Here’s a popular article at The Atlantic:
How I Became an Unfair Teacher
It’s easy to forget how tiny, arbitrary, everyday decisions can shape a kid’s school experience.
BEN ORLIN JUN 2 2014, 10:00 AM ET
In third grade, I got back a spelling quiz with red ink next to the word kitchen. I asked the teacher what my mistake was, and she pointed to my sloppy handwriting: “That r should be a c.”
“That is a c!” I said. “Why would I spell ‘kitchen’ with an r?”
“You tell me,” the teacher said. She strolled off.
That episode stands out among my memories of the year. More than sculpting dragons and writing Halloween stories, more than field trips, math games, and girls I had crushes on, what I remember most vividly is this unfairness. Never mind how trivial and meaningless it was.
It was a c, darn it.
When I became a teacher, I became preoccupied with the enduring legacies of school. I began wondering why we forget so much (quick—what’s a logarithm?) and why we remember what we do. I thought back to my own strongest recollections and quizzed my friends about theirs. A few themes emerged: teachers’ rambling anecdotes, cute lab partners, getting away with mischief.
But most of all, people remember injustices. False accusations of cheating. Getting singled out randomly for scolding. Points deducted on a cheap technicality. As a teacher myself, I vowed I’d do better, that I’d run a fair classroom where every student got a voice and a straight deal.
I’m the opposite. I remember a lot of what I learned in school and very little about being treated badly. Partly, that’s because I was usually treated well, but it’s also because I simply don’t remember the details of what seemed like injustices at the time. I can recall being absolutely outraged in fifth grade over being sent to the principal’s office for something that was Not My Fault, but the incident now seems comic and the reasons why I was punished are lost in the mists of memory.
It might be interesting to do a social science study of whether there’s an inverse correlation, after adjusting for overall memory ability and objective measures of how you were treated, between how much you remember of your lessons and how much you remember of what you perceive as mistreatment.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my relatively low-key outlook on life. I’ve certainly enjoyed my life, but I doubt if my personality is all that helpful in getting ahead. I’m reminded that I saw recently some list of supposed traits of strong leaders, and one was that strong leaders tend to be “petty.” I was reminded of a certain East Coast governor of impressive leadership skills: “How dare you not endorse my re-election? You just wait. I’ll block your lane!”
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Well, you made me Google “logarithm.”
You happy now?
(!)
http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-virtues-of-pettiness/#comment-563414
I can remember at 13 being subjected to corporal punishment (gasp!) for explaining to the girl next to me how a particular piece of “mental arithmetic” could be done. But (i) she was pretty, and (ii) being whacked on the palms with a leather strap holds few fears once you’ve started playing cricket. No cissie gloves for the fielders in cricket, you know.
Anyway, I forgave our maths teacher, whose personality you may judge by his nickname – “Black Jake Watson”.
This reminds me of ‘Theodore Dalrymple”s observations on multiple-offending criminal prisoners who feel a persisting and burning sense of injustice and resentment at having been jailed for the one burglary in the area during the past five years that they *didn’t* actually commit.
(The rest of us see this kind of thing as poetic irony, rough justice, nature balancing itself, compensation in action – or some other essentially *benign* process.)
The proper response to the problem of people who hold lifelong grudges for petty perceived-insults against themselves is NOT to resolve that there should in future be NO petty insults, ever, anywhere.
The solution is for anyone prone to such grudge-holding to develop some kind of realistic perspective on the human condition.
Sorry to hear you were treated unfairly in school, in that instance. I’m sure you would not have lied about it, so it must have been unjust, and very frustrating at the time.
‘I was reminded of a certain East Coast governor of impressive leadership skills: “How dare you not endorse my re-election? You just wait. I’ll block your lane!”’
I’m reminded of a certain US president with repugnant leadership skills: “How dare you not vote for me? You just wait. I’ll let you die waiting to see a doctor in the VA medical system!”
Due to their immaturity, children and adolescents almost always feel aggrieved by criticism, much less punishment, and are unwilling to admit to the slightest fault. There was the time that I threw a desk at a teacher and was taken to the principal, who said, “Young man, if that desk had hit him, you would be in big trouble.” Then he sent me back to class. I still vividly remember the resentful sense of deep injustice that I felt because the principal had disagreed with me that the teacher was the one who was in the wrong.
