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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/My_Brain_Is_A_Rental on 2024-11-06 09:40:01+00:00.

When I was in high school I wasn’t very good at writing essays in English. I knew all the concepts but flushing out a few pages of BS wasn’t something I could do in 45 minutes of class time.

For a few weeks we had a student teacher completing her Prac block. Knowing that kids circle substitute and student teachers like sharks she didn’t take any shit but overcompensated and more than a few of the kids in my class checked out or outright antagonised her. This just made her more hostile to the smart ass teenagers we were.

For me, check out was when I tried to answer a question about the use of a very specific term in a poem about WW1 soldiers. The author used “wheeled chair” instead of “wheelchair”. I put my hand up and gave some interpretation that made sense and I was always told there’s no wrong answers in these sorts of discussions. As a reward for participating I was treated to a fairly harsh “No. You’re wrong”… noted.

So we have to complete an essay on what we’ve learnt the last few weeks and the question is along the lines of “How did the author make you feel when reading (text)?”. Me, having mentally checked out of English class, not being good at that sort of thing and being the shitty kid I was wrote out a couple paragraphs summarising the message of the text and saying that I didn’t feel anything when reading it.

The next Monday we get our essays back and I’ve got a 5/25. More than I thought so those two paragraphs must have been pretty good. The prac teacher takes me outside and goes on about how she’s disappointed and I could have done better and how everyone else wrote two or three pages but I didn’t get half a page done. It all seemed pretty disingenuous to me because she hadn’t shied away from telling me or anyone else when we were wrong. She asked why I wrote that and I replied that I genuinely didn’t have an emotional reaction to it. Why lie? She then says I have the choice to either take the fail or rewrite the essay next class. “Ok, I’ll take the grade. No point wasting time”.

Her face dropped a bit and she took a while to reply “Really? Are you sure?” “Yep, I’m no good at this sort of thing remember. I didn’t get it right in class so why would that change overnight?” Defeated, she sent me back to class and went next door for a few minutes. A little while later I was called out again to speak with my actual teacher. She asked me why I didn’t think I could do better and what didn’t I understand about the question. After talking for a while she said that I will HAVE to retake the essay with a new text and question. One that was worded so I couldn’t just say “I didn’t”.

In the end I wrote around two pages and passed, just. The prac teacher was there for another two weeks or so and I noticed a few things. First, she didn’t react with outright contempt when someone gave an answer that wasn’t what she wanted. Second, she didn’t try try to play a game of wits against any more self sabotaging teenagers.

Bonus story about my actual teacher. She was younger and really nice but now that I’m older I think she was a one of those sensitive but naive sorts of people. We had to come up with a tv pilot episode and read it out to the class. One kid read out the first episode of Burn Notice word for word. Top marks and a heap of praise