Sometime I should do a thread of the crazy power trip fights I had with teachers in high school

Yes I am obstinate by nature but also high school teachers are FREAKING CRAZY sometimes

Okay let's just do this for fun real quick

Worth noting that I have several HS teachers that I LOVED and they tended to be brilliant and inspirational and really cared about stoking my curiosity for the subject matter and were lovely people

But plenty of bullies too

I tend to do best with people who come into a situation on equal terms with me and give me a reason to respect them

I have never done well with "We're doing this my way because I say so and I have authority"

You can imagine how this went over in high school

The problem is that by high school you have started to develop an awareness that adults are not all equally smart and knowledgeable and effective

Your teachers do not appreciate you noticing this if you form a low opinion of them

And while many teachers are lovely people they are still people with varying levels of skill and investment at their jobs and deal with teenagers all day who are also often SUPER dumb and irritating

Perfect storm of authoritarian power levering incentives with escalating stakes

Yeah yeah you should respect your teachers by default

Also I was a SUPER annoying student

Smart, only motivated if I respected you, zero tolerance for anything I thought was stupid, and I didn't care about my grades

I had a 2.0 GPA going into my Junior year and mostly just because I aced tests

I think my teachers were mostly surprised when I crushed my SATs and ACTs

I had total Bender vibes

Wore a black leather jacket all the time, angry, sad, explosive when pushed

So also a magnet for teachers trying to enforce lines because I fit a type. They all thought I was from a crappy home when really I was just dealing with personal drama

I got into a huge argument with an English teacher Sophomore year because she wrote test questions ambiguously and then wouldn't give me the points when I pointed out I had answered correctly and her questions sucked.

I wouldn't let it go and kept trying to argue with her that it was inane to expect me to read her mind and interpret how she had INTENDED the question to be answered. She basically told me to STFU and I decided she was dumb.

Then I had a chip on my shoulder and thought her book choices for the rest of the semester were boring (Silas Marner and Rebecca) so I just didn't read them and tried to answer the questions from context and Sparknotes. I think I got a B in her class.

My Junior year English teacher was at least smart, but she was EXTREMELY finicky about process and very sensitive. She started crying one time relating a story about a tree in her backyard that had been meaningful to her. Okay, whatever, kinda rolled my eyes at her.

Our big fight came when we were supposed to read a short story and write down our reactions to it for discussion. She wanted us to fold a piece of paper into a fan shape and write down the columns for... reasons? Aesthetics? fuck if I know

I didn't want to do this

It was a very stupid thing to fight about (my objection was as dumb as the requirement) but I insisted I was just going to note my observations on a normal piece of paper in my notebook.

But no, it HAD to be a folded fan. She told me if I didn't do the fan, I had to leave.

So I said, fine, I wasn't gonna do it. I HATED being forced to do pointless things (I saw much of high school this way and obviously had a complex about it).

She made me leave the room while they discussed the story and I just sat in the hallway.

Later, she told me I could do it at home to make up the assignment... but it still had to be the fan.

I told her there was NO WAY in which she would be getting a folded fan of reactions from me.

This turned into a WHOLE BATTLE that made it all the way to parent conferences.

When she met my parents she was like, "Uhhh... you guys are not what I expected. Your kid is smart but doesn't do their assignments."

My mom sighed and was like, "Does it have to be a fan?"

It did. We dropped it. I did not make a fan and took the F.

I was at least consistent with doing things that I had committed to that weren't stupid and were my own fault, though. I liked my French teacher, who was sweet but a hardass, and I volunteered to sing a song in french for a show she was putting together. Then I forgot about it.

Problem was that I wasn't very good at French (or foreign languages in general), so when she reminded me right before the show I had like three days to learn it. It was much harder to memorize French than I had expected and I couldn't do it. I begged for her to let me out.

But she told me I had given her my commitment and so I had to do it. I respected that at least.

