Many moons ago...
...during A Level time, I had a psychotic old hag of a psychology teacher (oh the irony- mentalist she was). Her idea of teaching was to bark random questions at you and then berate you if you didn't know the answer immediately. No explanations, no helpful hints, nothing.

Anyhoo, I spent the majority of my formative school years stoned out of my mind and would happily smoke bongs before going to school and waterfalls at lunch time. Prior to that I'd always been a bit of a geek and my grades never suffered as a result. However, not surprisingly, I sometimes found it a struggle to make it into classes, particularly ones taken by said evil harpy. One day she took me into her little office at the side of her classroom and demanded to know why I was missing so many classes. I just said I'd been a bit ill, blah blah, outright lies which she should really have been expecting.
So what does she do? Threaten to put me on report? Or tell my folks? Speak to the head of year? No,no, she tells me that I must immediately make an appointment with the doctor and then come back and tell her in great detail exactly what the diagnosis is! Even though I was lying, the fact that she had the audacity to demand such a ridiculous thing - has she never heard of privacy, or tact - really riled me, particularly as I hated the stupid cow anyway.
So we got into a huge row about it and I stormed out of her office and back into the class where everyone was waiting. She followed me and said the fateful words; 'Are you finished?'. Ah, ha, no i'm bloody not, thinks I and proceeded to tell her just what a poor teacher she was - not just a vitriolic attack but a frank, honest and constructive criticism of all the reasons she was so bad at her job. And then I flounced out.

Turns out she went home that day crying and the head of humanities, my fantastic history teacher, had to cover for her all day. He thanked me the next day in his lesson for telling her exactly what everyone was thinking, and even said he was surprised I hadn't given her a good slap!
I didn't go back to the lessons for a further week; she was demanding an apology before she would allow me back. I discussed this with my head of year and at the end of the week went to her and said that although I was sorry for the way that I spoke to her and the fact that it happened in front of a full classroom, I wasn't sorry for the things I said as I meant every word.
In my end of year report I was praised for my mature handling of the situation. In hindsight it was pretty mean but I honestly think it improved her behaviour towards pupils somewhat and helped her become a better teacher. It certainly made her think twice before picking on me again which was a blessing. It also gave a couple of the other teachers an opportunity to talk to her about some of her behaviour which until that point they had been reluctant to do. All in all a pretty good result.

Sorry that was a bit of an essay - the memory of her still winds me up 10 years later!
(Moniker1, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:32, 1 reply)

Way to go!
My friend's husband is a head teacher and it's hellish difficult getting rid of crap teachers apparently.
(TheWeeWitch hasn't been here much recently .., Thu 22 May 2008, 15:27, closed)