I had a gym teacher who was not really interested in being a gym teacher. He was the varsity football coach and that was where his main focus was. Gym/Health class was basically the bare minimum health information required by curriculum, and then the rest of the time was spent in the weight room. Not even doing like, fun games or anything like that, literally just ‘weight room’ so that his athletes could just use the hour for their workout time.

One day, after ‘weight room’ another student who was held back a bit (he had reached maybe 20 y.o. at this point, and hadn’t graduated) made a joke about wanting to shower with people. Nobody thought it was funny, we all ignored him. He takes offense to this, and decides to vent that frustration on me. He grabs me by the side of the head, and slams my head into the locker next to me. He does this within full view of the teacher, maybe ten feet away if that. I walk over to the teacher, holding my rapidly bruising face, and repeat to him what happened, literally what he just witnessed.

He looked me in the eyes and said “Yeah, and?” and refused to do anything about it.

I went to the Principal, who didn’t do anything. I went to the Vice Principal, who didn’t do anything, and then I went to the Dean of Students, who got that kid pulled from class for three days total. The next week I had a sit down with the Principal who apologized for what happened, but was oh so thankful that I was such an understanding kid, and could empathize with my assailant’s mental handicaps, and this didn’t need to go any further than it did, right?

Shoulda sued.

I was in class in high school, and I found a pen under the desk. Not an ordinary cheap plastic throwaway pen, it was one of those expensive metal pens that telescoped together to pop in and out, with gold trim and enamel cloisonne all along the barrel, the sort that you would give someone for an expensive birthday present. Eager to do the right thing, I put my hand up and told Mr Schulz, asked if I should take it to the lost-and-found at the front office. “No,” said Mr Schulz, “give it to me and I’ll keep it in my desk here”. It occurred to me that he uncharitably thought that I was going to get “lost” on the way there or back, instead of sitting in his lesson; I thought that he would hand it in to the front office on my behalf.

The policy at school was that if no-one collected an item from the lost-and-found, you could go and claim it. So a few weeks later, when I asked at the front office, I was surprised that the pen hadn’t been handed in. I asked Mr Schulz about it, and he took the pen out of his drawer, and used his Swiss Army Knife to etch my name into it, saying that I might as well keep it, because no-one had claimed it.

Of course, within a few days one of the other boys saw me using it, and decided that I had stolen it from him. Before I could find Mr Schulz to get him to verify my version of events, he and several of his friends caught me in the corridor between lessons and beat me black and blue. Two black eyes, and so many bruises that I couldn’t walk properly or stand up straight for weeks. My parents said “You must have done something to deserve it”, took no action against the school, and made me go back to school the next day anyway.

I was summoned to the deputy headmaster’s office. He told me that since I had stolen this pen from the other boy and put my name on it to make sure everyone thought it was mine, I was a disgrace to the school and would be put on detention (picking up litter before and after school, and at lunchtime, no canteen privileges, no excursions) for the rest of the year. I protested my innocence, so Mr Schulz was summoned, he promptly denied all knowledge and involvement, and straight up called me a liar.

Word had got around to all the teachers; by hearsay they also all decided that I was a thief and a liar, and gave me extra work to punish me, on top of my regular homework. I was now doing homework from the moment I got home until way past midnight, and in the mornings at 6am when my parents woke me up until 8:30 when I had to ride my bike to school.

I pretty much gave up on schoolwork, because if the teachers were going to lie, there was no way to know if what they were teaching was the truth, and if I asked questions about the problems I was having, especially in maths and physics, I was told to stop disrupting the class, because they had decided without evidence that I was a “juvenile delinquent” and not worth helping.

I had several serious bicycle accidents riding to and from school during this time, and I’m absolutely certain that it was because I fell asleep from pure exhaustion. I still have scars from those accidents, and I’ll always remember how I got them.

I left school at the earliest opportunity, left my parents and lived on the streets for a few years, and thanks to a charity helping street kids, got an apprenticeship and a place to live. A few years after that, I sort-of-almost reconciled with my parents, who still believed the teacher’s version of events, because “all teachers are good, honest, respectable people”.

