Gosh I forgot how much my standards have been raised since high school.
Context here is that my brother has an appallingly incompetent English teacher. Today they had an hour-and-a-half long class and about ten minutes in the teacher announced he was ‘going to look for’ some students he’d given permission to go to the library. He was gone for forty-five minutes. Three other teachers came in while he was gone, checking on his class, because this is a recurring problem, and when he came back he asked my brother “anything happen while I was gone?” and my brother said “three teachers came in looking for you” in a tone the teacher took as sarcastic and he spent the rest of the class lecturing my brother on how he needs to show more respect for adults.
My brother mentioned this casually over dinner and my parents said “yeah, sounds like he’s terrible, but he has all the power so you need to behave however he wants, right?” and my brother said “yeah, yeah” and the whole thing was - not remotely a big deal?
And I had a bunch of teachers like that in high school - one who made me teach the math class, one who gave over a whole class period to discussing how he hated students from my middle school, one whose cats peed on every essay he was ever supposed to grade - and I remember the conversations being exactly the same. “Ms. So-and-so hiked up her skirt to show us all that she doesn’t shave her legs today. Then she did a headstand and talked about how when she was our age she smoked pot.” “Well, be respectful.”
“Mr. So-and-so put on a movie and then flipped through the whole stack of essays writing “B” at the top of all of them, and then handed them back at the end of class.” “Mr. So-and-so got confused about derivatives and asked Will to teach the whole class.” “I don’t even know what our bio teacher looks like.” “Well, be respectful.”
And it’s not like it scarred me or anything, or even gave me particular issues with authority, but it’s just - I thought of myself as having a really good high school experience, and I know if asked my brother would say he’s having a really good high school experience, and the bar for that is just astoundingly low.
Stories like this help me understand the Prussian-education-hateblog element of this community better. It’s true that I had the odd terrible teacher, like the ex-programmer who thought of us as stuff like ‘A3’ or 'B7’ and then used a piece of paper as a lookup table to find out our actual names. But most were competent, many were excellent and a few were really really exceptional. Four people from my year group now have physics phds, which has a lot to do with a single teacher, and there were also great teachers in English and art and music and biology, and probably some other stuff I didn’t particularly care about. (That biodeterminist-pessimist thing you sometimes get round here about how teachers don’t really make much difference? Yeah I don’t understand that either.)
This was the local comprehensive in a small town, it was in no way fancy or selective, so I definitely still underestimate how good I had it.
I do agree that school is still a miserable place for the socially incompetent, I know all about that, but *academically* I have no complaints.