safely so we stop at the motorcycle dealership and my teacher calls the examiner to tell him we will run late. While the lever is being replaced, I am standing outside in tears. This is about as bad as it can get.

My teacher tries to calm me down. “Okay, so that is done now; it’s over,” he says. “Now you can focus on the exam and pass it.”

“I can try,” I say, shakily.

My teacher says confidently, “No! We’re not here to try. It’s far too expensive for that. You’re gonna do it!”

Cheered up only a little, I start the exam. For the base exercises, my teacher makes sure we go to the place I know best. Now comes the part I am so scared of; will the examiner make me drive in circles? I try to tell myself how unlikely that is when I hear my teacher over the radio making a subtle suggestion to the examiner.

“So, which exercise should we do first? Stop-and-go or—”

“Yeah, yeah, do that,” the examiner says.

I immediately cheer up over the little trick my teacher pulled, even if, on second thought, the examiner probably knew exactly what was going on.

And that’s how my teacher chose the perfect spot for the exam, saved me from the possibility of circle driving, and later even told the examiner that a line I illegally crossed was absolutely impossible to see with the wet surface of the road. I passed on the first try!

To this day, I think he is the perfect teacher and if I ever find the money to do the license for big motorcycles, I will definitely go to him! Even if I still have a guilty conscience about denting that motorcycle.

I had major back surgery during seventh grade. I was out of school for three months having the surgery and then doing in-patient physical therapy and occupational therapy to learn to walk and do things like dress myself and use stairs again. I still had to do schoolwork, which my teachers sent in monthly packets and which I worked on daily for four hours in a “classroom environment” at the hospital.

Before my return to school, there was a meeting with my principal, vice-principal, teachers, and mother. We checked that I was caught up in all of my classes and then discussed the plan going forward. One of the teachers present was the gym teacher, and the principal explained that since I was still having trouble dressing myself and took a long time, and because I was forbidden by my doctors from doing anything physical, my PE grade would be purely attendance-based. I merely had to go in and sit down on the bleachers. I was told that I was welcome to bring a book and read, so I did that for the rest of the year.

At the end of the year, grades came out, and I’d been given a failing PE grade. I went to my teacher to ask why, since I’d only missed two days — which were excused, as they were follow-up appointments with my doctors. She snottily said, “You did nothing all year! You sat and read and didn’t participate! You didn’t even dress out!”

I reminded her of what we had discussed at the meeting and she said, “That didn’t happen.” I had to go to the principal to get my grade changed, and the teacher ended up being fired from the middle school.

Because I had a 504 plan for my accommodations, her attempt to ignore it was an ADA violation. Under her terms of employment, that resulted in an automatic dismissal. It was not something I requested at all.

Unfortunately, on my first day at my new high school, guess who I saw in the hallway! That summer, my doctors had given me documentation to excuse me from the state’s high school PE requirement completely, as it consisted primarily of contact sports. I had gone through the process of getting the documentation signed by the county superintendent and filed with his office and with the office at my high school. So, while I saw the gym teacher around occasionally for four years, we never interacted.

Three weeks before graduation, I was called into the principal’s office and there was the gym teacher with a smug look on her face. The principal said they couldn’t graduate me because I’d never taken the required blocks of PE. I reminded him that I had paperwork on file that showed that the superintendent had personally waived the requirements based on information from my doctor. He didn’t remember, so they pulled my file and there it was. The principal apologized and said that he would have my graduation approved.

The gym teacher tried to murder me with her eyes all the way out the door. Nearly twenty years later, I will never forget that look of pure hatred.

Twenty sixth-grade students from a specialized interest school — in this case, aquaculture — are touring the library in general and the children’s area in particular.  

Most of the kids are well-behaved, but there are four boys who just don’t want to follow the rules. My colleagues and I are not supposed to chastise kids if they are with their (theoretically) responsible adults. We try to guide them back into the activities but they are determined to jump on tables, run up walls, and climb up on the backs of chairs to get at our windows.

I have had it. After I catch one of them trying to pull apart a large stuffed animal that is our mascot, I round the four of them up and march them into the little kids’ room.

“You will sit there, mouths closed, until your bus comes. And if I see you move again, I will get your names from your teachers and you will be banned.”

This is a pretty empty threat as I am a lowly junior librarian, but even my boss doesn’t say anything because she is sick of them, too. They aren’t perfect, but at least they aren’t destroying public property anymore and they aren’t putting any more sneaker treads on the walls.  

It is their teacher who ultimately gets my goat, though.

She comes over with a big smile.

“Thank you for talking to them,” she says. “I was getting annoyed with them, too, but it wasn’t my place to say anything.”

I stare at her in disbelief, and then my boss says, “Why not?“

“Oh,” says the teacher, “it’s your library, not mine. It’s not my place to discipline them in your space.”

“It might be our space,” says my boss, “but they are your students and your responsibility.”

The teacher just waltzes off with another group of barely-behaved children.

It was a long time before my boss ever allowed that school back for tours and programs.

During my junior year of high school, my school decided to invite a scientist of some sort that studied the effects of climate change to come to talk to all of us. Sounds cool, right? That’s what we all thought, especially since they took up an entire class period’s worth of time for it, but we were all so wrong. This presentation went wrong on so many levels.

For starters, I’m not sure where the presenter was from, but he had a very thick accent and monotone voice and that, combined with the echoey-ness of the gym my whole school was crammed into, meant that we could barely make out a third of what he was saying.

Second, of the words we could understand, a lot of it was jargon that was quite a bit above most of our high-school brains and he had complete paragraphs on his slides you could barely read from a distance that also used a lot of the same jargon.

The most interesting part of the presentation was when the guy’s slides stopped working and IT had to come out to troubleshoot.

The next day, the administration apologized to us and praised us for being so good throughout the assembly. I’m still honestly not sure if they realized half of us fell asleep during it, which is why we were so “good.”