Mrs. Walters, you suck

Posted July 1st, 2003 by Sean Williams

Mrs. Walters, my fourth grade teacher, did not meet my educational needs. I would like to use this space today to call Mrs. Walters out, and to beg the rest of you shitty ass teachers to take a second and try to figure out what is wrong with that kid that you think is just a snotty little fuck.

Was I a snotty little fuck? Sure. I know this because part of me still is. Was I the son of the symphony conductor and as such did I consider myself better than everyone else? No. I didn’t. I simply never did. But should I have been held to a different academic standard? Absolutely yes. I had an unrecognized learning disability that is so clear to the doctors that I went to at age 26, they were shocked that it hadn’t been detected earlier. “What were your teachers thinking,” one doctor asked me. “They were thinking about how much they hated me,” I answered.

And I guess the latest Harry Potter book really set me off. Not only is Harry’s behavior a close description of what manic phases feel like, but Umbridge is a just and perfect description of what the horrible beaten down bitches who taught me in school were like.

My apologies, I am sure there are some of you beaten down, child hating mongrel-dogs out there that are teaching school and are merely half bad instead of all bad. But there is a myth at work in the American school system. That myth is that people are attracted to careers where they can make no money and have to deal with people who are one tenth as mature as they are, simply for the altruistic bliss of passing on the knowledge of our culture to our children. It’s bullshit.

There are several reasons why people become teachers. Number one is, of course, that they are incapable of doing anything else. There is a saying in the world of the arts that those who can, do, those who can’t, teach. However, I think this alone accounts for a small number of people who end up cornered and backed into teaching.

The prime reason to become a teacher is so you can feel good about your own fucked up life by being around people who don’t know things that you take for granted. Those little forwards they pass around the internet full of hilarious mispronunciations and malopropisms from school age children? What are you laughing at, you asshole? Seriously, what is so fucking funny? Spelling is arbitrary, it’s changed a thousand times in the last two hundred years. Was a third grader supposed to know the difference?

It’s all so amusing isn’t it, and you feel a real sense of control, being around people who, through nothing other than their limited time on the planet, know less than you, don’t you? Chances are, they are actually smarter than you. I certainly was. I had one idiot after another, every single year, every single class, starting in montessory and ending when I finally dropped out of my fourth college. Not a single teacher knew how to teach me anything, and I am not alone. As a nation we are becoming stupider, and it’s because self help dropouts, unemployed narcisists who would otherwise be in prison, and sadists are teaching our children.

And that is the number one reason why people teach. They love the feel of a menacing threat delivered into the face of a nine year old. They love bending over from the waist and peering down at a smaller human and mentioning ‘detention’ or ‘demerits’ or, as has been the case for years, ‘the paddle’. They want to spread pain, in order to dull the voices screaming out their own mediocrity, they want to hear the cries coming from the children on their laps because they have lost the ability to cry for themselves, they want to inflict discipline on these innocents because they don’t have the discipline themselves to stop watching porn or eating cheese doodles or whatever it is they are doing that makes them hate themselves.

Someone will undoubtably tell me about some noble professor who taught them right from wrong, some fucking oh-captain-my-captain sob story, but I’m willing to bet that teacher taught at a well-funded private school, where dealing with kids is offset by the idea that the curiculum will make the world better, and the pay is worth it.

Never happened in my school. Not to me, and not to anyone I went to school with. Just Mrs. Walters slowly bending my finger back when I pointed at her and told her to leave me alone. Just Mrs. Walters breaking precedent and dropping the pop quiz I got a perfect score on, because I was the only one who was caught up in the reading. Just Mrs. Walters yelling times table numbers at me in front of the class, so sure that I would get one wrong, so furious when I didn’t.

All y’all should be ashamed of yourselves.