my calculus teacher did little senior year jokey biographies of people as a big powerpoint on the last day. he was well loved, venerable, yet also slightly … odd. sharp, but vaguely weird. he separated people into basically informal friend groups [with multiple people on the same slide] and people who were the sort of weird alone people. i was one of the alone people. and he said i slept all the time for some reason, i was very sleep deprived but very anxious.
i was sleep deprived all of school really, it started so fucking early, terribly unfair to anybody’s sleep schedule
upon typing this I suppose it isn’t the Worst but it’s still not a fun way to end
I have a terrible case of dislexia. It’s better now, but foreign languages during high school where basically impossible. Not that I wasn’t learning, I just couldn’t keep up with the class.
My French teacher, who was also the class mentor, didn’t believe dislexia was a thing and made it very clear he didn’t. I always felt like he was picking on me, as if he straight up didn’t like me. He’d often call me out in front of the class, but there’s this one time that still stands so clear in my mind:
We had a test, a simple one. Just 20-25 French words we had to translate. We had one day to memorise the. I studied for hours after school. My mom spend at least 3 hours studying with me. I still didn’t know much that night, but when showing up the next day for class, I had forgotten everything. I did the test as best as I could, but knew I was gonna fail. Just like I always did.
The following day, after he had graded the tests, he was calling out everyone’s grades. When he came to me, he held up my test to show the whole class, with it being pretty much all red crosses on it. He casually added “and look who didn’t study again and chose to get an F”
It broke me. I was trying so hard up until that point. I really did. It took all my strength not to just burst out in tears. I did everything I could, it still wasn’t enough and to add insult to injury my teacher felt it necessary to shame me in front of the whole class and he wasn’t even right in what he said.
After that day, I didn’t study for the class anymore. Not even once. After that moment I choose to live up to what the teacher already thought of me. It hurt my whole school career and I still kinda blame him for that.