Thread by @RadioFreeTom

So, during this #AT40 flashback, I'll tell the story of what it was like to go to my high school in 1978.
I was a science nerd because as a working class kid I figured the only real jobs were in STEM, and I did love chemistry. But I hated math. /1

My trig teacher was the head of the Math dept, a 347 year old spinster who hated all living things and, I think, ate kittens for breakfast. Anyway, she looked at my PSAT and decided that I should be an A+ student in trig, not realizing that I was just good at taking exams. /2

And I was struggling with trig and she decided to call my parents and suggest that I was lying about my bad grades because she hadn't heard from them and assumed the silence was because I had burned my report cards or something. She was, uh, not a warm person. /3

There was already PLENTY of strife in my home life with my parents, but even *they* were offended at this. I went to school the next day and told this teacher to get out of my life and I stopped handing in any work at all. She gave me a D- because she thought - who knows why. /4

(I should have flunked.) So, she nearly flunks me, denies me permission to take calculus (Hi, @KLeavitt)
But I still wanted to be a chemistry major one day, so my parents scrape some money together for a summer at @HarvardSummer, where I take 8 credits - a full year of calc. /5

I pass. With a C.
I come back to high school.
Instead of saying "good for you, you got off your ass," the reaction was...well, you can imagine.
And that's how high school ended up with me going to summer school at Harvard. A teacher - a bad one - changed my life. /6

When I became a teacher, she was one of the three examples of who I did *not* want to be and I carried that example with me for the rest of my career, and it served me well never to be that kind of teacher. /7x