My elementary school experience was one mean teacher after another. (Oddly, in junior high and high school all my teachers were pretty cool. This seems to be the opposite experience of most.)
Anyway, one example: we were in fourth grade and we were just learning cursive. The first letter we learned was 'i', and, this being elementary school, the lesson was to write the letter 'i' over and over a thousand times while the teacher drank booze-spiked coffee and fingered her ancient flaky vagina under the desk. (I may be baised.) Anyway, since I'm not a slack-jawed moron, I managed to finish my lesson in, like two minutes, and we were alloted about twenty minutes to do so.
So I'm sitting there, bored. The workbook we had had an inchworm on it--inchworms being the Patron Saint of Learning How To Make Cursive 'i's. Next to the picture of a cartoon inchworm on the page was the word "inchworm" written out in cursive.
So, me, being an enterprising chap, decided that instead of sitting there like a mope for fifteen minutes I would try my hand at writing the word "inchworm." And I did so, copying what was already written.
Well, after twenty minutes or so the teacher stood up, bones creaking as flakes crumbled off of her disease-ridden limbs. She ambles her fat, useless ass around the room, checking people's workbooks. Small children hold up their sad little workbooks, grinning ear to ear like they just won the Nobel Prize for Not Shitting Their Pants Yet.
She gets to my workbook. She looks at the word "inchworm" that I have written. She looks at me.
"Who told you you could write that?" she asked me. I didn't reply, because what do you say to that? "I didn't give you permission to do that. You think you're so smart, trying stuff you haven't been taught yet. You think you're better than me? Next time, do as you are told." And with her red marker gave be a big fat zero.
So I learned something that day. 1. Teachers can be assholes. 2. Don't ever try anything, ever. 3. Fuck the teachers who do this, and the unions who fight tooth and nail for the to keep their jobs. 4. Fuck everything and everyone.
Sadly, that's one of about a dozen stories like that of teachers who were assholes to me. Normally, I'm a "If you meet assholes all day, maybe you're the asshole" kind of guy, but in my experience and swapping stories with others I wasn't alone.