Throughout my own children’s education, I always had anxiety attacks when I had to take them to school, or go to school for parent-teacher meetings etc, even though they attended a different school and we now live several states away.

That was over forty years ago, and I still feel like Mr Schulz both derailed my education, and ruined my plans for further education.

My algebra teacher had anger issues. One day, my friend and I threw a bunch of sharpened pencils into the drop ceiling tiles. When he noticed it, he threw his planner at me. It was hard plastic and he narrowly missed hitting me in the face. The school did nothing about it.

One day when he was the lunch monitor, someone hit him in the face with a slice of pizza. He slammed his hand on one of the tables so hard while screaming at us, that he broke his wrist. So that was pretty funny

This wasn’t maliciousness to my mind so much as it was pure selfishness, but our school guidance counsellor fucked up in a vulnerable moment (particularly for me, but pretty much everyone who had to witness it as well), then doubled down on it and somehow made it worse.

One morning I came to school and my class was really somber. I found out that a girl’s mother had died yesterday- that girl was part of my friend’s group and I’d just met her mother a few weeks earlier at friend’s birthday party; she was lovely. A drunk driver had hit her on a roundabout at 12 midday, of all times, and she’d passed before they’d even gotten her to the hospital.

This was traumatic for my friend on every level, I’m sure, but it was my first experience with second hand grief, so you can imagine it was a bad time to go ahead with the scheduled guest that morning who was there to do a very graphic presentation about drunk driving involving sound effects and acting out a car collision.

I feel sorry for the guy, in hindsight, because he probably hadn’t heard a chorus of horrified screams and spontaneous sobbing in response to one of his shows quite like that, before, but that was on the school admin, anyway. What the fuck were they even thinking? “Yes, yes, we’re all sad about Jessie’s mum … So anyway, this is how she died, in real time!”

So, moments before this bloody show started up, another close friend of mine turned up late and was confused at our dismayed faces. No one had taken her aside to tell her (the bastards. Why would you not take the girl’s close friend group aside to tell them first? Jessie’s mum was like a second mum to some of us), so I found it was on me to convey it. That really sucked. A lot. I was clumsy, friend was distraught, you get the picture.

This bitch counsellor, though… When the completely inappropriate presentation got to the graphic bit, my friend took off crying down the hall 'cause fuck all that, and I made to as well. The counsellor stopped me (like she thought I was trying to go after her), and fucking made me sit down and watch the rest of that show, clinging to my other friends trying to sob as quietly as possible and not imagine poor Jessie’s mum at the moment her death. We were like, what, 15, 16 years old?

I don’t know how the hell my feelings about this bullshit got back to the counsellor, but I think my mum must’ve called the school after I came home in floods, because again, this fucking bitch called me aside right as the bell rang to go home to (figuratively speaking) pin me down and explain to me why she was totally right to do what she did and she hoped I understood that she did the right thing, blah blah blah.

I just nodded along desperately, getting more and more anxious because my one bus out of there had a very narrow window to get on, and eventually had to interrupt her to beg her to let me go home. I got to enjoy the sight of it driving off without me and had to call my mum to pick me up over an hour later (side of the road on a hot Aussie afternoon- no there was no bus shelter, no the school wasn’t open to let me hang around 'til my Mum got in).

Goddamn, I still think about that sometimes. It’s not even close to the worst I’ve heard of teachers, but it’s just so petty and unkind it somehow pisses me off more than overt cruelty. Like fuck off, you can’t gaslight me into believing you had my best interests at heart with bullying tactics.

Oh yeah that’s right, that same counsellor told me I had depression, too, when a) at that point in highschool I absolutely did not and it came out of left field completely, and b) when I did start to suffer from anxiety and depression she was as useful as a cat flap in an elephant house. Shocker.

Fuck you Mrs Whatever-your-face-was. I only remember you by the dumb nickname everyone gave you and that’s fair enough because you’re also dumb.