“Mean Teachers” May Be Effective Teachers
By Edward Martinez | Student worker at CLIMB Career Program at June 23, 2024 | 5:45 pm | Print
Like fluffy bunnies hopping up to kick you in the back whenever you begin to falter, your teachers spur you on, into the future. When youth is in its spring’s dawn the shadow of the future’s dusk is never so easily seen, save through the lens of hindsight; “what is this guy talking about”, I hear your young minds crying out in exasperation. What I am saying is this; though there are, to be sure, bad teachers in your school, you will someday look back at many of those meaner teachers whom you have placed in that category and understand why they were so strict. If you will allow me, I will tell you a story.
I remember that I once had a teacher who was incredibly mean. She would give my class mountains of homework every day on things that we had only just been taught how to do; then, when everyone failed she would just move on to giving us our next impossible task. She was also in the habit of calling the parents of any students that talked back to her. I hated her so much for how much her style of teaching had stressed me out; many other students felt the same and the principal’s office was flooded with complaints from their parents because their parents didn’t understand why she was pushing her students so hard. I remember that when the principal forced her to slow down she was in a foul mood for weeks and the entire class heaved a sigh of relief when the work became easier and far less was being expected of us. Little did we know that there had been a method to her madness.
Two years later, when I entered middle school, I was unprepared for the revival of vanished forms that would take place. I was now, once more, given homework nearly every day; and because I had not gotten used to that in elementary school, when my third grade teacher was trying to get me used to it, I was thoroughly overwhelmed by all the work and my grades quickly fell. Now that I was in middle school there was no one who was going to push for less work for me, I would just have to endure it. Not only had that part of her lesson plan been recurrent, but we were once more expected to move quickly from concept to concept and digest every bit of information quickly; at best we got three days to learn something before being tested, but usually we would be given a study sheet the day we learned it and an assessment the next day. If my strict third grade teacher had not been stifled, I would have gotten used to these changes early and would not have had such a rocky start adjusting to the pace expected of students after middle school.
Often when we feel that a teacher is being mean, they are only doing their best to push us forward into the future. They want us to learn the hard lessons early so that we won’t be snuck up on by them.
“But my teacher yells at the whole class”, hear the sniveling voices of the more sensitive of my readers saying with a whimper; as if that were not more of a reason to perk up your ears and listen. Well, as a great man once said “with thunder and heavenly fireworks one hath to speak unto languid and sleeping senses”. The meaning of that quote is simple; when people won’t expend the effort to listen you sometimes have to shock them into listening, and how your teachers do that is by screaming at you. More often than not, what your teachers have to say is important and if you listen when they speak, and I mean really listen, they won’t have to raise their voices.
The short version of this lesson is if your teacher are strict it’s usually not because they’re trying to be mean, it’s because they have something important to teach you; something that is important for you to hear.
Remember, a mean teacher and an effective teacher are often confused for each other.
