Actually, I suppose I owe a lot to a particularly dreadful teacher (believe it or not, she wasn't the worst I ever had, but she definitely cracked the top five). And I'm naming names, because:
1) It was so long ago it doesn't matter anymore and
2) fuck her.
Long story incoming.
Mrs. Warnick. First semester Sophomore Honors English in High School. For reasons I've never been able to determine, she took an intense dislike to me and legitimately had it in for me. I have a dozen stories about this old bitch, but the one I think best illustrates the extremity of the problem was the multiple-choice test.
One day we had a multiple-choice pop quiz. No problem. I'd read the material and the questions were pretty easy. However, when I got mine back, I saw that a handful of my answers, which I was certain were correct, had been marked wrong. I double-checked by comparing with a classmate who had recieved a high grade, and sure enough, I DID have the right answers.
This was early in the semester, before I'd gotten to know the teacher. I assumed it was an honest mistake in the grading, so I went to show her the problem and get it corrected. The classmate came with me. When I pointed out that, for example, we had both answered "C" and she'd marked mine as wrong and my classmate's as right, did she correct the grade? Nope. She looked me square in the face and said, "I changed my mind."
"About which answer was right?"
"Yep."
"But... it's multiple choice."
"Doesn't matter. I changed my mind."
And that was the end of that. The grade remained unchanged. I bristled at the injustice, but what could I do? This woman was determined that, by fair means or foul, I wasn't going to get an A in her class. I went home and griped about how she was mean and unfair, but my parents thought it was a simple case of not liking the teacher and exaggerating for effect.
That was the beginning of a very, very bad semester.
It was another student who finally drew serious attention to the problem. Now this girl and I, we had known each other for years and never gotten along. Seemed like every time we talked, we'd just get into an argument. But we were what you might call amiable enemies, both content to simply ignore the other's existence and carry on with our own separate lives.
This girl. THIS girl, who couldn't stand me... went home crying one day because of how badly I was being treated in class.
Her mother, understandably concerned, called my mother, and my mother finally realized that things really were as bad as I had been saying.
But here's where things got tricky. This was the HONORS teacher, one of only two in the school, and the other one only taught the senior classes, so I had two options:
1) Continue classes with the bitch for three more semesters and accept that she would continue to find ways to lower my grades (and it being English class, most of the work was essays, which she could grade as subjectively as she pleased, even if we tried to call her out on the few multiple choice assignments).
2) Leave the honors track and get good grades in lower-level classes, which had notoriously bad teachers of their own. (My high school had an amazing history department, but the English department was crap).
It felt like either way, the awful teacher would win.
At least, those WOULD have been the only two options if my classmate's mother hadn't proposed a third alternative during that fateful phone call. I was a reasonably smart kid, but her daughter was a freakin' genius - we're talking independent studies in math in middle school smart - and she'd already taken a couple math classes at the local community college. Her mother saw no reason I couldn't do the same thing in English. Why not have me take the placement test and see if I could get enrolled, and just get dual credit to count towards the high school requirements?
And that's the story of how I started taking college English classes at 15 years old.
And because I needed a full 8 semesters of English credits to graduate from high school, I just kept taking more and more English classes at the college, which happened to have a spectacular English department. There wasn't any one teacher who took particular interest in me (apart from the general amusement of having such a young student), but they were all very, very good, and I learned a ton from them, getting straight A's the whole way through.
If I hadn't made that switch, if I'd stayed in that lousy high school English department for all four years... well, I may well have been completely soured on English as a subject. That's what happened to most of the students who passed through there.
...I only wish I could remember that girl's name. The one who cried for me even though she hated me. I'd like to thank her.
Do you have any idea why she had it out for you? The injustice of that made me furious just reading about it, I can't imagine living it.
