The Anti-Mentor: What the Worst Teacher Taught Me About Education
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Dedicated to Mrs. Betsy Goss, Dr Ann Nunan, and Dr. Nancy Baird for the protection from the cruel words and comments from Mrs. Smith!
I was seven years old when my world shrank to the size of Crescent Elementary. My family had just survived our third "start over," landing in Griffin, Georgia. It was a place where my family never quite fit, a place that felt more like a sentence than a home. Mother and Pop were teachers at the local junior high school.
I was a seven-year-old with a severe stammer. My nine-year-old brother had what would later be documented as one of the first severe cases of Tourette’s Syndrome in the region. We were vulnerable, different, and deeply in need of sanctuary. Instead, we encountered the woman I will call the Old Bat.
In the 1970s, educators didn't understand Tourette’s. But instead of seeking to understand, the Old Bat weaponized it. When the principal paddled my brother for vocal tics he could not control, she cheered. She jeered. And when I dared to defend my family, she sneered at a colleague, “Everything was fine until those hillbilly Hendricks children showed up.”
Once, she grabbed my arm and tried to drag me from Miss McKinley’s class to take me to the principal’s office, stating I needed paddling like my brother. My brother had been paddled due to his “cursing” with his Tourette's. I fought back - and got away - to the arms of the amazing and kind Mrs. Goss. I would think for years and years as I grew up: why did saints like Mrs. Goss die young of cancer and devils like Mrs. Smith live long lives? I also found protection with Dr. Ann Nunan, my third and sixth grade teacher and also the great Dr. Nancy Baird. She never put her hands on me again, but she made comments about my family, my siblings, and myself often - and I would always find a way to snap back. Honestly, God forgive me, I loathed her. She epitomized everything I hated about where we had landed in Griffin, GA.
For over forty years, that cruelty occupied free headspace in my mind. Driven perhaps by a subconscious need to counteract the damage done at Crescent Elementary, I went into education. I didn't just become a teacher; I threw myself into the craft. By twenty-three, I had my master’s in education. I became a National Board-Certified school librarian. For twenty-five years, I walked into schools with a singular mission: to protect, to educate, and to see the children that everyone else looked past.
I spent my career building a legacy of empathy, while she remained frozen in time, a local relic of a bygone, crueler era of schooling.
Irony has a beautiful way of coming full circle. Decades after she tried to break my spirit, I ran into her at a local grocery store. I was in my late thirties, fully established, and finished with being afraid. I looked at the woman who had terrorized my childhood and finally delivered the punchline to her decades-long joke.
“You taught me the most important lesson of my career,” I told her. “You taught me exactly how not to treat children. And I thank God every day that I never became the kind of teacher you were.”
I turned on my heel and left her there.
Tonight, I read that she passed away.
When a monster from your childhood dies, the world expects a neat resolution. But life is rarely neat. As the sun goes down on her life, I find myself looking at the complex, messy aftermath of the era she helped create. My brother’s life took dark, tragic turns, marred by violence and segregation that began the moment schools like Crescent failed him. Looking back, I wonder if she saw the oncoming storm in him, or if her cruelty helped brew it.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter.
Her death forced me to take a final inventory of my own 25 years in the classroom. Did I ever make a child feel small? Did I ever fail to see a student's pain? I pray I didn't. I know, with absolute certainty, I never failed a child with special needs.
Upon her passing, the local Facebook page filled with the standard, polite accolades of a small-town matriarch. It made me angry at first, remembering how few reached out when my own sainted father passed. But then the "BOOM" hit me, the ultimate realization of what she actually gave me.
She thought she was breaking me, but she was actually drafting the blueprint for the educator I would become. Every time I comforted a crying child, every time I defended a student with a disability, and every time I used my advanced degrees to lift a student, I was actively undoing her malice.
And looking back at her professional legacy of my own 25-year career? If I could take a time machine back to that seven-year-old girl standing in the principal's office, I’d whisper the ultimate, snarky comfort: “Don't worry, Anne. You're going to go so much further than her. After all, she only has a Bachelor’s."
Rest in peace, Mrs. Smith. Thank you for showing me exactly how to be a heroine by showing me your perfect villainy.
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