When Your Child Says They’re Failing Chemistry and the Teacher Is Evil – What Worked for Us
The kitchen table still had crumbs from breakfast when my daughter Maya walked in with her backpack slung over one shoulder, the other arm hugging a folder to her chest. She didn’t say hello. She just dropped the folder on the table and said, “I’m failing chemistry, and my teacher is evil.”
I’d heard variations of this before. In ninth grade it was the math teacher who “hated” her. In tenth, it was the history teacher who “never explained anything.” But this time there was something different in her voice—not just anger, but an edge of defeat. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she hadn’t even bothered to unzip her jacket.
I poured her a glass of water and sat down across from her. “Tell me about evil,” I said.
She snorted. “She rushes through everything. She calls on people randomly, and when you don’t know the answer, she just moves on. Like, doesn’t even give you a second. Last week, I asked her to repeat the steps for balancing equations, and she said, ‘You already covered this in algebra.’ Then she smiled at me. A fake smile. Like I was wasting her time.”
That did sound frustrating. Also, somewhere in there, I recognized a familiar pattern: Maya was describing a teacher who wasn’t patient and who didn’t adjust to her pace. I’d had teachers like that. They’re not fun. But “evil” felt like more of a story Maya was telling herself to protect against the sting of doing badly in a subject she’d never been confident in.
Here’s the thing about labelling a teacher as evil: it feels good for about a day, but it doesn’t get you closer to understanding why the work isn’t sticking. So after she finished her rant, I asked a different question. “What exactly do you have to do for the next test?”
She looked surprised. “I don’t know. It’s on stoichiometry or something.”
“You don’t know what’s on the test?”
“The teacher gave us a study guide, but I lost it.”
That was a small, concrete clue. The “evil” teacher had given them a study guide. Maya lost it. That didn’t make the teacher evil, but it made the situation clearer. We started with practical steps.
That night, I helped her find the study guide by checking the school’s online portal. It was there, attached to the announcements. We printed it out. Then I did something that felt counterintuitive: I asked her to go through the study guide and put a star next to any topic she thought she could explain to me without notes. She couldn’t do that for any of them. So we made a list of the topics, from “mole conversions” to “empirical formulas,” and I suggested she pick the first two that seemed least scary. She chose “percent composition” and “sign figures.”
The next day at school, I called the teacher. I didn’t lead with “Maya says you’re evil.” I just introduced myself and said, “Maya is struggling with stoichiometry, and she mentioned you gave a study guide. She lost it, but we found it online. Can I ask what you’d recommend for a student who’s behind on the early material?” The conversation was short. The teacher said she posts extra practice problems on the classroom site and that Maya is welcome to attend Thursday lunch help sessions. She also said, “Maya often has her head down. She might be one of those kids who needs to hear the explanation twice – I can’t always slow down for one student, but I’m happy to go over specific questions during office hours.”
That was it. The “evil” teacher was just a busy person with a specific way of teaching and a limited amount of patience for disruption. But she had created off-ramps for students who sought them out. Maya hadn’t sought them out because she was too busy being angry.
We made a small plan. Thursday lunch wasn’t possible because Maya had a conflict, but she did agree to go to office hours the following Tuesday. I wrote it on the family calendar. We also set up a fifteen-minute routine after dinner: Maya would do one practice problem from the extra sheet, and if she got stuck, she could text her older cousin who had taken chemistry last year. The cousin was happy to help, which took the edge off having to admit confusion to the teacher right away.
The Tuesday office hours came. Maya went alone. She was quiet about it when she came home, but she said, “She showed me a trick for molar mass. It was actually kind of helpful.” She didn’t say the teacher was nice. She said it was helpful. That was enough.
The bigger shift happened over the next few weeks. Maya started using the study guide more proactively. She printed out a fresh copy and kept it in her chemistry binder. She didn’t suddenly love chemistry, but she stopped saying the teacher was evil. She said things like, “She talks fast, but I have to keep up,” or “I blanked on the quiz, but I knew the formula from studying.”
We still have bad days. Last week, she came home and said the teacher marked her lab report wrong for “not showing units,” and Maya felt it was unfair. I didn’t jump in with advice. I just listened, then asked, “Do you know what she wants you to do differently next time?” Maya shrugged. I suggested she email the teacher that night, using a simple sentence: “Could you please explain what you meant by ‘not showing units’? I want to do it right on the next one.” She sent the email, and the teacher responded within an hour, with an example.
What’s working right now is less about conquering chemistry and more about slowly dismantling the belief that a difficult teacher is an obstacle you can’t get around. The label “evil” didn’t protect Maya. It actually made her avoid asking for help because she’d decided the help would be unwelcome. Once she started treating the teacher as just another person with expectations, the interactions became more transactional and less emotionally charged. That didn’t make them warm, but it made them manageable.
We still don’t know if Maya will pass the semester. Her grade was hovering around a low C when we last checked, and last week’s lab report didn’t help. But she’s no longer coming home with that flat, hopeless tone. She’s annoyed, or tired, or occasionally proud of herself for getting a problem right. Those are all normal feelings. “Evil” was an escape hatch from feeling any of them.
I’m not saying every strict teacher is secretly wonderful. Some teachers are genuinely dismissive or poorly organized. But before agreeing that a teacher is evil, it’s worth putting that label aside for a week and asking a different question: what specifically is the student supposed to do, and who can help them figure it out? That’s not a glamourous solution. It’s just a boring, practical one. It involves printing out study guides, sending emails, and showing up to office hours even when you don’t want to. It involves acknowledging that a teacher’s job isn’t to make your child feel supported every minute of the day—it’s to teach chemistry. Sometimes those two things overlap, and sometimes they don’t.
The other day, Maya had a quiz on moles. She came home and said, “I actually think I might have done okay.” She didn’t say she loved her teacher. But she said “okay,” and that’s a lot better than “evil.” We’re still in the middle of it. The semester isn’t over, and I expect more complaints and more missed study guides. But the story doesn’t have to end with a miraculous turnaround. It just has to end with a student who can ask a question without deciding the world is against her first. That’s a skill she’ll use long after she forgets what stoichiometry is.
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