Uneducators

This post is inspired by something I saw on Facebook the other day. There I was scrolling along when all of the sudden my heart jumped. Could it be? Had someone really become a FAN of my least favorite educator of all time? Indeed, unfortunately, it was true.

I thought about trying to come up with a term to describe this teacher accurately. Poor teacher didn't seem harsh enough and the devil seemed too cruel (although I have been known to refer to this teacher as the devil on more than one occasion). The best thing I could come up with was uneducator: one who not only stalls the education process but reverses it.

Creative writing 101 in Jr. High. That class had my name all over it so I decided to literally add my name to its roster. A few friends were taking it with me and we were young so of course chatting ensued, often during class since this teacher rarely taught but mostly spent time praising her own literary accomplishments and letting us know how many important people she had met. For this I earned a well deserved Unacceptable in my citizenship grade.

But on to writing. The thing I remember this teacher being most vocal about was adverbs that ended in ly. If we even used one we would be marked down. Examples of these are slowly, accurately, repetitively and so on and are usually followed by a verb ending in ed such as placed, jumped, pounded, laughed etc.... The reason ly adverbs should not be used profusely is because they sometimes weaken rather than enhance the verb and increase the passivity of the sentence. They are, however, meant to be used occasionally. I dare you to find me one full length novel without a single ly adverb in it. See, they aren't evil.

Other annoyances were when her personal opinion came out, completely infringing my right to "creative" writing. For example here follows a partial of a sentence I once created: A smile danced across her lips.... I was pretty damn proud of my personification of a smile however this teacher simply looked at me, irritated and asked "How can a smile dance? Change it."

I won't go in to how the teacher slighted me personally except to say that several of my assignments were conveniently "lost" several times so that even though I did every assignment and did them well, I ended up with a D in the class, my lowest grade to date.

This teacher has won the best educator in Utah award before, probably more due to the fact that she teaches the cream of the crop honors classes where students work hard rather than her actual teaching ability. Luckily I discarded her ly nonsense and continued writing creatively so I was not uneducated as hopefully not many of my classmates might have been. Therefore I dub her the best Uneducator in Utah.