In honor of the start of the school year, MHS teachers are sharing their horror stories. Today, Mrs. Burge puts out a fire, Mrs. Graham calls the police, and Mrs. Nuku applies for a new job. This is today’s issue of Teacher Horror Stories.
“My story was actually in my first few years of teaching, at the first school I was at. I was teaching a chemistry class, and we were in the chemistry lab doing a lab with Bunsen Burners. All of the students had their burners going, and they were doing the experiment. I was over helping one lab group, all of a sudden, a student very calmly said, ‘Mrs. Burge?’ I said, ‘Yes?’ ‘I need your help.’ I said, ‘Okay, just a second.’ They said, ‘No, now.’ I turned around and the Bunsen Burner had caught their sleeve on fire. So, we had to very quickly shut everything down, and it was a very dramatic day, but thankfully, everyone was fine. No one was really hurt. Everything got shut down properly…It could have been an actual disaster, and we could have literally burnt the school down. We did not, and everybody was okay. We all survived, but that is a very dramatic and very nerve-racking thing that happens. Probably a good horror story too. I know that I learned a lot from that because it was in my first couple years of teaching.”
“I was up here one night working really late, grading papers. It was like midnight or something. I heard a noise, but I came out and I didn’t see anything and I didn’t know what it was…as I was leaving, I went out to my car, and I turned around and looked into the window, and there was a person standing inside the window where I had just been, and it was some guy I didn’t recognize. I went running around the front of the school because another teacher had been working. I was worried she didn’t know there was this creepy man inside. When I went running around the front, I looked up, and on top of Washington, there were two people walking on the roof. I yelled, and they jumped down on the top of the roof to hide, and I called 911. They were…trying to vandalize the school to get revenge on something…there used to be a window that you could open up, and they were trying to walk…on the roof from Washington to get in here, because that’s how the first guy got in. Then they were just [going to] tear everything up to get revenge on something they didn’t agree with. But when I called 911, they were like, ‘Do they have a weapon?’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know if they had a weapon.’ So…I got three people arrested that night. Later, they found out that they had been responsible two or three weekends in a row for the signs in front of the school. One of them got set on fire, and then someone spray-painted a bunch of stuff. They couldn’t figure out who had been doing it, and it turns out it was those people.”
“Probably the worst teacher horror story was when I taught in Danville. I taught in Danville for three years, my very first years of teaching. I had a student who came in one day, and she was just really, really, feisty with me that day. We had a generally good relationship. We used to do these participation points. It was a double-block class period, and we had a suggestion for doing a participation point wall, so that when they took their break, they would get graded on their effort, instead of us constantly correcting their behavior. We would just quietly mark them down if they hadn’t been doing anything all class period, so that they could redirect themselves at the passing period. It was only five points a class period, so it wouldn’t kill their grade, but it would be a little wake-up call if they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. This student had spent the entire first chunk of the class period, which was, I think, 50 minutes, doing another student’s hair. I had reminded her how much work she had to do, so I did some verbal redirection. She just chose to blatantly ignore me. I sort of let her make her own mistakes ,and she didn’t get any work done at all. So then the passing period happened. She got marked down, so I gave her a zero out of 2.5 points, so it was basically nothing. It was supposed to be that she would have the passing period to think about it and come back and start fresh. Not a big deal. She instead checked the wall, blew up, was angry, loudly shouting about it, and left the classroom for the passing period. I was hoping she’d kind of cool off. I was working at my desk, and she turned around, left the classroom, then came back, and my desk was directly in the line of sight from the door. I guess she had clay in her pocket leftover from art class that had been there and had hardened into basically a rock, and she was still so mad at me five minutes later that she threw it at me from the door all the way across the room, and it hit me in the face. So I’m sitting there looking straight forward, and I just get, like, clonked in the head with, basically, a rock. Then, she called me a bad word. I turned around, my whole face was red, and I couldn’t even respond. I was so shocked, and I was furious, but also, embarrassed, and sad, and didn’t want to cry in front of my students, so I just, I looked at my co-teacher, and just said, I need to go to the bathroom, and I went in the bathroom, and, bawled my eyeballs out, and I wanted to go home but then we obviously sent her down to the office. We had different principles for different parts of the school. Our principal was out that day, so she went to a different principal who I was really close with, and that principal thought she calmed her down enough and thought a good course of action was to call me and force her to apologize to me. Which was literally her being, like, ‘Do you have something you want to say to her?’ And she was like, ‘No.’ And so…she didn’t apologize to me. She got sent home that day, which was ultimately, I think, in that moment, not what she really wanted, but it was what she thought she wanted in that moment as a teenager with a totally dysregulated brain. Then she got home, her mom was a mess and called me in my classroom and shouted at me, and left a voicemail, and called me names for sending her to the office. She got ‘suspended,’ but we went into a three-day snowstorm. Her suspension was three days, and they counted the snowstorm as those three days, so when we came back, she was right back in my classroom, and I was mad about it. I used those three days to apply for the job here at Monticello, so that was how I ended up coming here!”
Della Taylor, Staff Writer
tayde@sages.us
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