In part 1 of Teachers That Influenced My Homeschooling Journey, I wrote about two teachers from my early years that had a part in my decision to homeschool as an adult. In part 2, I will discuss high school teachers that also influenced me. I had many good teachers in high school. I also had several very bad teachers. With two exceptions, the bad ones stand out the most in my memory. There was the typing teacher who was a bully. She purposely mispronounced my name and told me what a rotten kid I was because I would insist that she said my name correctly. (I don’t have an unusual or difficult name.) The threatened me that she was going to tell my mother horrible things about me and get me in trouble as she knew my mom was a teacher and teachers are generally harder on their own kids. When the time finally came for a meeting, she perceptive enough to realize that I had communicated all of my problems with this teacher. Instead she lied to my mother about how much she loved me and what a great kid I was. My guess is that she wanted to make me look crazy in front of my mom. This teacher influenced my homeschool journey because it made me realize that there were just people who had no business teaching children. I wanted to have more control over who taught my kids for this reason.
My absolute worst teacher was a bit of a sexist and pedophile. The good news is that if he were a high school teacher in 2008, I think he would have been tossed out of the school on his behind instead of getting the nod and wink that he got back in the 1980’s. This teacher did not believe girls belonged in his advanced math class and would comment to the class about me “let’s see if she’s as smart as she is pretty”. He would also touch the girls and make suggestive comments. My speaking up and being rude back to him earned me a retaliatory F for my third marking period. After my parents brought this issue to the administrators, my grade was changed and my Regents exam score became my grade for the year. , he continued to teach. I knew then that if I had kids I would never let them be put in that situation. I did not know that it meant I would homeschool, but I knew I would to prevent my children from losing interest in an entire subject the way I did.
Still I had many wonderful high school teachers who also influenced my homeschooling journey by showing me that you can be creative with your learning. There was the teacher who talked me into taking college level chemistry and allowed me to draw the elements when I could not articulate them in other ways. There was the biology and the Algebra teacher who pulled me aside and lectured me about my responsibility to help my brother who was having trouble in their classes. Finally, there was the art teacher who nurtured my creativity for three years and would not let me put my academics above my creativity. These teachers taught me about individualizing education and the responsibility of the family in education.
I am grateful to all of the teachers I have had in my past, because each of them are a major part of my past and so they are a major part of me. Without the effect of these teachers on my life, I would surely be a different person with a different resolve and even one different element may have caused me to be more passive about my children’s education.
Read: Even Teachers Don’t Finish the Textbook
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