I am working as a sign language interpreter in a classroom. I’ve been working with one particular student since she was five years old, and it’s been a pleasure to see her growing up and keeping pace with her classmates.

The teacher has just gotten a new aide: a stern, older-looking woman who — and I don’t mean to stereotype — looks like she’s stepped through a timewarp from the 1950s. She immediately takes a dislike to me, and she seems to favor specific students using the Ayn Rand method of education.

After a few days, I notice that [Teacher’s Aide] is standing between me and my student, blocking her view. It’s not a huge classroom, so she must not have noticed. I move aside and restore my line of sight with my student… and then [Teacher’s Aide] moves again.

Me: “Excuse me. You’re blocking my view with [Student].”

Teacher’s Aide: “Yes, I know.”

Me: “So, you’re doing it on purpose?”

Teacher’s Aide: “I’m doing it so that she doesn’t rely on you too much. She can’t be expecting to have interpreters every step of her adult life, so it’s in her interest to learn this now.”

Me: “She won’t be learning anything if she can’t understand what’s being taught!”

The teacher steps over and asks what’s going on.

Me: “[Teacher’s Aide] is purposefully blocking my view with [Student].”

Teacher’s Aide: “I’m not too sure what [Student] is doing here in the first place! She should be with her own kind, learning at an appropriate pace—”

Me: “Her own kind?!“

I admit that I said that way too loud. The children start murmuring.

Teacher: “[Teacher’s Aide], stop blocking [Student]’s view of [My Name]. We will discuss this further after class!”

The rest of the day went by unhindered.

After school, I returned to the classroom to speak to [Teacher]. She told me that [Teacher’s Aide] was a substitute and would not be coming back, based on her outdated opinions not just in [Teacher]’s class but in every class she had “assisted” that day. Good riddance!

A comment on this story reminds me of my time going through mathematics in high school. I was in a magnet program in middle school. (That’s grades six through eight, or about eleven to thirteen years old.) By the end of middle school, I was even with my fellow magnet students in Algebra I.

When I started high school with them in this same magnet program, I decided to follow the program’s plan outlined on our first week there: Pre-Calculus in ninth grade (fourteen years old), Algebra II in tenth grade (fifteen years old), Trigonometry in eleventh grade (sixteen years old), and Calculus A and B (introduction to calculus concepts and single-variable calculus) in twelfth grade (seventeen years old).

It turned out that all of my classmates were in this race to advance in mathematics class, taking summer classes elsewhere, getting certified tutoring each evening, etc. By the time we reached eleventh grade, I was the only one in this magnet program still in Trigonometry while they were taking classes in Calculus A, Calculus B, Calculus C (multivariable calculus), Linear Algebra (vectors and matrices), Fractals, etc. As they all took Trigonometry at summer school, either that previous summer or the summer before, and the magnet students in grades below me did the same, there wasn’t actually a Trigonometry class there. They put me in a “special” class outside of the magnet program for Trigonometry. It felt awkward that I was acing this class while all of the non-magnet students were struggling hard, and I was teaching them in group projects as much as the teacher did.

I guess the plan given to us from the magnet program was just a bar to compare yourself to rather than something to actually follow, considering I got some deal of flak from the counselor for not committing myself and not having ambition.

Perhaps I got the last laugh. When I did take Calculus A and B combined in the last year of high school, I took the Advanced Placement class for it (AP Calculus I). I took the standardized test that accompanied it and got a score on that test that put me in the ninetieth percentile in this magnet program. I was exceptionally good at calculus, even compared to the school’s overachievers. Haste makes waste. (Not that the counselor cared about that.)

Related:
Slow Down, Whiz-Kid; The Computer Can’t Handle It!

I still remember in preschool when my friend and I were reading all the colors out loud on one of those Crayola super packs. I got straight-up yelled at and sent to the principal’s office for saying, “Orange Pizzazz,” because the teacher said I had called someone a “p*ss-a**” and “would not listen” despite having the crayon as evidence.

After a thirty-minute scolding and waiting for my mum to leave work to pick me up “for my suspension”, she came in all apologetic. When I explained to her the whole situation, not the school’s side, she went ape-s***.

Mum: “How about ‘c**t’?! Can he say ‘c**t’?! Because you’re all being c***s right now! This is f****** ridiculous!”

I’d heard her say “s***” once before; that was the only swear I had ever heard from her, and we had just been rear-ended in traffic.

She just went off while I was sitting there all shocked and the principal was turning deeper shades of red with every word.

I got unsuspended on the spot, but my mum pulled me out of school for the day anyway. We had a lovely day, and she explained very well how I shouldn’t swear like that unless it was absolutely necessary and I’d exhausted all civility.

Mum: “When being civil simply isn’t working, sometimes you might have to call someone a p*ss-a**.”

The next day at school, I learned that I now had the stigma of being the kid who got the Crayola super pack taken away.

I’m pretty much the only geek in my grade, so whenever a teacher needs help, they come to me. This one teacher insisted on showing the IT guy her computer instead of me as the Wi-Fi wasn’t connecting.

Me: “You don’t need to show the IT guy your laptop.”

Teacher: “I will let the paid experts deal with my laptop instead of a student, thank you.”

I reached forward and simply switched the Wi-Fi switch from off to on.

The laptop connected to the Wi-Fi, and she gave me a detention.

I have just started teaching a new class of kids on the first day of school. Most of them don’t have their own phones, but one of them is going around the classroom with an older smartphone and taking photos of the walls before class starts.

Me: “Hey, [Kid]! What are you doing?”

Kid: “My dad asked me to take photos of everything in all my classrooms. He wants to check that there isn’t anything that supports the libel agenda.”

Me: “The libel agenda?”

Kid: “Something like that. Something about snow.”

Me: “The liberal agenda? Snowflakes?”

Kid: “Yeah… that! I don’t know why my dad hates snow so much. I mean… we live in Colorado.”