Double Standard

The worst thing that can happen is getting fired.

OK.

I'm working in a school and it has me incredibly, soul-crushingly anxious.  I used to have mild panic attacks on the school bus every morning.  Not from the kids.  None of the kids bullied me.

Once, on a joint English/History research project where the two grades from each teacher would be averaged together the English teacher gave me an A.  The History teacher failed me.  For grammar and style choices.  The English teacher and I got along famously, she loved me and every word I wrote.  The History teacher and I were not so harmonious.  He had a habit of saying absolute bullshit, presenting it as fact, and then getting mad when I'd point out why it was wrong.

So, when he failed me, I took the paper and his rubric to her.  She looked at it.  "I did my dissertation on style and punctuation.  I will take care of this."  And she did, and I am forever grateful, but I will never really know why it still broke her heart when I told her I wasn't going in to teaching.

It's incidents like these that make me wonder why teachers sabotage students.

A director I respect has three children, I am the same age as the middle child.  My brother is the same age as the youngest child.  My brother, the oldest child, and the youngest boy and I were all involved in theatre in the same school with the same drama teacher.  The youngest boy was cast as the lead in the musical his senior year.  My brother was cast in a minor bit part in the second act.  Neither my brother nor I ever had lead roles in school.  This director has cast my brother in major roles a couple of times.  We were discussing this high school musical nostalgically, well, sort of.

"All I remember was we had to go sit through it because he was in it."
He was the lead, right?  I was only there because my brother was in.
"Oh, wasn't he the comedic lead?"
No.  He never got cast in a lead in high school.
"Your brother?"
Nope.  Our parents weren't anybody, why do you think the drama teacher would have cast either of us as leads?
"You know, it took me much longer than you to figure out that's how that worked."

I paused to Google something and came across the statistic that schools are hoping for 100% reading proficiency by grade 3.  The first time I read this, I recoiled in shock and horror and thought, "you mean these days, they're not even capable of reading in 3rd grade yet?" and then I remembered the high school freshmen I work with.  Of the 30, students that were interested in being in speech and drama, so, kids who like language in one form or another, one of them reads excellently.  Most of them read like they're reading, and three of them, boys, still sound like graduates of the Shatner School of Dictation.

As much as anything, this probably explains why teachers were wary of me, they assumed I was cheating, and I showed many of them every little bit of my complete contempt.  They were used to holding the power that comes of being the adult in the room with the answers, and it was very easy for me to wrest it from them.  So I found myself in battles with adults for my educational career.

If I hadn't had the benefit of other teachers willing to go to bat for me occasionally, I'd almost being to assume that it was hysterical grandiose paranoia.  It sounds like it, when I think of how often teachers lost my papers, confused my work with the work of other students.  Twice, I was failed for projects that later wound up in displays picked by librarians as "the best" in the class.  My friend and I had the same English teacher in different hours and he didn't know we knew each other.  She got As, I got Cs.  For a poetry writing assignment, I wrote her poem and mine.  They were practically the same poem, if he'd known we knew each other, or actually bothered to read the piece, he probably would have called it plagiarism.  I got a C.  Hers poem by me was deemed the best he'd ever seen, she should write more just like this one.