12 things I wish I told my least favorite teachers before I graduated

Thanking your teachers is the bare minimum for graduation ceremonials, and some of us actually mean it. I certainly did; somehow in the mess that is the education system I managed to learn things, and it was in no small part due to the efforts of these wonderful teachers.

But I never got rid of the nagging feeling that not all of them deserved the paltry honor of my gratitude. In fact, in the case of my high school, I found that the teachers I least admired simply went on to torment my younger sister when it was her turn to pass through. It made me wish I had been brave enough to tell them what I really thought of them, before I left. And for every amazing teacher I had ever after, there were a handful of mediocre ones and one or two terrible ones. And no matter how sympathetic I was (and am) to the difficulties of the vocation, there were some who did things that made me wonder if teaching was totally lost on them — and if they should be teaching at all.

I don’t have any expectations about writing this out. I have no illusions about these old teachers somehow finding and reading this, let alone understanding who and what I mean. But now that I’m able to put a finger on all the things that were less-than-pleasant about having teachers, I’m content to put this out there for a bit of introspection.

So here are twelve pieces of my mind I wish I’d given certain teachers I’d encountered throughout my education:

1. Just because we haven’t worked out in the real world yet, doesn’t mean we didn’t know it when you were being unprofessional.

We might not have had all the semantics down, but we knew what was appropriate and what was not. We knew enough about the job description to have known when you were falling short of expectations. We might have never told anyone, but we knew.

2. We understood that the job was hard, but we weren’t sympathetic because you took it out on us.

We know teaching is not a walk in the park. Our sympathy was a little tied up by our egos, but we could have been the first to understand if you were under a lot of pressure. But on a day-to-day basis, if you picked on someone to get your way, if you were unpleasant because you hate it all and you took it out on us, then we obviously had no reason to be on your side.

3. We know life is unfair and we can accept that life is unfair, but if you keep pretending it isn’t unfair we will just take it as hypocritical lying.

If you had told us instead that it should be fair, admitting that it isn’t, and then told us how we should help make it a fairer world… that would have been a different thing.

4. Group work taught us nothing except to resent each other more.

So, thanks for that.

5. We were capable of understanding that the system was rigid and that your hands were tied, but you never bothered trusting us enough to explain.

We’re not stupid, you might be surprised to know — we discussed the problems of our education system amongst ourselves all the time. But we had no idea what was happening behind the scenes. We only got the part where if we all did well on a test, somehow this was a bad thing and you had to make it even more difficult for us to do well next time. Maybe you weren’t allowed to tell us why, but it shouldn’t have surprised you if we were resentful and uncooperative every time the system failed us.

6. You mismanaged your favoritism so much that nobody was actually jealous of your favorites, and it was embarrassing for everyone.

We hope you realize how much damage you’ve done to your chosen one. Not only did you make every achievement by that student seem cheap and less like a real achievement, you added another layer of hypocrisy to your reputation that made us a lot less inclined to take you seriously. You can retain your right to having favorites, if you like, but the only one who should be more embarrassed than your favorites should be you.

7. We might have been assholes, but you certainly didn’t cure us by being an asshole back.

And for the record, you were very ineloquent in anger. Maybe you should try to use something other than malformed, sputtering rage in the future.

8. It’s obvious who did it because they care and who did it to take sadistic pleasure.

Discipline is an age-old part of the institution, and granted some us badly needed it. But there was a difference between those who were really trying to nurture us into good people and those who did it to get to do their power play, and some of us could see the difference very clearly. And we won’t forget it.

9. You used humiliation to make a point and it will overshadow anything valuable you ever tried to teach us.

Maybe some of us needed to be taken down a notch, but trying to force the lesson by putting someone on the spot didn’t always work. In fact, it was more likely to be the moment that canceled out anything else you had to say after that — because in the long run, we’re more likely going to remember the time you shamed us in front of our peers, and not what we did wrong.

10. We caught on that you only wanted us to be mature adults when it was convenient for you.

You talked a lot about preparing us for the world past school, but only when you wanted us to do those assignments well and on time. We had to follow loads of arbitrary rules but have had little practice in thinking for ourselves. You weren’t fooling anyone with that emphasis on blind obedience, and it was a losing battle anyway.

11. If you thought sitting through a meeting with our parents was bad, imagine what it’s like to live with them at home.

And there is no way on earth we would have been able to articulate this to you.

12. No matter how headstrong you judged us to be, at the end of the day you were the teacher.

You were handling us at our worst and best — moving out of childhood and inching towards adulthood. And you got handed a really difficult system to slog through, so you got your work cut out for you. But ultimately, you should have realised that you were the grown-up, you had the power. We had responsibilities, as students, to the work; you had a responsibility to us. So no matter how rowdy we got, at that moment, in the classroom, whatever you said and whatever you did was bound to affect us profoundly. And we’ll remember it.