What Happens When A Teacher Mocks A Student: What Parents And Educators Need To Know
The scratchy linoleum of 10th grade biology still smells like formaldehyde and old eraser shavings to me. I was standing at the front of the room, holding a crumpled diagram of a dissected frog, my palms so sweaty the ink was bleeding. I’d stayed up until 1 a.m. quizzing myself the night before, but my brain went completely blank the second 30 pairs of eyes turned to me. I pointed to a mass of tissue and said, “Uh… liver?” Mr. Hale, our teacher who’d been teaching long enough to have had my dad in class, pushed off the lab counter and laughed. “Liver? That’s the stomach. Did you even crack your textbook last night, or were you too busy hanging out at the mall with your friends? Some people just don’t care enough to try, huh?” The whole room snickered. I left the diagram on the podium, walked out, and hid in a bathroom stall for the rest of the period. I’m 32 now, and I still hate him for it.
I told my mom about it that night over meatloaf, pushing the peas around my plate. She sighed and said Mr. Hale was a “tough but good” teacher, that I just needed to grow a thicker skin and study harder next time. I didn’t tell her that I had studied, that I got panic headaches when I had to speak in front of people, that I’d already been skipping lunch for a week because I was convinced everyone thought I was dumb. I stopped raising my hand in any class after that. I dropped honors bio the next semester, and when it was time to apply for college, I crossed the environmental science program I’d daydreamed about for years off my list. I told myself I wasn’t good enough at science anyway. It wasn’t until my own son came home from 7th grade two years ago, slamming his backpack so hard the magnets fell off his locker door, that I realized how much that one throwaway comment had shaped me.
Sam, my oldest, has always hated being the center of attention. He’d struggled with pre-algebra all fall, and I’d been meeting with his tutor twice a week after school. That day, he’d gotten called on to solve a problem at the board, mixed up a negative sign, and his teacher joked, “Looks like someone spent more time on Fortnite last night than on their homework.” The whole class laughed. He wouldn’t talk about it at first, just sat on the couch staring at his shoes, hood pulled up over his head, a half-eaten granola bar sweating through its wrapper on the coffee table. I remembered what my mom did, how she jumped to “what did you do wrong” before anything else, so I didn’t do that. I grabbed two lemonades from the fridge, the kind with extra pulp he likes, sat down next to him, and said, “That sounds so embarrassing. I’d be furious too. That was a really rude thing for him to say in front of everyone.” That’s all I said for 10 minutes. He started crying then, and told me he’d forgotten the negative sign because his little sister had kept him up half the night with a fever, and he was already exhausted.
I told him about Mr. Hale, about the frog, about hiding in that bathroom stall. That’s when I started thinking about how little we talk about how these small, offhand moments stick. People will tell you it’s just a bad day for the teacher, just get over it, but that’s not how it works. For me, it wasn’t just the comment—it was that no one told me it was okay to be hurt by it. No one said the teacher was wrong to say that out loud where everyone could hear.
I emailed Sam’s teacher that night. I didn’t yell or call him out, which I think a lot of parents assume you have to do to be heard. I just said, “Sam came home really upset after what happened in math class yesterday. He’s been working really hard on his pre-algebra this semester, and he’s already really self-conscious about getting answers wrong in front of people. The comment about Fortnite left him feeling humiliated, and he’s said he doesn’t want to raise his hand at all anymore. I wanted to share that with you so you know how it landed.” The teacher wrote back the next morning, apologized, said he’d been stressed about state testing that week and made a dumb joke he didn’t mean. He pulled Sam aside after class the next day and apologized to him directly. That didn’t fix all of Sam’s anxiety about math, but it took the sting out of it. He still gets nervous, but he hasn’t refused to go to class, which I can’t say I would have been able to do at his age.
What I’ve learned from this is that the small, unplanned moments matter way more than we think. For parents, the first thing you can do is not default to the teacher’s side just because they’re the adult. I get it, it’s easy to think that teachers know best, that your kid must have done something to deserve the comment. But instead of opening with “did you study?” or “you just need to ignore it”, try opening with “that sounds terrible, I’d be hurt too”. That one line is enough to keep the moment from turning into something that sticks with them for 20 years.
For teachers, it’s a simple shift: never call out a kid’s effort or perceived lack of effort in front of the whole class. If you’re frustrated that a kid isn’t preparing, pull them aside after the bell rings, when no one else is around. Instead of joking about their screen time or their after-school habits in front of everyone, say “I noticed you’ve been struggling with the last few assignments. Is something going on that I should know about? Can I help you get caught up?” Shame doesn’t make kids work harder. It just makes them stop trying.
I ran into Mr. Hale at the grocery store last spring. He was pushing a cart full of orange juice and dog food, his hair completely white now. I turned down the cereal aisle before he could see me. I don’t feel guilty about that. I don’t think I need to forgive him to be a healthy person, or to be a good mom. That moment still shapes how I talk to my kids, how I talk to the teen kids I volunteer with at the local library. I still don’t know much about frog anatomy, and I still hate public speaking. But I know now what to do when someone I love gets hurt that way. That’s the only good thing that came out of it, and that’s enough for me.
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