How A Teacher’s Offhand Mocking Sticks With Kids For Years (And What We Can Do Better)
I stood at the front of the 10th grade biology classroom, chalk dust sticking to the hole in my right sneaker, and stared at the blank Punnett square on the whiteboard. I’d studied for 45 minutes the night before, sitting on my bed in the new house, while my parents yelled at each other in the kitchen down the hall. I knew the material, but my hands shook so bad I mixed up the dominant and recessive ratio, scribbling 1:1 instead of 3:1.
Mr. Henderson, our teacher who’d been working there since the 70s and liked to tell the same hunting stories every Friday, leaned back against his desk, crossed his arms, and said, “I guess when they say some people don’t have the gene for biology, they’re not kidding.”
The class laughed. I could feel my neck turn bright red, so hot I thought I might pass out. I mumbled the correction, erased the wrong number, and walked back to my seat as fast as I could. I don’t remember anything else from that class, or the rest of the day, except sitting in the back of the library during lunch, not telling anyone why I wasn’t eating.
Twenty years later, I’m a parent to a 7th grader, and last week he came home from school, dropped his backpack on the kitchen floor, and stabbed at his boxed mac and cheese like it owed him money. His math teacher had made a joke in front of the whole class about him forgetting his homework for the third time that month, called him “our resident part-time student.” Everyone laughed. As he told me the story, that old hot knot in my stomach I thought I’d gotten rid of twisted right back up. I still hate Mr. Henderson for that line he threw away without a second thought. I’ve thought about it off and on for two decades, and I still hate him.
People say things like “It was just a joke” or “You need to let it go” or “He probably didn’t even remember saying it five minutes later.” That last part is probably true. That’s the worst part, actually. He didn’t remember. I do. I stopped raising my hand in any class for the rest of high school after that day. I loved my earth science class the year before, but I never signed up for AP biology junior year, even though my counselor said I’d do well. I went to college and majored in English, which I love, but I still sometimes wonder how one 12-word joke shifted what I thought I was capable of.
It’s easy to write this off as one bad teacher, but I’ve talked to enough parents and kids to know this isn’t rare. It happens all the time, when a teacher is running 10 minutes behind on a lesson, when a kid is being a little disruptive, when you just want to get a quick laugh to get the class back on track. But what adults don’t see is that most kids walking into school already feel like they’re one mistake away from everyone seeing they don’t belong. I was the new kid that year, my parents were getting divorced, I wore hand-me-down clothes, I already felt like an outsider. That one joke just confirmed everything I was already scared of.
The thing that helped me when I was figuring out how to handle my son’s situation is that it’s not about being nice all the time, or never correcting kids. It’s about where you do it. If I had to give one concrete tip to teachers, it’s this: all correction, all frustrated feedback, stays between you and the kid. If a kid messes up a problem on the board, you don’t need to joke about them not studying. Just say “That’s a common mix-up, let’s go through it step by step together” and move on. If a kid forgets their homework three weeks in a row, pull them aside after class when no one else is around, and say “I noticed you’ve struggled to turn in homework this month. Is something getting in the way at home?” That’s it. No audience, no joke, just a quick conversation. If you slip up and say something you shouldn’t have in front of the class, pull the kid aside that same day and say “I shouldn’t have said that in front of everyone. That was my mistake, I’m sorry.” It takes 30 seconds, and it erases 90% of the sting.
For parents, when your kid comes home upset about something like this, don’t rush to fix it or tell them it’s no big deal. The first thing I said to my son was “That sounds so embarrassing. It wasn’t okay for him to say that in front of everyone, and I’d be hurt too.” Then I told him about Mr. Henderson, that I still think about that day sometimes. He didn’t say much, but he stopped stabbing his mac and cheese and looked up, like he was relieved it wasn’t just him being too sensitive. Then I asked him what he wanted me to do: did he just want to vent, or did he want me to email his teacher to talk about it? He wanted me to email, so I did, and the teacher pulled him aside the next day to apologize, and that was that.
My son is doing fine now. He still forgets his homework sometimes, but he laughs about it with his friends now. I still don’t like Mr. Henderson, though. I saw him at my 10 year high school reunion, he came up to me and said he remembered me as a good writer, and I just smiled and walked away. I don’t lose sleep over it, but that little twist of anger is still there sometimes, when I have to speak in front of a group, when I mess up a simple task in front of other people. It’s still there, quiet, after 20 years. That’s the thing about offhand mockery: it doesn’t take much to leave a mark that doesn’t really fade. We just have to remember that, and try a little harder to do better.
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