One of the few things that helped me keep my sanity was going to the library with Randy and some of his friends during seventh period. We enjoyed talking about Ms. Franklin, our eccentric Spanish teacher, and Randy usually had some quirky anecdotes to share. Randy and I started to get closer, but once again, Eric began talking to Randy about me. Anybody else that Eric would try to discourage would usually tell me what Eric had said about me. Randy, on the other hand, wouldn’t come clean. One time when I saw the two of them socializing, I asked Randy what Eric had said. I knew it was a lie when Randy said they had been talking about music. Eric didn’t really like Randy to begin with.
It was the middle of May when I received my interim report card for the fourth quarter. For the first time in high school, I was actually failing math class, and the rest of my grades had dropped into the C range. Most of the teacher comments, which for the previous thirteen years of school were “pleasure to have in class,” were now “student appears distracted, inattentive.” They also pointed out my high level of absences. I was worried about what my mother was going to say when she saw my report card, as it had only been two months ago that I was admitted to SUNY Geneseo and making plans to go to college. My mother wasn’t too upset, though, and she helped me study so I could improve my grades by the end of the school year.
I didn’t like school to begin with as a senior, and all the mental drama I was going through made it even more difficult. During eleventh grade, I really enjoyed English and writing, but that changed when I got Ms. Carson as an English teacher senior year. Many of Ms. Carson’s students had mixed reviews about her. Most of her students either really liked her or couldn’t tolerate her. She definitely played favorites, and she loved students who had older siblings who were former students of hers. She also only taught advanced-placement and college-level English courses.
In my class, one of Ms. Carson’s favorites was a girl named Stacey—mainly because Stacey had an older sister, Jen, who was another one of Ms. Carson’s favorites. About once a week, Ms. Carson would spend the first three to five minutes of class asking Stacey about her sister and how Jen liked the college she was attending. Similarly, Erin, another one of Ms. Carson’s favorites, had an older sister attending college. Much time was spent discussing how Erin’s sister was adjusting to life at SUNY Albany. One time Ms. Carson asked Erin, “Is your sister going to transfer? Her grades and SAT scores are head and shoulders above what UAlbany requires.”
Ms. Carson showed a different persona to students she didn’t like when she saw them outside of class. Once she approached a former student in the library and told him that he was lucky he passed the final exam, thereby passing the course and avoiding summer school. Even though he did pass her class, Ms. Carson still had to come up to him in the library and yell at him. She had been teaching English for ten years at Colonie, and she didn’t want to teach Regents-level classes. If she did, she would complain to the administration.
In the beginning of one class, a girl named Jen told Ms. Carson that she had just finished touring Union College, where she was hoping to attend. One of most exclusive private schools in New York State, Union College was always very competitive. Ms. Carson walked up to Jen and bent down toward her face. “Well, that’s if you can get into Union,” she said. Jen didn’t attend Union College and went to a public university instead. In 2007, however, Jen ended up graduating with a master’s degree from Union College.
The most surprising point about Ms. Carson was what happened at the end of the year. Ms. Carson came to English class late one day because she was in a meeting in which her supervisor told her that she could only teach freshmen and sophomore English and was banned from teaching advanced-placement or college-level courses. As she told our class about what happened at the meeting, she started sobbing. I wasn’t sympathetic to Ms. Carson’s dilemma at all, though. If Ms. Carson didn’t want to teach courses that didn’t have honors students, why did she want to be an English teacher to begin with?
In response to the administration’s plan to bar Ms. Carson from teaching the accelerated-level classes, many of her students wrote letters of complaint to the board of education. In fact, some of the students were pressured into writing letters, just to make their friends who loved Ms. Carson happy.
The students’ attempts at keeping Ms. Carson as the advanced-placement teacher were unsuccessful. In the past Ms. Carson had taught non-advanced courses. Early in the school year, she talked about teaching regular eleventh-grade English and curled her lip in disgust. She often made fun of what the students were writing. Many English teachers complain that their students have vague and unclear theses. In response, many of Ms. Carson’s students wrote “My thesis is….” But Ms. Carson didn’t appreciate this and often mocked students who wrote that sentence. Ms. Carson, in my opinion, was one of the worst teachers at Colonie. She treated her students very unfairly; she loved her AP students who had older brothers and sisters who were also AP students, and at the same time she often refused to teach lower-level English and blamed the students themselves for their academic problems. Zoey, one of Ms. Carson’s students, wrote a letter to the board of education stating that Ms. Carson
