How I Survived Two Years With the World's Scariest Teacher

When I was in the first grade, we moved to Arkansas, where we stayed for 10 months before moving back to our former residence in Oklahoma. This caused me to enter school midterm, assuring that I would have no choice of homeroom teachers. But I had no way of knowing that beforehand.

Growing up, I always had an independent streak a mile wide, and on my first day back in town, I insisted on being driven to school and left alone to get myself enrolled in the second grade.

My brother drove me to school, let me out, and went on to school himself. I knew Mrs. Wynn from the year before and was quite partial to her as a teacher. So I just marched into her room, put my lunch in the cabinet in the cloak room, hung up my coat, found an empty seat, and made myself at home.

Mrs. Wynn noticed right away that she had an extra student, and gently informed me that things weren't as simple as I had thought. Because of entering school late, I had to go to the teacher who had the fewest students at the time. And she wasn't the one.

I'm not going to even mention the name of the teacher I was turned over to. As far as I know, she has no relatives left around these parts and I have no idea what became of her after she finally moved away. One would assume she had passed on by now, but she was one who might live to be 120 just for spite. I will only say that I was terrified of her, and for good cause. She had a violent temper and her frequent fits of rage left her students cowering in fear. She would turn red in the face, yell, stomp her foot, and hurl chalkboard erasers at any student who displeased her. And it didn't take much to displease her.

One day when we were having a test, she warned us that anyone getting out of his/her seat during the test would be in big trouble. As luck would have it, my pencil lead broke when I had barely started the test. I sat and waved my hand in the air as the minutes ticked by. She was busy with something on her desk and never looked up. I finally decided I was going to fail the test because I wouldn't have time to finish it, so I got really desperate. Not wanting to disturb the class by talking out, I got up and tiptoed quietly to her desk and whispered, "May I please sharpen my pencil?"

"YOU MAY SIT DOWN!" she roared as she smacked my backside with her open hand so hard it almost knocked me down. Of course that disturbed the class more than my talking out would have. Mercifully, I have no memory of the rest of that day. I have no idea if I ever got to sharpen my pencil or finish the test.

I often saw other students given the same treatment, and it always made me want to throw things at the teacher--things bigger and harder than chalkboard erasers. It's a wonder the class didn't mutiny, but we were, after all, small children who lacked the organizational skills to pull off such a feat.

When the school year finally ended, I thought I had it made. The next year I was determined to have Miss Himes, a teacher I loved dearly. What a relief when I found my name on her class roll! I had a couple of hours of bliss before the principal came to our room and announced that my teacher of the previous year didn't have enough students for a whole class of second graders. So she was being given half a class of third graders as well, hand-picked from the two regular third-grade classes. She had been allowed to choose the ones she wanted from the previous year. I suppose she wanted the ones she already had intimidated. Of which I was one. Or maybe she knew my parents wouldn't come to school and protest.

I must have gone into complete shock at the announcement because I remember nothing that happened for the next few minutes. It may have been even longer. I have no memory of the other unfortunates leaving the room. Maybe I just had my mind made up that, having finally reached Heaven, I would not return to the other place. All I know is that some time later, someone, probably the principal, came back to my class and announced that one of the ogre's chosen victims had not come when called. I have no memory of walking across the hall and back into the dungeon to which I had been banished the year before. Perhaps I was put in handcuffs and leg irons and escorted by armed guards. I simply don't remember. All I know is that it was one of the worst days of my life.

During those two years, I had chronic bronchitis (which I finally outgrew a couple of years later) so I had orders from home to stay in on cold days. During that time I also was not allowed to wear pants or attend movies, a result of my mother having listened too much to some radical preacher. Fortunately, she changed her mind later on. But my life would have been much easier if she had changed it sooner.

One day the whole school was escorted downtown to the Liberty theater to see a free movie. Everybody but me, that is. My mother wouldn't allow me to go. My teacher went ballistic when I broke the news to her. Right in front of the rest of the class, she ranted and raved about having to stay there with me instead of going to the movie with the others. While she was at it, she launched into a tirade about my always coming to school in "those little old thin dresses" on cold days and her being tied down at recess to "babysit" me because I had to stay inside.

Needless to say, I was embarrassed and humiliated. After that, instead of telling her on cold days that I had to stay in at recess, I would hide in the cloak room, which was a long, narrow closet across the back of the classroom, with doorless openings at both ends. I can remember hearing her coming to the cloak room, supposedly to get something she had stored in there, while the other students were outside. I would listen to see which door she was going in, then I would slip out the other one as she went in that one, and reverse the process when she went out. Fortunately, she never caught me. I shudder to think what would have happened if she had.

If it sounds like I'm having a pity party here, I'm not. It was a challenge for me to survive those two years, and I think it made me stronger. If anyone should wonder why my parents never went to talk to the teacher, it's because I never told them how she treated us. I figured they had enough problems without adding that to it.

And I also remembered a time when my dad had confronted my older sister's first-grade teacher for shaking my sister for some minor incident over which she had no control. That teacher took it out on the rest of us siblings at every opportunity from then on, although none of us ever had the misfortune to wind up in her class. So, having no desire to give another teacher any reason to hold a grudge against my family, I decided to just tough it out and suffer in silence.

The end of third grade was for me like the end of a long prison term. What a breath of fresh air my sweet fourth-grade teacher would be!

From that point on, I don't think I ever had another teacher that I really disliked, at least nowhere near as much as I did my warden in the second and third grades. I suppose when you get the world's worst teacher early on, any teacher from then on would seem good by comparison.