So she put me on stage in front of like 400 people from other french classes and schools.

I only knew the first verse so ended up mumbling the entire song in made up French-sounds.

This was embarrassing for me, but probably more for her in retrospect. I feel kinda bad about that one since I'm guessing she was hoping I'd pull it off out of a magical last minute effort... alas.

Next up was the Economics class which I LOVED but once again was assigned an assignment I thought was stupid. We had to draw pictures of our life/career goals in 4 increments: 2/5/10/20 years

I wasn't even sure what my college plan was

I pointed out that it didn't make any sense for me to form a 20 year goal when I wasn't sure what would happen in 2 years and he insisted that it was a good exercise (he was probably not wrong about that, but not a lot of guidance).

But being obstinate and annoyed, I picked obnoxious 10 and 20 year goals for this assignment. I believe my 20 year goal was to become a Pirate King and sail the world having adventures.

This was not what he wanted and he gave me an F on the assignment. Another HUGE fight.

I told him I thought it was ridiculous to ask me to pick a 20 year goal and then get mad at the goal I picked because he didn't like it. Who was he to tell me I couldn't be a pirate king?

How DARE HE.

I did not get my grade changed but I liked his class and he was an okay dude.

There was a teacher at our school who had a PhD and insisted that everyone address him as "Dr. [last name]." He had a reputation for being a dick. I'm glad I wasn't ever in his class because it would have been ugly.

We weren't supposed to eat food in the halls, but my French teacher used to let us go buy food at the school store during breaks and bring it back to class to eat there.

I would frequently open my chips on the way back to class since I thought the hallway rule was stupid.

One time I passed by the venerable doctor on my way back to class with my freshly opened bag of chips about 40 feet from the door to my classroom.

He ordered me to halt and told me to give him my chips.

I tried to explain that I was just going back to my classroom and he demanded I hand them over anyway.

I said I'd just throw them away instead. But he insisted I was to give them to him.

This made me suspicious. I was not giving Dr. Asshole my chips if he was gonna eat them.

Sure, rules are rules and I accepted that getting hit by stupid rules was part of the game. But yielding my chips to random teachers was not the rule. I told him I wasn't giving him my chips and that I'd throw them away but would not hand them over.

This infuriated him and he tried to take them from me, but I held on and we glared at each other holding this bag of chips in the hallway. I'm laughing at the ridiculousness of this looking back at it now. What a stupid power struggle to get into with a teenager.

I suggested that if he was concerned about the rule and me actually tossing them, we could do so together.

Probably realizing that this was the best he was gonna get, he grudgingly agreed. We walked step by step to the garbage can, both clutching the chip bag, and discarded it.

Then I went and bought another bag of chips and went back to class. What a dick.

My theater teacher and I in Junior year DID NOT get along. She was an absolute freak about control in her domain, and I thought her rules (like no swearing in the theater backstage) were controlling and dumb. We fought all the time.

Her attempts to get me to follow her arbitrary rules turned into an escalating power struggle where she kept trying different ways to make me comply, and I kept digging in harder. Rather than addressing me directly, she eventually decide that peer pressure might be easier.

I walked into theater practice one day where she had attempted to AMBUSH ME with a TRIBUNAL of my peers to talk to me about my "problematic behavior" (of not doing the arbitrary things she wanted).

One of my friends had tipped me off that this was being planned and I walked into it absolutely livid that this was her latest move. She had assembled the entire theater group and stood me in front of them to let them share their concerns about my behavior.

Of course this was massively uncomfortable for everyone and no one wanted to talk. She nudged the President of our theater club to "tell me about their concerns" and he sort of awkwardly mumbled that they needed me to follow the rules.

If I didn't, I couldn't be in theater productions anymore because it was "creating conflict." I listened and then addressed each of the officers, putting them on the spot, asking each of them if they really felt this way, that I was a major problem? No answers.

