my calculus teacher did little senior year jokey biographies of people as a big powerpoint on the last day. he was well loved, venerable, yet also slightly … odd. sharp, but vaguely weird. he separated people into basically informal friend groups [with multiple people on the same slide] and people who were the sort of weird alone people. i was one of the alone people. and he said i slept all the time for some reason, i was very sleep deprived but very anxious.
i was sleep deprived all of school really, it started so fucking early, terribly unfair to anybody’s sleep schedule
upon typing this I suppose it isn’t the Worst but it’s still not a fun way to end
My 10th grade French teacher.
The very first day of class, she stood up and stated clearly that everyone already has their grade for the year. No matter what we did, if she had already put an “A” that was the grade we were going to get. If she wrote down an “F”, the same. Me being an ugly awkward boy that had the temerity to take her class, of course, received an “F”. I did all the work, studied hard for the tests, but she always found a way to fail my work. I forgot to put an accent aigu, or grave somewhere on the work… Fail and she would defend to her last breath to the administration, who ALWAYS caved to her. (EDIT: If I missed just ONE accent mark on the entire work, she would fail then entire thing. )
Of course who got the “A” grades in her class? The cheerleaders and pretty popular people.
Toward the end of the year, I inadvertently got massive revenge on her though. All throughout the school year she would talk about her dog. It was like her child. We got every detail of how that dog ate, pooped, and did any little stupid thing. She was OBSESSED with the thing.
What I didn’t know what that she lived near one of my friends. I had visited my friend and was driving out of the neighborhood. I was not speeding. I was driving my car in a very safe manner. When a small dog darted out in front of me and I slammed on the brakes and saw the dog run back into the yard. I never felt an impact, as I was driving a 1970 Impala that probably weighed in at 4500 pounds (2050kg for my more civilized friends). So I didn’t stop, didn’t feel an impact and the dog went yipping back up into the yard, so I thought it was OK.
Well, I was wrong.
The French teacher was out for the next two weeks. No one knew why, until she returned looking like a shadow of herself. Apparently a huge green car came screaming through the neighborhood at a very high rate of speed and veered up onto her lawn to hit her precious dog…
And killed it.
At first I didn’t connect the dog I thought I had almost hit to her dog, until I spoke to my friend. He said that she came out to find her dog dead in the middle of the yard, obviously hit by something very large. He said her screams could be heard all over the neighborhood. Which occurred about two minutes after I left his house and the only description of the car was a very large and old green car.
Yeah, my car was green and this was 1986, so my car was 16 years old at the time.
I feel terrible for the dog. Its death was a complete accident. I didn’t even know she lived in that neighborhood until she came back to school and told everyone what happened. It is not in my nature to hurt animals, so even if I had known it was her dog, I would have still done my best to avoid hitting it.
Definitely not the method of revenge I would ever use of my own volition. It happened and there is nothing I can do about it.
No, I never owned up to it and do not feel I need to. What I did do, was focus on my driving skills, awareness and make sure my car stayed in its absolute best mechanical shape to avoid a repeat. A habit that I continue to today and one I am teaching my oldest child who has just started driving instruction.