"She was a bitch," Jack said. I gave him a look that said that I heartily agree, even though I probably wouldn't use that word because I still have an innate respect for school teachers.

"I hated how she played favorites," I said carefully. "It made me feel horrible that I always had to sit in the back of the class, and all her favorites got to sit in the front row. She made me feel so dumb. She had me put in special-ed and held me back in reading. I was reading The Hobbit to my mom in the third grade."

"You aren't dumb, and she had me put in special-ed too," Jack said. "Do you remember that public list of late work that everyone could look at?" I crossed my eyes.

"Her favorites never had any late work, and I had lines and lines of late assignments, and I could never get caught up because she wouldn't grade the late work I handed in. I would do the same assignment four or five times." I felt like crying when I thought about this, crying out of anger and frustration that I still remembered from the third grade.

"Yea, my parents finally figured out that she wasn't grading my work and they went and yelled at her," Jack said.

"My mom had me start using carbon to copy my work after she memorized the answers for work I'd done a dozen times," I said.

"Why would someone fuck with kids heads the way she did?" Jack said. I shrugged and had a clueless expression on my face. "She arbitrarily picked Keven Kane as her favorite and he got to use the computer every time it was available, and he always sat in front, and he got perfect grades and he was soooo smart. I went to high school with him, and he wasn't that smart, maybe average, and he ended up being a stoned loser meth-head."

"Keven was really cute," I said. "I only got to use the computer once, but I was the richest kid in class. Do you remember the bottle cap money thing we did in class?"

"Yea, some of them still smelled like beer, then you bought my calculator and I was the richest kid in class," Jack said.

"Yep, that's probably my only good memory of her class. I think that hell's probably a lot like Mrs. C's classroom."

Mrs. C. had a potent and lasting effect on her student's lives, thirty years after we were her students. People are always talking about how inspiring a teacher can be. We don't talk about the teacher who has genuinely gifted children but can't see it because they aren't cute, or from the rich family, or don't have the right skin or eye color. A bad teacher can discourage a child with great potential from going to college, from taking an interest in school, from interacting well with authority figures. A bad teacher can make a person feel inferior and stupid over the course of a lifetime. It takes a lot to overcome the effect of a truly horrible teacher, and I firmly believe that this type of person comes straight from the pit.