Mrs. Wicked.

I started second grade a month late, on account of having taken a trip to the United States with my brother and mother to attend my grandfather's funeral.  We were in the States for a few weeks, leaving my poor Dad behind, alone, in Liberia.

Mrs. Wicked was the second grade teacher.  She had blond hair and huge, oversized, tinted glasses. To a shy, quiet seven year old, she did not seem exude warmth of any kind.  In fact, she seemed rather grim to me, and seemed to smile only with conscious effort.  Later in the year, Mrs. Wicked would take the entire spiral bound SRA reading teacher's text, raise it above her head, and slam it down to the floor, yelling at the class to be quiet.  I don't think she was really cut out to be a teacher.

When my mother took me to the classroom at the end of the school day the day before I was to start classes, Mrs. Wicked said, "We've already made it rain in the classroom this year."  I had not only missed a very cool science experiment, the likes of which I could hardly imagine, but here was Mrs. Wicked rubbing in the fact that I had missed it. 

It was not a good start to the school year. 

Then came time-tests: horrible, panic-inducing mimeographed pages of mathematical torture, fuzzy blue thumbtacks in the digits of my normally-clever mind.  Mrs. Wicked would start the stopwatch, and my mind would freeze into a block of space-cold moon rock, totally blank.  Most of the answers I didn't know and had to think about, but there was that stopwatch in Mrs. Wicked hand, ticking away towards doom.  There was never enough time to figure out the answers. And the more time tests we had, the more panicked and tense I got with each one.

Sometimes I guessed, and filled in any number.  Sometimes I left most the page blank. Always, I was a disappointment to Mrs. Wicked.  How could a child who was so smart do so poorly on those tests?  Obviously, I wasn't trying, right? If I would just put out the effort!  For me, the only conclusion I could draw was that I was dumb at math.

I had a little run in with the other girls in the class at one point during the year, including a few who were friends.  They passed around a note to all the class, except for me, that said, "I hate Jenny."  I found out on the playground, at the end of recess, when I was told by Katy, and shown the note. Stupid, yes, to a grown up.  But pretty devastating to a seven year old.  Why do children act that way?  Far from "toughening me up" as some advocates of mass public education would say, it made me less trustful of other kids, more shy, and more cautious.

Other than cementing in my mind the fact that I was incapable of mathematics, I didn't learn much else in second grade.  I was already reading well above my grade level; when one can read fluently and has no television, there's really no limit to learning, despite the teaching of grim teachers like Mrs. Wicked.

It wasn't until well after college, when I started solving basic operations in my head using methods I had never been taught but had puzzled out on my own, that I realized that I might have been good at math,  had I been given the chance to learn it via some non-standard approach, or if Mrs. Wicked taken pity on an uptight, perfectionist little kid and been willing to ditch the time tests.

Fortunately, I have the chance for a do-over.  I'm homeschooling my own kid, and we don't own a stopwatch. Take that, Mrs. Wicked, wherever you are!

Names have been changed.

Comments

[Jennifer C-L]

Looking back at a similar set of circumstances in my elementary school years, I now suspect that children of a classroom pick up subtle and not so subtle clues about how to treat other students from the TEACHER.
(But alas, that doesn't explain Junior High.)

[Cheryl]

So, I'm assuming "Mrs. Wicked" isn't her real name?

[Elephantschild]

Safe assumption, Cheryl! People do Google their names occasionally, and hers was unusual enough to get a hit here if I had used her real name. Same for the friend who thought it politic to share the note with me.

[Pam]

Sadly, it seems that every child ends up running into a Mrs. Wicked...I know that my Andrew did. So far, the other three have not (except for during our homeschool years when I was having a bad day!)

[Joy]

The day after I got my retainer, I went to the teacher before class and explained I couldn't enunciate very well (as was obvious by my speech). A few minutes later she asked me to read a big paragraph in front of everyone.

That's just plain mean!