The Story of 7-Year-Old Me, My Nemesis, and a Very Bad Teacher
My latest true story about discovering the worst parts of myself.
Despite writing many personal essays and true stories, this is the story I’ve found the most challenging to write. In fact, I’ve written this story at least three times since my childhood, and scrapped my draft every time. The events are just so weird, the kind of narrative that conjures up statements like, “Wow, truth really is stranger than fiction!” or more realistically, “She obviously made this up.” But I think, thirty years after the events of this story happened, I’ve finally cracked it. I hope.
My public elementary school seemed to revolve around one particular main character—a second grade teacher in her mid-sixties, who went simply by the name “Doc.” She used this name because she was the only teacher to have a doctorate in education. Looking back now as an adult, I realized this must have been irritating as hell for the other teachers, one step less annoying than a Harvard-educated teacher showing up and declaring that everyone must call him Crimson.
Over her many years at the school, Doc had become the figurehead of our school. She was, seemingly, exempt from the required curriculum. She taught niche topics unrelated to a typical second grade syllabus. She took her students on field trips that the other second grade teachers didn’t. She put on a self-written play and puppet show every year, and the other second grade teachers didn’t. She was revered as a sort of quirky maverick who didn’t play by the rules. To have your child in Doc’s class was a gift. But despite all her fun excursions and activities, she was not known for being an “easy” teacher. It was an open secret that first grade teachers did not place their remedial students with Doc. And given that I was a smart-ass seven-year-old, perhaps the only person at school who believed themselves to be more special, smarter, and more of a main character than Doc, I wanted to be in her class. Because she was so unusual, and because I was still reeling from social isolation after I told my first grade class that I was an alien in a skin suit (and they believed me, which is kind of on them) I was under the impression that Doc would see what was special about me—see past the bad parts that everyone else apparently saw, realize how kind and smart and special I was, and bring out the best in me.
The summer after first grade, when I was about to turn seven, I received a letter informing me that she would be my teacher. I cheered as the fictitious Crimson may have upon discovering he was admitted to his alma mater.
On the first day of school, I was determined not only to impress Doc, but to be her favorite. I showed up wearing a makeshift English boarding school uniform that I pieced together from a GAP Kids navy pleated skirt, some dorky sweater vest and a white poplin blouse. Knee socks and a hair bow may or may not have been involved. My heart raced as I stood in line behind the other kids, all of us about to enter the hallowed halls of Doc’s second grade classroom. Finally, it was my turn. I looked up at her, towering over me. I remember her being impossibly tall, but it’s possible my memory is skewed from having been a child and she was just average-sized. She had short, permed brown hair and heavy powdered foundation, high drawn-on brows, and red lips that befitted a Broadway actress.
Finally, I said what I had been practicing all morning: “Twelve times twelve is one hundred and forty-four.”
For some reason I expected Doc to smile, cheer, or do anything to assure me that I was special. Instead, she said, “Oh, great, you’re one of those.”
I quickly learned that “one of those” was a very all-encompassing term, because Doc found most of her students exasperating. Her reputation as a “tough” teacher was, if anything, undersold. She did things in our class that today might put a teacher on the local news. For example, we had two students in our class who came from other countries. They could speak English, but struggled a bit more with grammar and spelling. When one of them made a particularly egregious spelling mistake, Doc asked him to stand on his desk and bend over so she could spank him in front of the class.
