Year 3 teacher despised me and did everything she could to make it clear to me and the kids who until then, had always been my friends that I was stupid, lazy, rude, scruffy, poor, unfeminine, ugly and a 'horrible little girl who thinks she is so clever, she's better than the rest of the class'.
Scruffy - yes. Poor - yes. Unfeminine - probably, I had three older brothers. Horrible and lazy - possibly, as I was also an abused and neglected child and have ADHD. I wasn't stupid, though, not by any stretch of the imagination - which I think was the cause of her hatred; I was very high ability and she didn't think I should have been, especially as this meant I got bored and fidgety when I'd already understood and completed all the work. I didn't think I was 'better', but I knew I could understand things quickly, remember stuff and work was easy - in infants, I'd always had the job of working with other kids once I'd finished what I'd been set, so I knew I was a bit different.
She was finally found out when the Headmaster looked at our books - he called me into his office (for which she took great pleasure in telling the class 'Oh, she's in really big trouble for telling lies or stealing, probably') and when he opened the books full of big red crosses - not a single tick - and asked me if I knew what the 'U-words' were in my book that I'd written down in a test, I said yes and gave the definitions, as I'd recently been investigated for potential kidney issues, so knew exactly what they meant. She had marked them wrong, told me off and kept me in at playtime for using rude words like urine, ureter & urethra and had then said to the Headmaster that I must have cheated and copied them from something, so I was actually being punished for lying about knowing those words.
The last four months of being in that class were so much better, as when I wasn't being taken out for assorted activities, including 'doing special lessons with the Headmaster' with a couple of other kids in the year group and had to see somebody who came in to speak to a couple of us (probably an Educational Psych, thinking about it), she completely ignored me until the last day of term.
She then cornered me in the classroom alone, informed me that she had told my new teacher all about me, I was going to be punished everyday for being so horrible this year, everybody hated me and the worst thing about her job was that the Headmaster had decided teachers weren't allowed to hit children anymore as she would have loved nothing better than to take me out and use a cane on me (it was before Corporal punishment had been outlawed, but it was a more progressive school where they had never used it since opening in 1974).
I got upset, ran off and told a couple of Year 6 girls who were wondering why I was crying in the toilets what she'd said about hitting me, they fetched the Deputy Head (and my new teacher came along) and for the next three years, she looked straight through me as though I didn't exist. Thinking about it, the older girls doing that could mean that one of them had been on the receiving end of her venom in a previous year.
Up until that year, school had been my only safe place away from abuse, the silent treatment interspersed with screaming rages, being cold, hungry and told I was nothing. She took that feeling of complete safety away from me permanently, as I then believed that the only reason teachers weren't hitting me like at home was because they weren't allowed to, even though every other teacher in that school was kind to me.