For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for October 24, 2015

I never had a teacher that annoying when I was a kid. Most of my teachers actually cared about kids and didn’t hold them up for ridicule. How come poor Elizabeth gets stuck with such a dud teacher?

what a horrible reputation Elizabeth is getting in class

What a terrible teacher! A teacher to a young child like Elizabeth has a lot of authority over them. She could have simply called Elizabeth over after the “Pencil Check” and tell her that she shouldn’t be biting her pencils. This is a humiliating approach to reprimanding a student. I am disappointed in this teacher, who should be fired or at least told to change her teaching methods.

I have a lot of unresolved anger.

Hey Teach, bite this!

Man this teacher’s awful lol

Not a true depiction of first-grade teachers where I live. And yes, Elizabeth, sometimes you just have to bite something.

Unfortunately i had one just like this in 4th grade. I was a straight A student for all my other grades but with this teacher I earned 4 Ds. My parents didn’t hesitate to whoop us if we were lazy in school and got bad grades. But amazingly, they saw what was up with this teacher and spared my rear end for a year. Private school to boot. Bottom line is there are bad teachers……. and bad CEOs. Bad bus drivers. Bad priests. Bad is bad. Teachers aren’t bad. Bad teachers are bad.

Wow, did teachers do this in the 70s?

More of this " we" crap!!!!!!!!!!!!! Get over yourself you old bag!!!!!

One of kids purposes in life is to spread germs.

When I was in first grade (1963) I had a teacher who had a keen sense of smell…and I can still remember her “investigation” of determining who pooped in their pants by making each child go into the coat room (where she waited) so she could “check them”. OMG, luckily it wasn’t me, but I felt humiliated anyway. Can you imagine a teacher getting away with that today? I also remember her asking a little girl to sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the child, knowing only the parody, began to sing: “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah…teacher hit me with a ruler….I bopped her on the bean with a rotten tangerine and her teeth came marching out…” OMG, the teacher lit into her 100x worse a humiliating scolding than Elizabeth! I remember the girl crying (sobbing!) in humiliation. We are talking 52 years ago….school was quite different.

Just don’t share your pencil. (That’s probably a no-no anyway.) They are your germs. They won’t hurt you.

Can’t wait for the teacher to find out Elizabeth is a lefty. It was cruel what they used to do to left handed people, especially learning to write.

Praise in public. Criticize in private. Teacher needs to learn a lesson.

Consider this —you touch that pencil with your hands, and your hands have touched many other things. That is only one of the many ways that germs are spread. It’s a nervous habit. And it’s a bad habit anyway. Better to break it earlier than try to break it later. And that is also good practice for self-control. which you will need amply later in life.

Lynn’s Notes:

This was my grade two teacher. She actually rapped me on the head with my pencil, calling me “Germ spreader!” The thing which really got me down was that I hadn’t bitten my pencil. I liked to keep my stuff in good shape. They were my brother’s teeth marks she’d discovered.

Annoying heck, the teacher is shaming her. Perfectly understand her thinking about biting the teacher.

Elizabeth’s teacher is Dolores Umbridge in disguise!

I think Lizzie has the right idea.Sometimes you’ve just want to bite something. Or someone.

This lady is horrible! I hope Lizzie tells her parents. I hope Lynn told when this happened to her.

Another social engineering drone who speaks in thefirst person plural.

This brings back too many sad memories. I moved to a small town, where if they didn’t know who your family was, they felt they had the right to single you out, to the others. And then of course, the other kids thought it was okay too. :(

Oh, yes… this takes me back.My Grade Two teacher loved to single me out. And when the teacher makes fun of you, it teaches the other kids that it’s okay to make fun of you. This is exactly how bullying started for me.…You would think a teacher would be smarter than that.

Why are you upset with the teacher? She’s just teaching her what her mother didn’t.

I had a bullying teacher just like this in the 5th grade (the early 1960s). She would decide she didn’t like you that day and would find something to give you heck about and then belittle you loudly in front of the entire class. Needless to say there wasn’t a single 5th grader in the school that liked her. We called her “Monster Mullen.”

Given the teacher’s germophobic propaganda, seems to me that biting the pencil would be a wonderful way to prevent other students from “borrowing” it.

Grade 2 teachers seem to have a thing about biting pencils. Mine was not nearly so bullying, but if she caught a student biting his pencil, she’d have him dip the end in Keene’s mustard powder to discourage the practice . I think the concern was more about damaging our teeth. People were not so germaphobic in those days. Or perhaps I should say not so germ-aware.

Just be glad you don’t have The Sister’s of Perpetual Pain teaching in your school.

SPOILER ALERTI guess one of the reasons Elizabeth became a teacher was to undo the damage caused by teachers like that.

When I was in first grade I had a teacher who did that sort of thing. I have a mental block when it comes to math that I deal with still today due to her holding me up for ridicule.

I do not let students bite the pencils, but instead of reprimands I give them something they can chew on, e.g. toothpicks.

I’m convinced that my Grade 1 teacher was out to get me (this was 1962). We didn’t have a public kindergarten at the time so for a lot of kids like me this was our first experience with organized schooling. I had a bit of a speech thing at the time so that when I was counting to ten (as high as we went in Grade 1 originally) I tended to say “free” instead of “three.” She would go after me as soon as I said “free” instead of “three.” Then there was the Halloween incident. We all dressed up in our costumes for a sort of parade through the school and then went to the gym for treats and chocolate milk, which we had to bring from home. The dairy we used (this was in the days of home delivery) didn’t sell cartons, they used glass bottles. So we were sitting on the gym floor having our milk and treats. Then as now I was a bit of a klutz and I knocked over my bottle of milk. My teacher not only yelled at me for spilling my milk on the gym floor but ordered me to clean it up then yelled at me for not doing it the proper way! No wonder I had lousy attendance that year. The funny thing is that I can remember the names of all of my elementary school teachers – and this was around 50 years ago – except my Grade 1 teacher and my Grade 4 teacher.

None of my teachers were even HALF that bad. Alas, each of my son’s had at least one that was WORSE. The youngest has never fully recovered.

Snoopy agrees:.“I feel every now and then that I gotta bite someone!”

she should bite the teacher next time. what a crappy teacher.

What a judgemental b*tc*