At this point my teacher stepped in herself and tried to take control back of the conversation she had sock puppeted and told me they needed me to follow her rules and that they were inviting me to participate. They were "throwing the ball" and just "needed me to catch the ball."

I was embarrassed that she'd dragged all my friends into this fight between us and furious at her for not just handling me herself in private if she was that mad at me. I just stared at her while she mimed throwing a ball to me.

I told her to fuck herself and that I didn't want to do theater anymore, thanks, and left. I was so mad at how she'd tried to ambush me and how it had played out that I was shaking. The other theater teacher (who I had a great relationship with) noticed me in the hallway.

I explained what had happened, and he got this very tired "Oh fuck" look on his face and sighed. Like I was being a difficult teenager but clearly his colleague was also being RIDICULOUS. Only one of us was an actual child here.

He told me that she and I were very similar in some ways in how we needed to win and sometimes "You just have to stand upwind of assholes." Good advice in retrospect. Dropping out of theater was probably the right call for me there. My friends apologized later.

My mom was not pleased about how the teacher had handled the situation when I told her about it later and it turned into a whole thing with the principal and she was disciplined for her handling of it.

I was frustrated at not doing theater anymore but let it go and moved on.

Here's the wild part of this: Maybe two years later, in college, I had a public livejournal under my real name. For a while, I was getting anonymous comments on it from some absolute douchebag who made very specific references to this event.

My college friends defended me and told this person to fuck off and they went postal on the comments until I blocked them. I don't have evidence, but I can't imagine who would care other than her. It HAD to be her.

So fucking weird.

Anyway, this thread makes me sound awful but mostly I just hated high school (with emotional personal life drama mixed in) and had perfectly normal relationships with most of my teachers and great relationships with the best ones. These are just the most egregious situations.

I just really, really hate dumb people and bullies trying to fuck with me.

Personality trait. I'm quite easy to get along with if you have good reasons for what you're asking me to do and bring me along with you.

Okay okay, I'll end this thread with my favorite teachers and our interactions so I don't look quite so much like an unhinged sociopath

Freshman year I took a theater class from a brilliant, warm, and lovely woman who was a bit of a mentor to me throughout my high school career. She suggested cool books to read and taught me how to do improv and have fun in theater and I loved her to death.

She only taught the lower grades but I still came back and hung out to help her out with theater exercises after hours and I acted as her student assistant for a semester. She had great life advice.

My algebra II teacher Junior year SAVED my math GPA by being an amazing teacher. After I had failed geometry I had concluded I sucked at math. But this guy made it seem like a bunch of elegant and fun puzzles and I loved taking his class. He repaired my relationship with math.

I loved my Humanities teacher so much when I took his class as an elective that I audited it a second time the next year during my free period, which he allowed. He was a very sweet man who was very smart and very passionate about the arts.

He had a way of REALLY making you appreciate the emotions behind the art and taught us Dante's Inferno and Renaissance art and history. Fascinating guy who sparked a love of classic lit in me.

My debate teacher was another favorite of mine (shocking I know) because she taught me how to argue in a structured way, which I'm sure my other teachers really appreciated. I also did a semester as her student assistant and thought she was wonderful.

My favorite theater teacher was married to an English professor who taught my Senior AP English class. We never had a strong relationship, but I loved how laid back and direct he was. He was no-nonsense, but also no-bullshit and basically gave us the tools we needed.

I liked how hard he pushed us to go do interesting things and gave me room to reach on stuff I liked. He assigned us sections of the Iliad to write papers on but let me do a paper on the whole thing because I wanted to read it in its entirety.

There were also rumors that he had once been a hippy and we asked him to tell us what acid was like once, but he told us that was a 10-hour lesson and he didn't have time to cover it.

The vast majority of my teachers were neither terrible or awesome. They were doing their jobs and did them fine.

The 4-5 teachers I mentioned were the only ones I had really significant run ins with. But they SUCKED.