The main thing I remember about my first grade teacher was how she looked and how much I hated her. She was a plain woman with a doughy body who dressed in what she believed to be very fashionable things. She was short and had short, unattractive brown hair that lacked any kind of describable style beyond just . . . short. She favored pastel colors. I think this was some kind of deception, a way to lull people into thinking she was soft and passive and easy. She was none of these things. She was a little bully.
My short, plain first grade teacher was married to a man who also taught in the school. Her husband, as I recall, was also short and plain and lacking in the hair department. However, because he was a man in a school primarily ran by women, he commanded a certain level of respect. Because my teacher was his wife, she felt she commanded this respect as well. Every school has a level of elitism to it. Richer students have status. Smart students have status. Teachers had status and teachers with ties to other teachers possessed even more status.
In every pond, no matter how small, one will find the big fish. When said pond IS very small, said big fish know it. They hate their small pond and hate that their importance is based only on the size of the pond. There is a kind of perfect storm in people who are aware of their on insignificance but in a position of power over others. They are, in some ways, the worst kind of people. My first grade teacher was a perfect example of this.
My first grade teacher, in her small town, small school, small pond kind of way, was an insecure elitist to the highest degree. She lorded over our class with an air of aristocratic irritation. She acted as if we should consider ourselves lucky that she taught us . . . which, as I recall, she barely did. Most of the time, we were given photocopied worksheets that she would require to have finished by the end of the day. The following day, each worksheet would be handed back to us, with whatever grade she felt we deserved.
Her aura of indifference was only broken when she became irate with one of us. When any child acted in an unruly manner, her look of smug boredom would be replaced by one of outrage. We would be pulled from our seat and paddled in front of the whole class. Most teachers would take you outside for a paddling, or at the very least remove you to a discrete corner of the room. Not this woman. She would paddle you in front of everyone.
I also remember her paddling the hardest of all the teachers I had. She would always leave bruises, because there was no real restraint in what she did. She never paddled after she had calmed down from her anger. She always paddled at the height of it. She never paddled a set number of swats. Instead, she would paddle to whenever her arm began to tire. This was usually seven or so swats, given rapidly and furiously. I remember almost feeling ill due to the pain of sitting down after she did this.
And oh yes, I was paddled. I was paddled many times during her class because I would break the rules on the days when her whims dictated that broken rules required physical punishment. There were no set rules of what level of discipline would be used. Some days, and depending on what students were causing problems, she might decide to do nothing. On other days, even the smallest infraction might gain her wrath.
For instance, one day during an indoor recess, I playing a board game with some of the other girls. The boys, including her son who was in our class, wanted to play the game instead. They wouldn't leave us alone and I yelled at them. I realize indoor voice is an important thing, and I know some level of punishment probably should have happened (though also to the boys, because they wouldn't leave us alone, but that is a whole other can of worms).
She walked over and told me to go to the front of the class. Even then, I didn't expect to be paddled. I thought she was just going to talk about Indoor Voice again. Instead, she walked back with her paddle, her eyes stormy and angry. She had me to bend over and swatted me six times. They were fast and very, very hard. Four fell on my ass, the rest on my upper portion of the back of my legs.
The thing about any act of violence is that even when you know it's coming, you're never exactly prepared for it. I was stunned during the punishment and afterwards. I'm never sure what people expect others to think when they act in a violent way to them. Maybe they expect some kind of respect or awe. All I ever felt was anger. All of my life, if one thing has held true, it is that the more anger and violence I see from you, the more I despise you.
She told me to go sit down and in tears, I told her I couldn't. I was in too much pain. She looked at me and for a second I thought maybe it occurred to her that what she had done was very wrong, that she was a horrible person, and that she shouldn't be teaching children. Maybe this did occur to her, but instead of her apologizing like she should have, she spun me around again and swatted me four more times. Then she got in my face and with teeth showing, she growled that she could do this all day and that if I didn't want to be spanked more, I should get to my seat.
The rest of the day was deeply painful for me. The seats were plastic and had absolutely no give to them. I couldn't concentrate on anything but being in pain. I kept wiggling in my chair because there was no comfortable place. And as bad as it was on my ass, the worst part was where my legs fell against the edge of the chair, because she'd managed to hit me there too.
You know, as an adult looking back on this, when I think about what was going on in my life at that time, I realize that the worst thing about this woman wasn't her crazy want to hurt little kids. The worst thing about her, especially in terms of her being a teacher, was that elitist indifference she possessed.
This was during a time when I was literally being tortured at home. My mother's husband was horribly violent to us. I know that when I went to school, there was no way she could have missed the bruises on my body. There is no way she couldn't have seen the suffering I was going through. She was a trained professional and she should have been able to see all the signs of the abusive homelife I had. As a teacher, she should have taken steps to get me out of there.
And it's not like the woman was stupid. Things like child abuse are pretty obvious. She just really didn't care.
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