Weekend Assignment #Ninety BaZillion

SCALZI'S Weekend Assignment #59:
Teachers Worth Remembering [for good or bad]

Weekend Assignment #59: We've all had teachers who have made a difference in our lives. Tell us about one of yours. It can be a teacher from any level of education, from kindergarten to graduate school.

While I'm sure everybody else will be writing about a wonderful teacher whose good counsel and kind words they will treasure forever, my most memorable teacher was also the worst teacher I ever had.

Her name was Miss Elizabeth Meadows. She taught at Skokie Junior High School in Winnetka, Illinois. Winnetka boasted a school system that had a national reputation for innovation. One of their innovations was to get rid of grades until high school. In Miss Meadows' class this would come back to haunt me.

My family had just moved from the city and I had skipped half a grade at my old school, which was considered one of the better public schools in the metro area.  So I was half way through sixth grade as the new school year was about to start. My younger brother had skipped half a grade, too. i just assumed they would skip me the other half a grade and I would start seventh grade in the fall.

In a decision that would affect me for the rest of my life, they skipped my brother a full grade, but not me. I was told I was too old to be skipped. I was ten.  How could I be too old? Apparently they had a policy that if a student was past a certain age, he or she wouldn't be skipped ahead, but held back. Regardless of their skills.

I remember trying to talk to the principal about why I wasn't being skipped to seventh grade. i was distraught, He just ignored me and walked away. My mother wasn't going to buck the system. Heck, we had moved to Winnetka in order to embrace it in all its glory.

So I began the fall at the beginning of sixth grade. It soon became very apparent that I was a fish out of water. I could already write cursively but everyone else in my class was still printing like second graders. I had already been taught multiplication and long division. The class was still just adding and subtracting double digits. I was finishing speed tests almost as fast as they were handed out.  

I won all the spelling bees. But no one was happy for me. No one congratulated me. It wasn't like I was smart. It was just very clear that I did not belong in that class. And the teacher, who could see I didn't belong, didn't seem to care. Miss Meadows knew she had a loose cannon on her hands and she resented me.

I loved to write. I had already started writing and producing plays at my former school.  So, I wrote my first comedy, called The Japanese Tea Party, about Americans who visit Japan and don't like the taste of the tea. Hey, comedy is hard.

I remember turning it in and thinking about how much fun it would be to produce it. But Miss Meadows saw a chance to put me in my place. She called me up to her desk and proceeded to ridicule my lack of knowledge about the Japanese tea ceremony in front of the whole class.

She totally disparaged my efforts, almost gleefully. She knew I was bored and should be in seventh grade. But, instead of finding a way to interest me and keep me from languishing, she was happy to find a way to put me down and let me know I wasn't so smart after all.

I was devastated. I had always received praise for my schoolwork. I'd had always earned good grades. Now there was nothing for me. Not even grades. Instead there were meetings with your parents and evaluations from theteacher about your progress.

I was head and shoulders ahead of everyone in the class and my parents were told I wasn't working up to my capacity. No shit.

If we'd had grades there would have been tangible proof that I was doing the work at a high level. Then, if there were complaints about me not working to capacity, the burden would have been on the teachers, not me.

It didn't help that I was being put down at every opportunity by Miss Meadows. I stopped writing. I stopped caring, and I started getting into trouble. Nothing big. Just stuff that bored kids do.

With nothing to challenge me academically, the school decided to occupy my time with electives.  But art and childcare were the only two offered to me for some reason.  Home Ec, Shop, and Printing, all the really fun ones, were off limits.  So I took an art elective. I was good at drawing. I loved to draw from the time I was in fourth grade, spending hours making portraits of horses, which were my passion.

Unfortunately, I was the only sixth grader in a class full of eighth graders. And a a brand new kid at the school besides. A fish out of water again. The teacher finally said he didn't think I fit in. Ya think? So I had to settle for childcare.  I hated childcare. Watching little kids climb on the jungle gym was like punishment. No thanks. I don't know whether I quit or stuck it out. I do remember how slowly the minutes passed when I was standing around as a glorified babysitter in the nursery school they had on premises.

Miss Meadows, an unmarried, ancient old battleaxe, continued putting me down every chance she got. Somehow I was chosen to write a play that all the sixth grade classes participated in, but Miss Meadows made a point of telling me that I would only be allowed to write a certain part of it, even though the whole concept was mine.

By the end of that year I had become a lazy student, disengaged and bored with school. I did as little as possible to get by, because I could. Seventh grade wasn't much better. Even though I was in the accelerated class, I was still ahead of everybody and very bored. It wasn't until eighth grade that I finally felt challenged. By that time my study habits sucked, since I had never had to study before. Quite frankly, I don't think they ever recovered.

Naturally when my nemesis died, they named a new addition to the junior high after her. The Elizabeth Meadows Wing. I didn't go to the dedication.

Extra Credit: Tell us your second favorite subject in school.   My second favorite subject in high school was geometry. I was fascinated by it, thanks to Mr. Donald Leverenz, a dynamic and interesting teacher who had me looking forward to every class. His students never scored lower than a C on the comprehensives we had to take at the end of the year. Other teachers had students who didn't score above a C. He was such a goood teacher that he ended up running the whole math department eventually.  

[My favorite class was English no matter who taught it.  I loved to read and write and despite Miss Meadows' tireless efforts, no one could stop me from enjoying that.]