Why Does My Teen Say Their Teacher Is “Evil”? A Parent’s Story About Failing Chemistry
The first thing I heard when I walked through the door was the thud of a binder hitting the kitchen table. My daughter, Maya, was already in full rant mode before I even had my coat off. “I’m failing chemistry, and Mr. Hartman is literally evil,” she announced, crossing her arms.
I braced myself. We’d been through this before with other subjects, but chemistry felt different. Maya had always been a solid B-student, but this class had her in tears more nights than not.
“They don’t even teach,” she continued. “He just goes through the slides so fast, and then gives us these impossible quizzes. The homework counts for almost nothing, but he takes off points if you write the wrong subscript. It’s designed for me to fail. He’s out to get me.”
I’ll admit, my first instinct was to defend the teacher. It’s the classic move, right? “He’s not evil, Maya, he’s just preparing you for college.” But I stopped myself. That wasn’t going to help.
Instead, I asked her to show me the last test. She pulled it out, and there it was: a 61% marked in glaring red ink. I looked past the grade and saw the patterns. She had the right concepts for balancing equations, but her states of matter were always wrong. She wrote “aq” when she meant “l”. She confused “exothermic” and “endothermic” in the essay section. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the idea of chemistry; she was drowning in the specific symbols and vocabulary.
The “evil” teacher narrative was easier for her to accept than the reality: she was lost, and she was embarrassed about it. When you’re sixteen, it’s easier to paint the teacher as a villain than to say, “I feel stupid because I can’t memorize the difference between ionic and covalent bonds.”
It took a few conversations to untangle the actual problem. We didn’t talk about the teacher’s personality. We talked about the structure of the class. Maya struggled with the fast pace. She is a careful, methodical reader, and chemistry requires you to pick up shorthand quickly. Mr. Hartman was a “chalk talk” kind of teacher. He explained a concept, wrote an example, and immediately moved on. He assumed a baseline of knowledge that Maya simply didn’t have. It wasn’t malice; it was a mismatch.
One evening, when Maya was sketching out a diagram of a carbon atom, I noticed she was drawing every single electron. She was getting tangled up in the visual. She didn’t need to draw every particle. She needed to understand the valence shell. It was a lightbulb moment for me as a parent. I wasn’t going to be her chemistry tutor—I barely remembered what Avogadro’s number stood for. But I could help her learn how to study for this specific kind of class.
Here’s where the practical stuff began. We stopped trying to “do” the homework together, which was just causing fights. Instead, we focused on the communication breakdown.
I suggested she email Mr. Hartman directly. Not to complain, but to ask a specific question about a problem she got wrong. I wrote the draft with her. It was short and neutral: “Hi Mr. Hartman, I’m struggling with problem 5 on the worksheet. I understood the stoichiometry, but I don’t see where the ratio came from. Could you point me to the right page in the book?” It was a low-stakes interaction. It wasn’t asking for extra credit or complaining about the pace. It was just a question.
The response was surprisingly normal. He sent back a two-line email with a page number and a timestamp link to a Khan Academy video. It wasn’t warm, but it was helpful. This was a turning point, not because the teacher suddenly became nice, but because Maya realized the teacher wasn’t a monster. He was just a guy who gave efficient, bland help.
We also made a small environmental adjustment in the house. We moved her study space from the busy kitchen table to a quiet corner in the living room, but more importantly, we changed when she studied. She was trying to do chemistry at 10 PM after doing homework for other classes all afternoon. Her brain was fried. We shifted it to a 45-minute block right after school, when she still had residual “school energy.” She focused better, and the frustration level dropped.
The biggest shift, though, was in how we talked about grades. I stopped saying “just try harder.” That phrase is poison. Instead, we talked about spaced practice. Chemistry is like learning a language. You can’t cram the periodic table into your head the night before a test. So, we made a series of flashcards for the polyatomic ions—a pain point for her—and stuck a stack of them in the car. She’d flip through them on the drive to school. It wasn’t a massive overhaul of her schedule, but it was a repeated touchpoint.
There are still bad days. Yesterday she came home frustrated because she mixed up a formula again, and the “evil” word slipped out. But now, when that happens, I ask for the specific thing that triggered the reaction. Was it the quiz format? The time limit? The way the question was structured? Usually, it’s the time limit. She can get the answer, but she needs more time to parse what the question is asking. That’s a different issue than “knowing” the material. It’s a processing speed thing.
We looked at the syllabus and realized the final grade is skewed heavily toward tests. The daily homework—where she actually learns by making mistakes—counts for only 15%. That feels stacked against a kid who learns through repetition and error rather than immediate recall.
Even now, we haven’t fixed it. Her grade is still a low C. The “evil” teacher has not transformed into a mentor figure. He still goes fast, and he still grades harshly on the details. But the dynamic has shifted. Maya no longer sees the class as a place where a villain is trying to destroy her. She sees it as a hard class she hasn’t fully figured out how to pass yet. That may sound like a small distinction, but it’s huge. When you stop fighting the teacher and start focusing on the material, you at least know what you’re fighting against.
It’s messy. She might still fail the semester. But I’ve learned that when a kid says a teacher is “evil,” it’s usually shorthand for “I feel lost and I’m scared to ask for help.” The job isn’t to convince them the teacher is nice. The job is to hand them a question to ask, a quiet space to study, and maybe a stack of flashcards for the car. The rest is up to what happens in that classroom, which, for now, is still a work in progress.
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