#i teach esl so english isnt her first language

[princess-kittyxoxo]

I have this new regular student, we've only met 3 or 4 times, but in our very first lesson she told me how much she hates people who are overconfident and vain and only talk/care about themselves...and i have come to the swift conclusion that this woman is ✨projecting✨ like a mf. The amount of times this woman uses the word "perfect" to describe herself or her skills is actually incredible.

And also the irony of saying that if she has kids in the future that she only wants one - a girl, not a boy, very important - and that she wants her child to be exactly like her, because that would be "perfect". Like...yikes 😬 Go off, I guess...hope you don't have a boy in the future because I already feel bad for any kids you might have, regardless.

[psychokangaroo]

Oh god oh god. I had the same thing happen to me. Freshmen year of high school, I was placed into all AP track classes (no AP classes for freshmen). My English teacher had been in maternity leave, so we had a great substitute for the first quarter. I breezed through with A's. Then, the actual English teacher came back from maternity leave, and my grades plummeted from As to Cs and B-'s. I went to her office hours for help a few times, but all she told me was that my "writing style wasn't great" and that I "had some grammar issues". She then told me that I should switch to an English as a Second Language class.

Me, who has been in honors reading/writing classes since I left ESL 5 years before. Me, who literally read through 80% of David Eddings when I was 11 and half of Lord of the Rings when I was 12 (I quit because I thought his prose was stupidly wordy and unnecessarily long) and a large number of Austen when I was 13 (and a small smattering of Prachett). Me, who read through the Newberry Medal list for fun and was known as one of the 3 "book girls" in math class who were known to read thick tomes and then have fights with said books (in our defense we were literally 12). Me, who was literally scoring Bs in an AP-weighted English class even with her pulling my grades down. I needed to switch to an English as a Second Language class?

I wish there was a happy ending to this, but there isnt. I didn't know how to report her, and she's still teaching at my high school. She basically forced my parents to have a meeting with the department chair at the end of the school year because she put in for my transfer to ESL. And despite the fact that my English teacher was a batshit racist, the department chair switched me to regular English for a few days before my parents managed to get the English department back into the AP track. For the record, after the fiasco with that teacher, I had maybe once where I finished the semester with a grade lower than A-. The worst complaint from an English teacher was that I "had no sense of humor".

I was really really insecure about my English/writing skills for a long time and developed an instinctual distrust for young blonde female authority figures (which to be fair was also partially due to another incident in high school). I'd like to think that I'm mostly okay now though. Fuck you Mrs. H.

She hated me and made me think I was an idiot.

LTRFTP

I don’t know if this is pro, but it is certainly more than petty.

In high school (10+ years ago), I was quiet and attentive in class. Teachers liked me. I wasn’t popular, but I had good friends. I say all this to explain that high school was relatively calm for me. I played sports, was on the student newspaper, and got decent grades. However, that all changed my second semester junior year.

I’ve always been a voracious reader. My freshman English teacher recommended I move up to the honors English track, so I did for freshman, sophomore, and the first half of junior year. Then I was put into Classical Literature my second semester junior year. I’ve always loved Greek and Roman stories, and had already read your typical high school classical reading list on my own. I didn’t mind reading them again until I met Ms. Umbridge. She put on a sweet facade, but she was downright evil. She also decided she hated me. I still do not know why, or what transgression I committed, but she HATED me. I assume it was my habit of sometimes nodding off in classes. At the time, I had undiagnosed thyroid issues, and was getting up at 5 a.m. for swim practice. I say sometimes, because it happened maybe twice a month total between all eight classes. I don’t remember nodding off in her class, but it could have happened.

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