My Third Grade Teacher

My 3^rd grade teacher was the weirdest god damn person that I’ve ever known. I do not have a lot memory about my third grade which means that I had a pretty happy life back then. Because human beings are designed in that way, you never forget when something bad happen while you can’t keep your happiness for a minute. But me remembering about him doesn’t mean that he had bad impression or something, he was just too weird to forget. His impression was that much to me in a third grade.

Anyway, before I talk about any story, I think I have to give all of you a little bit of description about him. I actually don’t know his age and have no idea if he’s still alive or not, but I remember he looked like approximately 70-80 years old guy outside, but always had a 13-year-old boy inside, he always wore three-piece suits with flashy pattern, his chest pocked held pocket watch doesn’t work, jade bangle on right wrist. He never looked like his job description, he looked more like a mafia don. People didn’t even think that he was a teacher.  

Since he was quite different from any other teachers, it is hard to describe but I think more description I added, more suspicious people would be about this human being. These is still a lot of thing I don’t know about him, so I assumed I should start from what I know about him but I am not sure at this point.

Do people at my age remember about third grade? Maybe they do, but for me, third grade passed faster that any other years, so basically most of the memory I still have is about how I tried not to submit my homework as much as I can. I loved doing my homework when I was in my 1^st and 2^nd grade. I did my homework because I felt like the teacher admitted my hard work, but one day I was just suddenly felt doing homework is such a ridiculous thing, I got scared and decided to be rebellious a little bit. Anyway, this is a whole long way to say my elementary school made their students do homework literally every single day, it doesn’t really matter whether it is holiday or not for students. I remember that there was a table to put your homework every morning before school starts, and the student who did submit their work have to sign a name board next to it. I didn’t do my homework at all, but I did actually sign them because I was stupid and thought my teacher won’t never notice, I had no doubts that he had never noticed but at this point, I think he maybe did notice about it.

Despite the fact I didn’t do my homework at all, my grade wasn’t that horrible. I actually was always called out for other reasons though, I was such a boorish kid and that’s why I remember about him so clearly. He always wanted to give us some life lessons that he learned from his childhood, but the problem is children then and children now are living completely different life. And because of that, students could never stop making fun of him. One day, I was sitting in a class as always, I really did, but my teacher found something peculiar going on, he said “What is that”, and I said” What is what.” He didn’t like student’s posture during a class, he wanted us to sit up straight, but we couldn’t. Do you want to know why? It is because that my school was poor and they could not purchase new sets of desks and chairs that students could fit in, so, technically it was none of ours fault, we just couldn’t sit up straight physically. But, our teacher casually decided to complain about something we don’t control of in order to bring up his experience from his childhood. He started his story in the way every person on this planet usually does, he said the following “When I was a kid-”, I was like “Classic!” He made a whole speech about how students in school used to be physically abused, and someone asked him “What kind of Nazi is that?”, I am truly sorry if this make someone uncomfortable, we were eight or nine years old and didn’t even know the differences between being friends and bullying friends. Anyway, he answered that it was worse than Nazi, thought I didn’t know about the world and the society system, I knew about Nazi and I simply thought how massive homicide of all time could be worse than child abuse in school. Well, I know it is impossible to compare them and both of them should not be allowed in any situation. However, at that time, we’ve all wanted to hear what they have actually done to students back then, and another boy asked “What they’ve done to you?”, “They put a ruler in my back as if it is like a splint for broken bone.” We were speechless and froze like an old computer for 3 minutes straight, and we all started to laugh.

    As I take a look back my third year, I do not know what was so funny about it, but I think all of these silly moments were very important elements and principles to talk about my life because these sculptures my character and made who I am today. In addition, the story I told was when we all started to have a weird bonding as a class and also, I kind of started to like my teacher. I didn’t believe that stories and life lessons he had taught us will change my life or anything, but interaction that I had with him definitely changed my behavior at school. At the end of my third year, I finally started to do my homework again, and I cannot thank him enough for making things right. After all, he is one talented teacher.