You’ve probably got a lot of nerd traits (as do most of us commenters), so you tend to remember the content rather than the social-network aspects. People who are more socially focused tend to see pettiness as an indication the other person doesn’t like them, people like you (and me) try to figure out what piece of info we forgot.
It’s more about seeing the world (I guess; any of the non-nerdy people reading this can comment better) as a network of allies, enemies, favors, and debts than a set of tasks. But I’m a nerd, so I could be totally off base.
Memory is a funny thing. I once spoke to someone who I went to school with and he said that our teacher in the first grade was “always shouting”. I have absolutely no memory of her ever being angry, let alone shouting. Now, I’m not saying that I’m right and my former classmate is wrong, but we can’t both be right at the same time…
Like Sailer I have only a few memories of being wronged in school. There is a type of person who believes that teachers give out the best grades to the ass-kissers, and I suspect this is the same kind of person who remembers every little injustice from school. I always found the grading system straight-forward and reasonably fair. A stupid charade, but a fair one. Do the work, know the material, get the good grade. My memory of people who complained about unfair grades were the people who simply didn’t understand the work. The major issue, when it came to fairness, was group projects. (*The* major issue is the existence of public schooling at all, but I digress.)
If only Elliot Rodger had that attitude…
As a 23 year old, I might be the youngest guy reading Sailer. I assume the guys commenting above me are boomers, or at least older than me. You were taught by the Greatest Generation. Of course your students were basically fair. My generation was taught by you. Radical feminists, open radical communists, and crazy cat ladies. I don’t remember the details, but every male in my school eventually just accepted the fact that we were graded harsher and treated worse than the females. Additionally, although a lot of us were conservatives/libertarians, very few were brave enough to actually voice this in class where it would most certainly lower your grade.
Good for you that your teachers weren’t nutballs. Your teachers are dead now though and schools are very different. I suggest reading some of Glenn Reynolds and his wife Helen Smith’s take on modern schools. It isn’t pretty.
Public schools these days are child abuse. It made me tougher, but my children won’t grow up in America, and will learn and grow from other challenges than being indoctrinated for 18 years.
chunkystyle,
Yeah, the guy who came IMMEDIATELY to mind is Obama, the Imperial President. As liberal Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has been going around saying, “He’s the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.” Lose Turley and you’re gone.
I still remember the new history teacher who blackmailed me into joining the debate club by giving me failing exam grades. After I joined they miraculously became As. He was a newby who wanted to impress everyone by “coaching” a winning team. My short-lived revenge came at every meet. In our competitions these were scheduled as teams of two. A total score of 100 points was divided among the four debaters and the team with the highest combined score always won. I almost invariably scored highest and my team almost invariably lost.
Towards the end of the season, this scumbag scheduled a special, off-calendar debate with the local, very-big-name, prep school. When we discovered that their league was debating a different topic I wanted to go down fighting honorably and suggested that as the visitors we were honor-bound to debate their topic. The scumbag was utterly insensitive to any niceties of human conduct and insisted that we debate our topic – His attitude was, “To hell with honor! A win over a prep school would look good on his resume.” We did indeed “win”. But we lost on a higher level that this guy could never understand. He had our “victory” announced over the PA system the next day. When I told my version of events to a few friends the story got around and my history grades once again plummeted.
One thing of note about my school years was that after they were over they really didn’t matter. I did not do well in high school and I assumed that meant that I should not try college. But since that time I have had many jobs finally did go back to school and graduated with a B.S. with Honors in Computer Science. I have held many positions that pay well but neither the college, nor any of the companies that have ever hired me ever asked how well I did in high school. They never asked if I even attended high school. I could have dropped out in the third grade for all they knew!
The teacher who annoyed me was the 9th grade algebra guy who said, “I expect you to be getting an ‘A’ in this class.” Don’t know where he got that idea. There used to be a lot of 30-60-90 triangles on the SAT, which really helped.
‘Bernstein’: “A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
–”Citizen Kane” (1941)
Should I be ashamed that not only do I know what a logarithm is, I actually used one yesterday?
I’m 49 and remember very clearly being stood in the corner in first grade by a bitch nun for someone talking TO me. You don’t forget that sort of humiliation, especially if you were a shy and obedient child. Not only were the teachers mean but my fellow Catholic students were equally mean – so happy when my parents transferred me out to the vastly superior public school a couple of years later.
I remember clearly my 11th grade English teacher scrawling “diction” and “syntax” all over anything I turned in. Of course I had no idea what he meant at the time.