Mean teacher: I was very busy, ma’am.
Unknowing sub: Well, I’m sorry.
Mean teacher: You will be!
We thought that was awesome.
It wasn’t so fun when I was her target.
For our first term, we studied Native Americans. We read books, wrote essays, baked corn cakes. We had to make art projects to end our unit, and I worked so very hard on mine. I even skipped a Halloween party to stay home and toil on my diorama. My paper Cherokees kept flopping over, but I had a horse and cart from my Little People farm collection and I painted the shoebox myself. I was pretty impressed with my work.
Then I showed up at school with my droopy cut-out drawings and all the other students had these friggin’ masterpieces that were obviously done by their parents. The teacher walked around, oohing and ahhing, and then her eyes fell on my project. You would have thought it was a pile of puke.
I got an S- (satisfactory minus?) and later in class offered to make a tree for some other stupid project we were doing. “You’re going to make a tree?” she sneered.
I nodded.
“It better not be anything like your diorama.”
I got all sniffly.
“You didn’t spend very much time on that, did you?”
I squeaked out a protest and ran to the bathroom.
I’m not saying it was a good diorama. It was a piece of crap. But I was just a little kid. I was too young and innocent to experience that awful feeling when you have done your best, and your best isn’t good enough. I could take it when the theater director at college explained there was a lot of “synchronized motion” in the play and he didn’t think I was ready for that but would I like to sing backstage? (I am even worse at dancing than dioramas, and I knew it.)
But when I made that awful project, I didn’t know. I absurdly thought I had done well, that I did a great job, in fact, when really my work was beneath satisfactory.
I’m not saying teachers should pretend their students are good at something when they clearly are not. But there’s such a thing as constructive criticism. She put in a snide remark about the diorama every chance she got, in front of the whole class. I was very hurt by this. I was humiliated. Kids do horrible artwork all the time, but their parents and teachers say it’s beautiful and hang the scribbled mess on the wall. I wasn’t a baby, but I think I was owed that, at least in elementary school.
To this day, having to do any art project terrifies me.
