I always know where I’m going…I just don’t always know where I am.

This was a Plinky prompt.  It’s not meant to be deep. I just have a terrible sense of direction.

Ooohhh…my. I’ve had some terrible teachers. Some really terrible teachers.

(I’ve also had some great teachers, but that’s not the question of the day, now is it?)

First, there was my Grade 5 teacher, Mrs. B. Mrs. B should have stayed in the nursery school where she came from because children who were starting to be able to reason and think were way too much for her. Certainly she would have been better with kids who didn’t have the capacity to talk back. Poor Mrs. B. She finally lost her mind in the middle of an English class, hurling her purse across the room at my friend D. He was sort of our resident class clown, loud mouth and, looking back on it as an adult, scapegoat for everything that went wrong. Fortunately for D, Mrs. B had terrible aim and missed him by a foot. UNfortunately for E, another student in my class, she was the one sitting about a foot away from him.

After throwing her purse and screaming, “DAMN YOU ROTTEN KIDS!!” she ran out of the classroom sobbing, leaving 25 ten year old children unsupervised in their portable. “What should we do?” None of us knew. We were all too shocked to wreck any more havoc. A lost opportunity, really.

Eventually our principal showed up, avec Mrs. B, and announced that she had something to say. We received a very quiet, very forced apology. Then she left. We never saw her again.

Years later, I found out she was fired from another elementary school for smoking in the closet. I don’t mean this an a euphemism. She was literally smoking in the classroom closet. This woman was a superstar.

And then there was Grade 6 and Mr. McM. Aside from giving us lessons that might have been required reading for admission to NASA, Mr. McM was clueless about most things of any importance to 11 year olds. He had no concept that our bodies were changing, we were discovering that members of the opposite gender didn’t have cooties, girls were getting their periods, hormones were raging and we were all, as least a little bit, self-conscious about the whole thing.  We were also all age appropriately crazy.

Every year in my small country school, we had a gymnastics unit. Because Mr. McM was clueless and thought the only reason we weren’t Olympic athletes at this point in our lives was because we were slackers, decided it was a good idea to ask me to demonstrate how to hoist myself high up on a bar and then swing back and forth, let go, flip 360 degrees in the air, and then land on my feet.

It was a really dumb thing to ask.

Why? Because next to my friend S, I was the single klutziest kid in the entire class. Oh, and I had zero gymnastics training. I could barely pull off a cartwheel.

“Mr. McM, I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can. T will spot you.”

Great. The klutziest kid in the class being spotted by the smallest kid in the class. Brilliant. I could see about 213 ways for this to end poorly.

In the end it was #124. I landed straight on my head (but without injuring T…I was thankful for that) and into a heap. I was also pretty sure I had a concussion, but that would have been too much paper work.

I’ve just done a search for Mr. McM online and have no idea where he is now. I’m not sure if that’s because he hasn’t done much with himself, or because I’m so old that almost all of my elementary school days predate the interwebs.

Then high school:

Mr. W told the boys in my class I had a “nice ass” and that they should “try and get a piece of it.” Classy.

Mr. X could never have a conversation with a girl while looking her straight in the eye. He didn’t understand how a girl in my brother’s class could be suffering from depression when she “you know…has a body like THIS!” And, in his capacity as a staff advisor, thought it was completely appropriate to allow lingerie to be modeled at the annual fashion show. Where is he now? Not teaching at my high school. Rumour (and I stress it is a rumour) has it he was fired for sleeping with one of his students. One of my younger brothers has informed me Mr. X is (or was as of last year) dating one of his friends in her early 20s after leaving his wife and children. Oh yeah, and he never had any of us do any sort of work in his class, but with everything else in this list, it doesn’t really seem to matter.

Mr. XX told me I was a “black spot on the school community” after writing an article discussing why you can’t fix something you don’t acknowledge is broken. The thing that was broken was our sense of safety. There had been guns in our school.  Drug trafficking had increased significantly during the time I had been in attendance. The issue was that the people in charge wouldn’t admit we had a problem. It would have caused too much bad publicity for our school. So I wrote an article for the city paper. It made Mr. XX really, really angry. Angry enough to call me a “black spot”. Angry enough to infer I might not get any awards or scholarships when I graduated.

All this being said, it was actually a little bit tricky to write this piece. I really did have so many amazing teachers while I was in school and their contributions to my development far outshine these few negative examples.

As S (yes, my klutzy friend from Grade 6) wrote on Facebook as I was asking for help with this post:

Thank goodness it’s the teachers that influenced you the most that you remember.

Yes, S. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

But that might just be because I was dropped on my head.