It's all right to cry, unless your teacher is uncomfortable with emotions
March 16, 2012My fourth grade teacher wins for Surliest Teacher Ever. His name was Mr. Klein, but I'm almost sure that's not how it was spelled. I can't recall the correct spelling, and this is killing me. It was Clyne or Klyne or Goebbels. Something like that.
Mr. Klein didn't like me, and I didn't like him. My parents couldn't stand him. Now, though, I can't help but feel a little bad for the guy. Because he had no idea what he was up against.
Well hello, Mr. Klein.
(Could I look any more put out by life? Fine, take my picture. Whatevs. Yeah, I know last year I used a brush on my hair, but that's so third grade. Oh, you like my vest? Pfft. I don't even know where I got this.)
Mr. Klein might have given me a hard time, but I'm pretty sure I tortured him. Because there was one thing he couldn't handle: tears. And tears were my mutant superpower. I could soak an entire dress in my tears in seconds. I was always on the verge of weeping. Every report card I have up until fourth grade refers to my crying and whether or not I had it "under control." In fourth grade, I suspect I didn't bother with this whole "control" issue.
Mr. Klein was always on my case for being disorganized and messy. Are any fourth graders capable of organizing their stuff? For whatever reason, the sight of my messy desk drawer filled him with rage. So much so that one day he actually upended my desk and forced me to get on my hands and knees in front of the entire class and clean it up. This was a major error on his part, however, because not only did his outburst set me off, it caused most of the class to follow suit. Faced with twenty kids crying at once, I'm surprised the guy didn't leap out a window.
Now you. Fourth grade. Spill it. I've been loving all your stories. You all get As in my book!
Return next week for fifth and sixth grade (the magical years), seventh (the most embarrassing school photo there ever was), eighth (no, wait, this one is), and ninth (do I have to show you this picture?).
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Reader Comments (57)
Alice I have been loving these! Fourth grade was rough for me. I started bugging my Mom if I could wear makeup. She said no. I wore earings that looked like telephones and had my hair cut short in the front, longer in the back. Yes. It was a mullet.
Fourth grade sucked. I was in a really small class--9 kids, maybe?--because we were in private school. My teacher, whose name I've blocked from my memory, always wore awful polyester pants and those horrible old-lady shoes. She was not nice.
That was the first class where I ever failed a test. I got a D on a geography test. A D! Oh, the shame. She pulled me out of class to tell me (in retrospect, she was probably as shocked as I was, because I was such a good student) and then I had to go tell me parents. Oh, the shame.
So on the next test, I cheated and looked over someone's shoulder. The horror! But who else remembers that the capital of South Dakota is Pierre? No one!
I think my opinion of fourth grade might be colored by the fact that my parents decided to keep me in the private school for that year rather than get me braces. And now, at 32, I really wish I had straight teeth.
My fourth grade superpower was vomiting. It only happened twice (once on stage on opening night of Aladdin) but I remember puking ALL the time and then going to sit in a hallway near the nurse's office. WHERE ONE COULDN'T POSSIBLY VOMIT. Because we were closer to a school nurse?
I was also younger (and shorter) than everyone else in fourth grade, so I looked like a first grader. And it wasn't cute anymore at this stage. My friends were looking and behaving a little older, and I think I still had a blankey. I still have a blankey, though. Who doesn't? I was also moving away from school sports and had discovered the Spring School Musical, so I got to experience that (vomiting center stage! My superpower). This was also the year that my father realized that drama would forever be interfering with his dream of me being a below average athlete.
Fourth grade was the year I was mercilessly bullied by about 30 of my peers. They would shout "Erin is a dog! and Erin is a pig!" in unison during lunch. They asked me to sign their elementary school yearbooks and then said "Thanks, I always wanted a dog's signature." My former (third grade) best friend led the charge. So yeah, fourth grade was about tears for me, too.
I had a teacher named Mrs. Knox who would constantly ride herd on me. I never caused trouble throughout my entire school career - I was quiet, unassuming, didn't bother anyone and kept to myself. I got decent grades. I wasn't a bully. but for some reason she treated me like I was the antichrist. I could not do anything right, no matter how hard I tried or how nervous I got in front of her - and I was very nervous kid.
She hated me so much that my parents had to have a parent-teacher conference to discuss why she was mistreating me so much in front of everyone. To this day my parents don't know why she acted like that, although Mrs. Knox said it was because I wasn't living up to my potential.
That's hardly an excuse to constantly castigate one of your students in front of the entire fourth grade (my elementary school had one of those experimental open classroom arrangements where every class in a certain grade could hear what was going on and on the other classes in that grade). Mrs. Knox was indirectly the cause of my first panic attack which would plague me for most of my life.
