It's nearing the end of the school year, kind of, right?
I'm still in school, I'm still living at home with my parents and stuff...
And I know my teachers pretty well, if I do say so myself.
So far, in my educational life, I have not hated a single teacher as much as I hate this year's Science teacher.
I don't know if this applies to all school districts, but... in my school, each grade is split into 3-4 'teams', consisting of 3-4 teachers each (there was something like 250 kids per grade). Each teacher covered one of the main four subjects: so there would be a Mathematics teacher, a Language Arts/English teacher, a Social Studies teacher, and a Science teacher (for the teams with 3 teachers, one teacher would cover two subjects).
So, from the previous grade, I knew 3 of the 4 teachers I had this year pretty well. One of them, the Language Arts teacher, I knew to be an excessive neatfreak who was also super laidback and relaxed with his due dates (so you could turn something in a week late and he probably wouldn't take off any points). I knew the Social Studies teacher to be a younger man (25 or something) who was obsessed with baseball and history (which he coached and taught, respectively) and told the funniest stories and somehow made history the most fun class out of the four. And I knew the math teacher was a cool-headed, experienced teacher (female) who taught so well that it was virtually impossible to fail her class.
Now, to me, all these people sounded pretty cool to have as a homeroom teacher.
And I knew who'd be in my class, already, since I was in the advanced class and the school thought it'd be a jolly good idea to have the advanced kids all in the same class for four years in a row (which made social events hard, since we only knew 25 other kids, essentially).
So I receive my schedule and stuff in the mail, right, and it has my homeroom teacher on it, and IT'S THE SCIENCE TEACHER: THE ONE TEACHER I DIDN'T KNOW ANYTING ABOUT.
At first, I was like, 'it's cool, it's cool, it's no big deal. She can't be that bad'.
And then, on the first day of school, I walk into the room, and the first thing I do to gauge what kind of teacher this woman is is look at the ceiling.
You see, my school has this project where people decorate ceiling tiles for their favorite teacher and the tiles are placed into that respective teachers classroom, so usually the more tiles a teacher has, the better teacher they are.
She had one tile.
Earlier, when I had been in the other classrooms, I had seen that the math teacher had seven tiles, the social studies teacher had 10-15, and the language arts teacher had 15-25.
She had one.
That made me really concerned.
So, we all sit down, right, and the first thing she says is, "Hey, y'all! How're y'all doin'? Ready to get on learnin'?!", in this super fake and overly excited/happy voice that was ten octaves too high.
I could swear the whole class exchanged a look of something that was a mix of horror and disgust.
She's middle-aged, a little round (but not fat: like plump), kind of short (but not shorter than 5'6"), and one of the blondest blondes I've ever seen.
Over time, after having her class essentially every day, we (the class) have all come to the general consensus that her ancestry hails from the Southern United States, she would be the perfect 1st grade teacher, and she really doesn't teach us anything.
We have to take a standardized test on the curriculum we were supposed to have learned this year, and we basically know nothing they want us to know because SHE HASN'T TAUGHT US ANYTHING NEW. Everything she's teaching us we've already known since grade 4, 5, 6.
So, in the beginning of the year (something like October/November, I think), I was really annoyed with how she was acting (sickly sweet and condescending, if you get what I mean), and I began writing.
I write (and eat) when I'm upset.
So I began drafting a bunch of theories as to why she acts the way she does (I am interested in psychology, as you may or may not know-- I don't know if I've mentioned that already or not...).
I filled out three pages with my thought process, making hypotheses and then connections and hypothese off of those hypotheses and connections, until I reached a relatively accurate conclusion.
My conclusion was that she was innately (and characteristically femininely) insecure. With herself, with her life, whatever. I concluded that she only pretended to be upbeat so that we'd like her more (which failed miserably-- we now only view her as fake and forced). And she's obsessed with self-glorification, always indirectly complimenting herself and making herself seem all perfect. She's also a horrible sore loser (hates to be proven wrong). These all stem from being insecure.
How did I come to this conclusion, you ask?
I don't quite remember.
But, I do remember that I used her current behavior to determine the fact that she was insecure, and from there I used what I knew about her to determine the causes of said insecurity.
I somehow reached the conclusion that she was unmarried.
As well as other conclusions.
And over the course of the year, as I learned more hard facts about her, all of the conclusions began turning out to be true.
She is unmarried.
She is desperate to make herself look as good as possible.
And she does hate my guts.
She hates my guts because I have her figured out, and because I have indirectly pointed out the flaws in her personality (I managed to do so through quizzes/tests and through basic conversation).
She hates me so much that she gives me special treatment-- it's pretty obvious, even to others besides me.
So far, we've been having this cold war. Everyone on the team knows it (including the other teachers, since she has been so courteous as to tell them about 'how disrespectful' I am and whatever).
But, it's like... of course I'm not disrespectful to her. That is, I don't want to be disrespectful to her. It's true-- I have zero respect for this woman. But I don't want to show that. I know it's wrong to disrespect her. If she didn't bite at me so often, we'd have a peaceful stalemate in which all feelings are disregarded and we don't talk to one another (unless absolutely necessary) and we don't clash.
That's fine with me-- but apparently not with her.
She's so insecure, that she won't back down until she wins this cold war.
She keeps snapping at me and I'm taking it like, 'Chill. Can we just... not fight? If we don't talk to each other, you see, we don't fight. Is that okay with you? If you hate me so much, don't talk to me. It'll benefit both of us'.
BUT. SHE. WON'T. LET. UP.
OH. MY. GOD.
Science class is torture because she's always beating on me, simply because she dislikes me.
Why can't she see that if she talks to me, I have to talk back, and because I have no respect for her, my response will be disrespectful? If she just... shuts up, I don't have to be disrespectful and she doesn't have to be mad that I'm being disrespectful.
And everyone's happy.
But she doesn't want to 'lose'. It hurts her dignity too much (not that she had much to begin with). She's so insecure that she can't let this go.
And it's not like I'm the only one who hates her.
On a daily basis, kids are congratulating me for standing up to her. EVERYONE hates her. Even the other teams hate her.
But I don't want to be congratulating her. I'm simply putting up with her because I have to. Because if I don't, I'll explode and end up physically hurting her.
If you can't comprehend how I could hate this teacher so much, think about it like this:
If she were murdered, I'd spit on her grave. And if I could, I'd be the one to murder her.
