When I was in 3rd grade, my school teacher just seemed to have it out for me. I don’t really know why, but she seemed to pick her favorites at the beginning of the year, and if you weren’t one of those, you were screwed.
She would do stuff like give 100-question multiplication tests and take off 5 points for every answer you got wrong. So when I missed 5 questions out of 100, I ended up with a C (75%) on the test.
We had to write a theme for one of our assignments in English. My teacher graded it poorly and then wrote a note on a separate piece of paper, stapled it to my work, and said to make sure my parents signed it and returned it the next day.
I am pretty upset because there are big red ink marks all over my work and a D in the corner. She has marked off for grammatical errors that were way beyond a 3rd grade scope, such as run-on sentences and parallel structure.
My mom teaches grade school, 4th grade at the time. She read the note and then read my work and got pretty livid. Apparently, the note accused me of both lying about what I wrote about and also receiving outside help.
My dad comes by to pick me up for the evening (my parents are divorced, but very civil), and my mom shows him the note and my paper. Both of them know I would never lie (well, at least at this stage in my life). My dad just gets this very peculiar grin, which always means he is about to do something awesome.
He tells my mom that he will take care of it. While at my dad’s house, we do our usual stuff: go outside and play, eat dinner, and he makes sure my brother and I do our homework. Unbeknownst to me, while we are working, he pulls out my teacher’s note, gets a red pen, and then grades the grammar and syntax in her note; he even puts a big C- in the corner.
He then writes a short note on where he expresses that he wants her to sign it and return it to me so I can return it to him. He then signs her note and writes his phone number, staples his note to my teacher’s note, and puts everything in an envelope.
The next day, I hand the envelope to my teacher. My teacher calls my mom, not my dad, briefly describes what my dad did, and tells my mom that my dad is a bad influence on me. She was probably expecting to get my mom on her side since my parents are separated, but my mom knows absolutely that my father is 100% devoted to us and would do anything for us.
I hear her on the phone say something like “WHAT?! Where are you? No! Where are you RIGHT NOW! You stay right THERE! I am coming in, and we’re gonna meet RIGHT NOW!!” and slams the phone down.
My mom asked me to fetch any recent homework or tests that I had, so I dug through my backpack and pulled out a few assignments, the 75% multiplication test, and handed them to her. She told my brother to watch me and swarmed out the door, jumped in her car, and tore off to my school.
She laid into my teacher for about an hour, questioning her grading policy, her ability to teach, and her judgment as a human. She told her that she would review every graded assignment, every quiz, and every test I brought home and would ask every day if we had taken any new tests so she would know if they were mysteriously being graded and not coming home.
She made it clear that if any more capricious grading scales were applied, my mom would make it her mission to end her career as a teacher. Lastly, she said that if she ever tried to drive a wedge in my family again or said anything disparaging about my father, she would bring her up on ethical misconduct to the school board.
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