She's probably dead now so, really, who cares.
4th grade was a nightmare because it followed 3rd grade. 3rd grade was a nightmare because my horrible teacher, Mrs. Adelson, called me "Fogbrain" in front of the class, and it stuck.
And then Mrs. Adelson was assigned to my 4th grade class.
Is teaching fourth grade particularly hard on one's sanity or something? My fourth grade teacher repeatedly said that she hoped she was dead before we were all grown up, since we were so horrible. She also threw things and cried a lot. I have blocked most of this out but my mom still talks about how terrible that teacher was.
Alice! Thank you! These entries are so funny I can barely get through them I'm laughing so hard, and it's hard to read when eyes are all laugh-squinty!
Oh my word, we had a Mr. Klyn at my school, too! It's a dutch name, and I'm from a Dutch town. Anyway, he was the other fourth grade teacher. I had Mrs. Van Wyk, who was super awesome, and was kind to me and considerate of my abundant emotions (in one year my grandma died, my dad went to rehab for drug addiction, and I realized I was incredibly unpopular). I'm assuming Mr. Klyn was a jerk, because that seems to be in the Klyn nature. Klein means small, you know. Your teacher was a small little man.
LOVING this series of posts!!
My 4th grade teacher was sensitive to the horrors just starting in young bodies...and therefore made us each, every single day, stand and raise our hands in the air and she would come around and SNIFF OUR ARMPITS to see if we had "B.O. yet". I don't know if this was some sort of sick fetish or if she was just bat-shit crazy, but I think it's safe to say we were all traumatized for life.
Oh, and she also regularly asked students, in front of the entire classroom, if we'd had a "B.M" yet that day.
Yeah, pretty sure she was bat-shit.
Oh 4th grade. The worst grade ever. They blew up my beloved school where I went to 1st-3rd grade to make a post office (I wish I was kidding). So I was transferred to a new school on the other side of town. And then there was Ms. Johnson. Who was the meanest ever. She would give herself a manicure during reading group and then during "art" would refuse to get her hands dirty. I hated her. No longer was I the special, perfect, straight-A student. She gave me my first C. Not even a B! I hid the grade in my desk for weeks and I can't believe after all these years I'm still mad about it. Oh I hated her so much. The other grades after that were much, much better, though! :-)
Yay, fourth grade! My memories! Finally! (Still wondering, though, who the hell has hypnotized all the previous years. Seriously -- I have no memories of school or home and even photos jog nothing before fourth grade). Mrs. Makel (or Makle) was a treasure. She was beautiful. And well dressed. And pleasant. And she spoke nicely but firmly. I absolutely can be a teacher. I absolutely can be an astronaut. I absolutely definitely can be president. She was the first person to emphasize race to me, to tell me that people would try to tell me I couldn't do things because I am black, but that I should not be deterred. I'm sure she was just in her early 30s, but to me, she had lived! She'd been to New York City!
If I think back from fourth through high school, fourth grade is my absolute best year. All because of Mrs. Makel. I still think about her now and then, wishing I could thank her for her kind words. Sometimes I wonder if she's disappointed that I am not president. I remember visiting her in fifth through eighth grades, just to say hi. And now I'm smiling. Also, I loved vests in fourth grade.
In fourth grade, I had this super bitchy teacher named Mrs. Suarez. One day, I dropped my pencil, and it rolled underneath her chair (she had one of those director's chairs that she never, ever got out of) and when I crawled to pick it up, she announced to the whole class, "Amy is trying to look up my skirt!" I was in a 4th/5th split class, and was already not super cool and this was the end of any hope of a social life.
These entries are fantastic! Good stuff.
Fourth grade for me barely even registers in my memory. I had a teacher named Mrs. Sharp, but what did I learn? What did the classroom look like? Who were my friends? I simply can't say. Either that year left very little impression on me, or those were the brain cells I killed in college. All I remember is that Mrs. Sharp was a very round woman who always wore calf-length dresses and she had the tiniest ankles I've ever seen. I would often wonder how those teensy ankles held up the very ample rest of her.
Fourth grade was the year I started parochial school. The night before the first day of school I had, what I realize now, a panic attack as my mom was tucking me into bed (yes, I did get tucked into bed in fourth grade).
The panic attack was induced by the fact that I realized I didn't know the Hail Mary. I was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would make me stand up and recite the Our Father and Hail Mary in front of the class on my first day.
