I’m smart, opinionated and have been pissing off authority figures as long as I can remember. I had some wonderful and professional teachers and I’m sure that I frustrated them to the point of distraction. In K-9 I got thrown out of class by virtually every teacher I had, and with many of them it was a weekly, and sometimes daily experience. I attended a Hebrew day school for K-9. The classes were small, sometimes as few as 10 kids, and almost all the kids were bright, many of them exceptionally so, so being smart didn’t get you any perks and it was hard to avoid close attention from the faculty and staff.
So I probably deserved most of the negative attention I got. That being said, my 1st Grade Hebrew teacher and 7th grade English/Language Arts teachers were psychopaths. The 1st Grade teacher once forced me to clean up vomit. The English teacher in 7th grade, Mrs. Paris, was most likely a misandrist, threatened by boys around the age of puberty. No girls in the class got lower than a B. No boys in the class got higher than a C. There were six boys in the class and I think she gave out three Cs, two Ds, and an F. Somehow, only a few short years later, those same boys were getting As in AP English courses in high school and attending schools like Michigan and Columbia. She once refused to let me return to class unless one of my parents came to school to observe my behavior in class. My normal situation w/ my parents was that they were upset over whatever the latest discipline issue at school was, so you can imagine that my mom was not pleased with me. After observing Mrs. Paris in her classroom, my mom decided that in this case it was a crazy teacher.
I should note, BTW, that one of the forces for mainstreaming disabled kids has been the teachers’ unions, who see them as a good way to get more government funding and more teachers and teachers aides (i.e. union members) hired.
