Good and Bad Teachers

As a student I had some teachers who were good, some who were bad, and many who were medium. I’ll blog about some of them in my next few posts, but won’t mention the names of the bad ones. They’re probably all dead, but I wouldn’t want to get sued by their families.

The worst teacher I ever had was in the First Grade. She was so bad we all called her Miss Devil behind her back. 

This was in the 1940s and nobody realized how many children had been born during WWII.  There were 40 kids in our class. Kindergartens were optional back then, only taught the sort of things preschools do today, and weren’t required, so many of the kids hadn’t ever been to school before starting First Grade.

If a kid didn’t obey “Miss Devil” she would grab them by the shoulders and shake them. I was one of several kids who threw up every morning before going to school because I was terrified of going, and kids often vomited during class. When that happened she’d have us sneak outside quietly so the other teachers wouldn’t hear us while the janitor cleaned up the mess.

Math was horrible. Every day we had to write numerals, spell out the words for the numbers, and draw that many apples. The first week we did the numbers from one to ten, then added another ten until we reached 100 after ten weeks. From then on we had to repeat doing that for the numbers from one to 100 every single morning for the rest of the school year.  Boring! To this day I hate anything that involves writing numbers on lines.

About half the class weren’t learning to read so she’d have them chant the letter sounds over and over while the rest of us did other work at our desks. Twenty of the kids had to repeat first grade because they hadn’t learned to read.

Obviously that teacher wasn’t called to teach young kids, and I heard she later got a job teaching in a junior high school. I hope she did better there.