My mom assured me that wasn't the case. I assured her it was. I was starting Catholic school. I would be expected to know all the prayers (silly me thinking there were only two prayers).
So she sat with me and taught me the Hail Mary and agreed not to leave me until I had it memorized.
Did I have to recite it the next day? No. But I did have to learn the Act of Contrition because we all had to say it as part of morning prayers. No wonder we Catholics are guilty of feeling guilty all the time--I had to start every day for four years asking for forgiveness.
The incident that sticks out the most about the nightmare of 4th grade was when my teacher, Mr. Roberts, asked the class something like "What is another name for a place you can live in?" Man I knew a great answer! Everyone was going to say something lame like "house" or "apartment" so I really raised the heck out of my hand so he would know my answer was really good. "Okay Samantha, what's the answer?" "Condom!" I said with every confidence. "UM..you mean condo?" Why was a class full of 4th graders laughing?? I didn't even know what that was!!
4th grade was the beginning of YUCK. After a Norman Rockwell elementary school experience, we moved to a Middle School and suddenly some of the kids became bullies. I was tortured with cruelness because of my buck teeth. One day Lois B. punched me (HARD!) in the stomach IN CLASS! Hunched over in pain, I made my way over to the teacher (Mrs. White - an older woman who always wore a starched dress rather than those really groovy, colorful polyester pantsuits the cool teachers wore). She didn't make eye contact with me, didn't address the issue, didn't punish Lois. It was the first time in my life I didn't feel safe and I never felt safe in that classroom again. I stopped smiling, stopped being friendly, and started to become withdrawn and moody -- a phase that lasted until about my junior year in high school.
Grade 4 we had this ancient teacher who could not handle a full time teaching position anymore so we only had her afternoons. Really she should have been retired already. Her name was Mrs. Drydon and we called her Mrs. Dragon for her terrifying antics.
In the mornings we had such a wonderful kind teacher Mr. Greaves. I was still trying desperately to get my pants wetting under control. It was definitely stress related, because all morning I would have Mr. Greaves and no accidents, and the Mrs Dryden would come in for the afternoon and terrify us all, and surprise surprise I had a lot of accidents.
She ended up having a mental breakdown around Christmas because she could not control our class one lick. This forever branded our class in our tiny school as the "rowdy" ones. We would have talks at the beginning of every school year about how we can be a difficult class, but we're going to change that this year, right?
Her replacement was Mr. Plater, and he was as bland as bland can be, but very sweet.
I remember Mr Greaves first putting me in the easier reading group, and me just being bored to tears with it, and by the time we moved on to the second set of books going up to the advanced group. Also, being allowed to write with pens was a privilege we could earn if our writing was neat enough, and we all coveted pens greatly.
It was also the year we started french. The french teacher taught all the grades and was off her rocker! She had me thinking I HATED french from grades 4-8 until I got to high school and discovered it was just because she couldn't teach worth beans.
we grew canola plants that year. Some seeds had gone into space and some hadn't. I have no idea what the results were, but I remember my previously thriving plant suddenly disappeared.
I could write a book on 4th grade. I had a new school, one my mom hadn't worked at before & my older sister hadn't attended. The teacher was so bad my mom threatened private school & they changed my classroom in the first month of classes. That teacher wasn't much better and I went from 4's and 3's (it didn't fool us at all, clearly those are A's and B's) to my first string of D's. And being sent home with stomach aches. The next year I was put in a gifted program that was like therapy for wounded smart children and I survived.
Fast forward to a job interview with a school district years later where I was asked about my elementary years, and I admitted that 4th grade was a disaster. Guess what grade they assigned me? I spent 5 glorious years working with 4th graders, they are delightful. It's my favorite grade!
oh! and JTT (Johnathon Taylor Thomas) was ALL the rage that year!
I had Mrs. Riddle for fourth grade. The tall bad kid who had to have been 12 years old already was also in my class. He pulled such classic pranks as Putting Tacks in the Teacher's Seat and Slamming the Erasers Together in the Classroom. Fourth grade was the year they started pulling kids out for the "academically gifted" class, which took place at the same time as Social Studies with Mrs. Ashe. She decided to fail all of the AG kids in Social Studies, because we never turned in our work. Which we didn't know we were supposed to do, since we weren't actually in the class. It was a cold, hard lesson in ... something sinister about adulthood and class structure, I think.
There's a good chance none of this makes sense. I'm on dilaudid.
Mean! Upending your desk. Why do people like this go into teaching?
Conversely, my fourth grade teacher was my favorite. Miss Remmick. She had all the girls for a sleepover at her house one night, and we watched The Carpenters perform on tv. My throat was sore so she gave me saltwater to gargle. I was grateful, but she could have used some help with the salt to water ratio, imho.
