What Happens When A Teacher Mocks A Student: A Parent’s Story And Practical Lessons
The chalk dust tasted like dry cement in the back of my throat. I was 13, in 8th grade math, standing at the front of the room in a too-big hand-me-down sweatshirt, staring at the quadratic equation I’d just written on the green chalkboard. I’d gotten the first two steps right, but my brain went completely blank when I got to factoring. My sneakers squeaked against the linoleum as I shifted my weight, and I could feel 25 pairs of eyes on the back of my neck.
Mr. Hale, our teacher who always wore a tie with coffee stains, leaned back against his desk and crossed his arms. “Take your time,” he said, and the whole class could hear the smile in his voice. “I’m sure it’ll come to you. Unless… you didn’t do any of the practice problems last night, did you?”
A few snickers rippled through the room. I felt my face burn so hot I thought my ears would melt. I opened my mouth to say I’d tried, I’d gotten stuck on three of them, but nothing came out.
“Right,” he said, nodding. “Some people just don’t have the mind for this kind of thing. Go sit down before you waste any more of our time.”
I walked back to my seat, folded my arms on the desk, and hid my face for the rest of the period. I never raised my hand in any class for the rest of high school. I still hate him for it, 27 years later.
Last month, my own 13-year-old daughter Lila came home from middle school, dropped her backpack by the door, and refused to eat the after-school granola bar I’d set out for her. She’d had her hand up to ask what a control variable was for the second day in a row, she said, and her science teacher joked, “Haven’t we already covered this? Do you even pay attention during notes?” The whole lab table laughed.
“I don’t want to go back to science ever again,” she said, staring at her scuffed tennis socks. “I’d rather fail than ever raise my hand again.”
That’s when Mr. Hale’s face popped right back into my head, clear as that old chalkboard. Lila asked me later why I still hated him, after all this time. “It was just one comment,” she said. “Why do you still think about it?”
It’s not the comment itself, I told her. It’s that the comment turned into a story I told about myself for decades. I’m just bad at math. I don’t get numbers. I shouldn’t even try, because I’ll just look stupid in front of everyone. I skipped every optional math class in high school, majored in English in college just to avoid any more math requirements, and still get a tight twist in my chest when I have to calculate a tip or figure out the square footage for new carpet. It’s not that I couldn’t do it. It’s that I learned, very clearly, that looking stupid was worse than not trying at all.
Most of the time, these little mockeries aren’t even meant to be mean. Teachers are tired, they’re overworked, they have 30 kids to get through a lesson in 45 minutes, and a repeated question or a frozen student can feel like an annoying speed bump. An offhand joke feels like a quick way to get the class back on track, but it sticks with the kid way longer than the 10 seconds it takes to say it. Working with other parents at the elementary school I volunteer at, I’ve heard dozens of these stories. Everyone has a teacher like this: a small, cutting comment that sticks around longer than any lesson they actually taught.
The good news is, there are small, easy things both teachers and parents can do to keep that hurt from sticking, or fix it when it happens. For teachers, it doesn’t take big overhauls of lesson plans, just a couple of small shifts in what you say when a kid is stuck. If a student freezes at the front of the class, don’t comment on their effort or ability. Just say, “That’s the trickiest step of this whole problem—let’s do this part together. What did you have so far?” If a kid asks the same question twice, don’t call attention to the repeat. Just say, “Great question, let me walk through it again from the start” and move on. And if you slip up, if you make a joke at a kid’s expense before you even think about it? Pull them aside after class, one on one, and say, “I was frustrated with how class was going today, and what I said was out of line. I’m sorry.” That takes 30 seconds, and it can stop a hurt that would otherwise last decades.
For parents, when your kid comes home humiliated, the first move isn’t to storm the school or tell them it’s no big deal. It sounds small, but just say, “That would make me so angry and embarrassed too. That was a rude thing for them to say.” Don’t minimize their feeling before they’ve even had a chance to get it out. Then, ask them what they want to do about it, don’t just decide for them. When Lila told me her story, I didn’t immediately call the principal. I said, “What would make this better for you? Do you want me to talk to the teacher, do you want to go talk to her together, or do you just want to lay low this week and see how it goes?” Lila said she just wanted me to send a quick email saying she was upset, no big meeting needed. Her teacher wrote back right away, pulled Lila aside after class the next day and apologized, and that was enough. Lila’s raising her hand again now, slowly, but she’s doing it.
I still think about Mr. Hale sometimes. I saw him in the grocery store a few years back, retired, pushing a cart full of lemonade and hot dog buns for a cookout. He didn’t recognize me. I stood there by the cereal aisle, and that old tightness came back to my chest. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him, really. I don’t think I have to.
I’m slowly unlearning the story he gave me, anyway. I’ve started doing those little daily math puzzles on my phone, just for fun, and I get half of them right now. I don’t call myself bad at math as much as I used to. That hate I carry isn’t useless, though. It reminds me to watch what I say when Lila gets stuck on homework, when a kid I volunteer with freezes during reading time. It reminds me that the small, offhand comments we make when we’re tired stick around a lot longer than we think.
Some days it’s still there, that old hurt. But I’d rather carry it than let it happen to another kid.
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