5th Grade

When I was in fifth grade, I had an absolutely insane teacher, Miss Tang. She was, including all of my college years, the most difficult teacher I have ever had in my life. Am I possibly exaggerating? Judge for yourselves:

1. She would never tell us when we were going to have a test. This was for English, Social Studies, Spelling, and Religion classes. All tests were surprises, and the only warning you had was three seconds ahead of time when she would announce "Everybody clear off your desks and take out a nice, clean sheet of paper."

2. All tests were comprehensive. A question could be about anything learned since the beginning of the year.

3. On spelling tests, she would not tell us the word that she wanted us to spell. Instead, she would provide the definition, and we would have to guess which word she meant. God help us if it had a synonym she'd covered at some point.

4. Also on spelling tests, we had to hyphenate and include accent marks for all words. This was not optional.

5. We were graded on creativity. For example, if instructed on an English test to write a sentence containing 4 adjectives, 6 nouns, 3 pronouns, and 5 verbs, the more imagination shown in creating the sentence, the higher the grade. I once got a C on a test where I had technically gotten all the sentences correct, but lacked panache. On the following test, I wrote outlandish things about purple dragons rolling over police cars and made a B-.

6. The length of a minus or the size of a plus counted toward your grade. "B long minus" was a common grade to receive, meaning that you were on the cusp of a "C big plus."

7. We were given reams of poetry and facts and essays to memorize, and every day Miss Tang would go around the room, starting with some kid in the front, and they would be required to begin reciting whatever she told you to until she moved on to the next kid.

8. If she felt that you weren't reciting loudly enough, then the entire class would be required to scream at you: "Crystal, PLEASE SPEAK LOUDER!" Complaints regarding the noise regularly were sent over by Sister Patricia Marie next door.

In spite of this insanity, Miss Tang was not all bad. For instance, she regularly gave us an extra recess every Friday afternoon. An extra recess. Clearly she was mad, but at least we could benefit from it. She also encouraged us to dress up in costume for Halloween, something that you generally didn't get to do after 3rd grade. And she had me do almost all the reading for our class's school mass, so I was particularly keen on her. I loved reading, and I loved attention.

She was a model citizen in all ways, but sometimes during recess, we -- Jennie Snyder, Kerry Sweeney, Meaghan Fitzgerald and I -- would whisper to each other that her perfectly coiffed hair, pristine in its bun, was just a wig, a wig that concealed a mohawk that she'd reveal when her much-younger boyfriend would come by after school to pick her up on his motorcycle. It was possible . . . surely her hair was too perfect to be real . . .