She put a claw-footed bathtub in the classroom reading nook, did a whole unit on Emotions which involved drawing pictures, writing, and speaking into a tape recorder (a girl's dream!), and taught us the German song, "Mein Hut der hat drei ecken" about a hat with three corners. (see link)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg_AXp61OZg
(I'm wondering now what it must have been like for the boys in the class. Hm.)
Anyway, the only shock I had was when I caught a glimpse of her in the teacher's lounge one day SMOKING. But I forgave her immediately because I loved her. Fourth grade was a good, good year until we moved away from this dear little semi-rural school to the mean streets of suburbia.
I also wept a lot in fourth grade, but never in front of my teacher. Her name was Mrs. Cowger, and at one point, told me in front of the entire class that I was the most disruptive student she had ever had. She won teaching awards, and I didn't understand why until much later - she was a really excellent advocate for and educator of non-native English speakers and students with disabilities, but she was abysmal with gifted students. I wasn't being disruptive because I was a jerk - I was 9, is anyone really trying to be a jerk when they're 9? - I was being disruptive because I was bored. That was the year when, after finding that raising my hand only got me systematically ignored, I started turning around in my chair to watch the clock.
Also, I was growing into my really big teeth, and growing out my awkward bangs, which I parted in the middle and clipped back with two snap clips positioned immediately above each eyebrow. This is paradoxically one of my mom's favorite school pictures of me.
First - I love how much you look like YOU in that picture. You could shuffle it in with photos of a hundred other kids, ask me to pick out 9-year-old Alice and I'd be right at that photo in a heartbeat.
I can't really tell you about 4th grade because I kind of skipped it. After they did 3rd grade testing, I went into a special program wherein they combined 4th, 5th and 6th grades into 2 years: EAP1 & EAP2 - standing for "Enriched, Accelerated Program - to the administration, but "Educated Apes & Pigs to the other, non-EAP students. Yeah, they looooved us.
But I didn't care because I was finally with a class of my peers - 24 weird, nerdy-bright kids among whom I finally felt something vaguely like "normal" for the first time in my life. I am actually struggling to remember my teacher's name. I remember he was good, and it was the first time I'd had a "he" - a male teacher.
But really, the thing for me was to no longer stick out and feel like a weirdo because I could do complicated math in my head, and wanted to know more about astronomy and archeology, and thought the Greek Gods were fascinating.
I (and probably most of us) could have done without the skipping aspect to the program, because as a group we were generally smaller, less athletic and less mature than our peers. (Surprise, surprise.) So combine that with being a year younger and being tossed back into the general population and Middle school was a right disaster for most of us.
One thing I am struck by as I read all these stories, is the amazingly destructive power a bad (evil or willfully cruel or just plain crazy) teacher can have on a child - and how that echoes down through the years and shapes (warps!) even the adult they become.
Teachers have so much power over our kids - and yet we underpay and undervalue them... setting some of them up to become evil petty tyrants, taking out their frustrations on our kids. Yikes! (Thank goodness my kids have great 4th grade teachers this year!)
In 4th grade I had Sister Kieran. God was the only one who could help you if you spelled it Karen.
She was huge - easily 6' tall in her squatty, practical nun shoes. Her white hair was poodle permed in a tight crop around her head and she wore knee socks under her skirts and would sit on a stool at the front of the class where we could all see her knees.
My name is Melissa. It is important to note the following: 1) There was another Melissa and a Michelle in my class. 2) Sr. Kieran was filled with a burning rage toward children. She would dump over your desk for the slightest infraction - especially not paying attention and being able to read aloud when called on. 3) She was either insane or senile.
She was going around the the room calling on people in biology. She said "Michelle please take your turn." Michelle did not. She repeated her name. Once. Twice. The tension in the room was crackling. I did not dare look up because I was so afraid for Michelle AND terrified of losing my place. She came thundering down my aisle and screamed Michelle as she flipped my desk. I was stunned. Trembling, I said, "My-my name is Melissa." She said she didn't care what my name was it was my turn. The rest of the year, she could not be convinced my name was Melissa. She crossed it out on my papers in red. She called me only Michelle. She called my mother into a meeting (about ME - a straight a student who was never in trouble) saying I wasn't responding to my name in class. It was the worst year of school. Ever. I was miserable and terrified. When it was over, I got my report card. I was so happy it said Melissa! Sr. Kieran got the last laugh. My name is Melissa U____k, but it said Melissa T______z.