Tag: byvampireapologist

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vampireapologist:

vampireapologist:

man once in HS I got punished with a Saturday school sentence and honestly to me it sounded so ideal because it was four hours of mandatory silent reading or homework and I was reading Jane Eyre for AP and really enjoying it so I thought shit nice I’ll have time to sit down and finish it.

Wrong wrong wrong because the woman running Saturday school (whom I’d NEVER seen ever. I think she was a coach) could for some reason not BELIEVE any student in detention was a halfway decent kid who would just show up and do homework, and she decided I was Up To No Good.

I always read leaning on desks with one hand on my forehead, and it worked out that she couldn’t see my eyes while I was reading, and she told me to “sit up and quit sleeping.”

I told her I wasn’t sleeping, and she snapped at me that she wasn’t stupid.

Utterly convinced that she was mistaken on THAT especially, I stopped leaning and kept reading.

Five minutes went by. “Molly, stop sleeping.”

Again, I said I wasn’t, and I shot a helpless look at the boy sitting across from me, a frequent member of the Saturday School Club.

I wasn’t sure how she thought I was sleeping when she was sitting only about three feet from me and could see me plainly. Still, I sat up straight and took the book firmly in my hands, trying to look more attentive. Ten minutes went by, and she was on it again.

“Molly, I can SEE that you’re just pretending to read, quit sleeping. This is Saturday School.”

At this point, I felt like I was losing it, that she was messing with me on purpose, but I didn’t know what to do. The boy came to my defense, saying “I can see her eyes while she’s reading; they’re open. She’s not sleeping.” He and I never really spoke, so I was surprised he spoke up for me. But she didn’t care.

“If I catch you sleeping one more time, I’m taking the book.”

Now that was horrifying to me. As a kid with bad bad (at the time undiagnosed) ADHD, sitting for another two hours in utter silence with nothing to do seemed as bad as literally dying.

So I sat up like I’d been shocked, turned my chair so it was facing her, and started quietly reading the words to myself so my mouth was moving as I went.

This, I was sure, was the answer.

She didn’t take my book, but when I got to school on Monday, my principal called me into the office at lunch and greeted me with “so…..I hear you’re Sleeping Beauty.”

I absolutely lost it, near tears, and offered to give him an oral book report and analysis of Jane Eyre then and there. He laughed and said he believed me and sent me back to lunch.

Nothing more came of it, but I still think about this from time to time and wonder what the fuck was wrong with that coach?? It’s almost as if she were just having fun upsetting me.

to be clear, nobody deserved her to treat them like this. we were all just kids in detention. I don’t think I was less deserving bc I was reading

I had a couple of teachers like that, sadly. We didn’t have Saturday school but we did have detention and the few times I was sent there (normally for being in the midst of a group of friends dumb enough to get caught doing whatever they were doing, and me dumb enough to be hanging out with them.) we either had teachers who knew me and would just look at me, shake their head and tell me I needed better friends, or we had random teachers who you never saw outside of detention, the kind that read Matilda as kids and thought Miss Trunchbull was Goals™.

There was one who was prone to walking around the class room in slow steady steps, before swooping down and snatching the books out of people’s hands to try and catch them on their phones or reading something else. Sometimes she would, and then crow like she’d caught the

Lindbergh baby kidnappers, just this vindictive glow of triumph that left you without any doubt that this was once a playground bully who had decided to become a teacher. Or perhaps the quiet kid themselves, who decided to become a teacher to “protect” people like them, and had turned into the bully they’d hated.

She was the kind of person that made me think of Dolores Umbridge, with hindsight. The kind that would make you write over and over again “I will not tell lies”, for something they had said and done. Or, “I will not sleep in class”, when you had clearly been awake. “I will not speak, I will not laugh, I will not, I will not” all the while you’re going mad inside cause you are complying, you are playing the game by the rules. Except they don’t want you to play, they want you to snap and lash out to prove you are as bad as they say they are and their petty vindictiveness will be justified. 

There are some people who should never be teachers, just like there are some people who should never be parents. And they often go hand in hand.

I’m just going to add about my own Latin teacher I got for two years (I was 13-14 for reference), and who, for whatever reason got into her own twisted head, decided to keep me illegally I might add after school for two hours.
Yep you read it right.
Two fucking hours.
Short of it: my mom panicked, and when I got back to her after those two hours, I was pulled out of school for the rest of the year.

Long story below the read more bc it’s heavy stuff

At the time, I was already dx as a dyspraxic which… was nice? Honestly I liked knowing why I was not able to keep up with writing as the same pace as other people and all that.
What was less nice was that my whole school was against the fact that I was disabled. And when I say the whole school, that’s bc apart from one or two teachers, I was bullied by all the teaching staff and the director told my mom and I quote “Disabled kids have nothing to do in my school”.

Yes I know.

Anyway, I’m 13, it’s been two years since my dx and the subsequent reaction of the teaching staff – and I end up in Latin bc I’m a Nerd and I wanted to do Latin.
Not my most brilliant decision I tell you.

So this teacher is weird. Like Weird, smelling alcohol in the morning weird. Or screaming at students and ripping their papers weird. Or y’know, abusive.
The whole story starts with a control we had in this class. Up until now she likes me more or less (I’m interested in Latin, I answer her question and don’t move much), but this one time, she sees me preparing my sheet early – like before the test starts bc you have to do that weird formatting by hand to your sheet otherwise you get -2 points directly and it takes me so much time that I prefer to do it before the test so I don’t lose time.

And she loses it. Like big time.
She tells me that I’m cheating which… ok. So I offer to do it again so she can checks it’s not a mistake.
wrong move.

She ends up throwing my prepared sheet in the bin, forbidding me from taking the test and confiscating my card game.

At this point I’m fuming and I go back at home in the same state of “grmblblblb UNFAIR” that I was in class – and I talk about it to my mum who gets, understandably, very worked up about that.

So mum sends to this teacher a very strongly worded letter about how I was disabled and if I wasn’t able to use my computer, the least they could was not make me lose time on my tests (time that I desperately needed) by making me re-do the presentation every time.

So that teacher, reads the letter? And after the hour (it was the last of the day) is up, she tells me she wants to talk to me.
Kiddie!Me is ofc trusting that she’ll say sorry or try to work through what happened (what can I say, I still had the hope that people might be kind and have my best interest at heart), and tells my friend to go ahead and not to wait for me.

And before I can say anything, she starts laying on me, how lazy I am to dare say I’m disabled? And even if I am, working to strive to be just as normal as any other is good and that’s what I should do – and to stop complaining to everyone because that’s what lazy, and unemployed people would do and I don’t want to end up unemployed since it’s what I’m destined to do if I ever continue like that – and don’t think that college will take you with your weird ‘disabilities’ that don’t even exist- oh and your friend don’t like you they’re just using you, same for your parents.

For two hours.
Needless to say A) My mom was Extremely Worried bc I was supposed to meet her right after school and B) Ready to spit nails by the time I managed to sob out an explanation.

and that’s how my mom sent another letter to my teacher that basically told her that she ever even looked at me again, my mom would rip her intestines out. Politely worded of course.
Copies of this letter went all ‘round the school and that’s also how the disabled services got tipped off that there was something weird at my school and my director engaged in a screaming match with them.