In third grade a bitter old woman named Hansen became my math teacher. Noting that I was both gifted and disruptive she assigned me EXTREME amounts of extra rote arithmetic homework and talked my trusting parents into letting her do it. Said it would make me even better at math and of course teacher knows best right? All the same basic functions. No new math to be had, just a desperately busy and quiet boy. My folks eventually figured out what she had done, but by then I had already come to hate it and had taken a few punitive licks from my misguided father for my complaints and 'laziness'. This greatly reinforced the negative association about homework and math in particular I was developing.
In high school I remember a detention teacher tried to buy time one day with the old "add all the integers from 1 through 100" trick. 5,050 derived by 101*50. I let bastard sit down before I asked him (I think teach was male) to please come check my answer. He said I was wrong and to do it again. He was either an idiot or presumed I was, probably both. I told everyone the answer. I somewhat remember getting in trouble for this and being sent home. I was probably already in detention for truancy anyway, but it could have been for 'student conflict'.
That evil bitch Hansen simultaneously sharpened my talent and ensured my hate of it's use. Public school is freaking diabolical.
Third grade was the same year I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and both lost faith in movie monsters and realized I had trouble fitting in because I was like the creature that thought and felt and was not a real threat to people but was also not one of them because I had been made different. I was not yet bitter enough to hate God over it, just hurting from all sorts of things, and wondering why the movies made the creature out to be a dangerous dullard.
After I attempted suicide halfway through fourth grade and my parents got me on antidepressants and put me in a Christianazi private 'Christian' school I began to hate God.
I had a teacher in 4th grade, Mrs Conway. All the parents loved her. Aged teacher, loads of experience, grandmotherly look.
When the parents weren't around she was a sadist that took particular pleasure in humiliating 4th grade kids. I did a little jig 20 years ago, when I discovered she had died.
I don't have confirmation on her demise, but she was similar to what you described. More of a 'tough but fair' reputational veneer over a spirit more dried out than her then probably mid 70s shamble of flesh. Like goiter sized neck folds that made her look like an evil turkey. In some twisted sense I think she justified her cruelty as actually good teaching, bought her own hype maybe and 'it ain't done right anymore' attitude. Just picking at the memory to describe her has me physiologically responding with tension and short breaths.
There are far too many of those.
People who for some reason, somehow, get some kind of sense of power and validation out of making children feel small and powerless. Which is particularly pathetic considering that children ARE small and powerless.
There's this myth that low pay for demanding hours means that only people who love teaching children will become teachers. While there are some teachers who are teaching because they love children, the reality is that the lack of competitive pay has generated a lack of competition for the job, and a resulting lack of competition for getting into teaching programs, and a resulting lack of quality in some of the people who are accepted into them, some of whom only applied to a teaching program because they were rejected from all of their first-choice programs. I've seen it happen. I don't know how often it happens, but I know that it does.
The school was called Red Apple Elementary. It was public but prestigious for what my hometown had available. The sort competitive parents would spend a night in to ensure a place in registration. The school apparently had a tradition of this. They did have some marvelous teachers and I got a very good education for an American public school before I crashed from violence, stress, and a growing sense that the world was horribly WRONG.
LOL! I remember very good one named Gutenberg of all things, 2nd grade maybe and English teacher for sure, who ironically taught me to write in print. Cursive was the domain of the third grade elite.
I definitely ran into the LCD sort of teachers you describe later in junior high and highschool. The stint in the private Jesus camp was the beginning of a fall from grace in a bunch of ways for me but from the rest of 4th grade through 5th I got a REALLY good education in terms of learning skills but it was filled with bloatware of the worst nose-in-air elitism and head-in-arse faith I've ever seen to this day as I can recall ATM. Lots of the kids were from rich families and mine was lower middle class with three kids and lots of medical bills, no small number mine.
The rich kids hated me and feared me. Smarter. Funnier when in an OK mood. Much bigger and some few mean little bitch boys discovered MUCH stronger. I was by this time suffering bad childhood obesity and a special acne God reserved in a little jar next to the grapes of wrath for the Italian-Irish.
It wasn't all bad. Several kids from my childhood church went there and my brothers also got pulled and sent to keep us together. Dad has been almost miraculously successful in making us stick together. More on that later.
Half way through 6th grade my folks were asked to withdraw me. Too disruptive again I guess.
Must have been the apple
I threw one day
or the way kids all spoke
behind my back.
They said hit the road please.
Thanks for the memories.
And you jerks can go hang with your Lord.
Maybe He'll forgive you for me.
But that's historically
a 50\50 bet.
Not just a reply to your posts guys but a bit of story progression too. When I post here again soon I'll bring it back to my current experience here as relates to PD.
And to be clear I love the tiny bit I know of historical Jesus and most things I 'know' of 'biblical' Jesus. Will even go so far as to say centuries of prophecy were fulfilled by chance or design in his life and by his obedient and willful sacrifice
Way ahead of you guys! Let me just get that for you. This is not sarcasm. I have my doubts holstered but I can play devil's advocate for either team.

BUT apocryphal Jesus is where they really hid the bodies ontologically.

And these fucknozzles worship
*ahem*
Big Papa Boom Boom,
Skyking of the Uberflock,
and Giver of Unlimited Easy
Plastic Jesus.
A quite recent and horrifically parasitic lloigor that feeds on pride, greed, and stupidity.
Label says it's the real thing. Religious institutions are not subject to false advertising suits. I'm not saying there's a connection but the dots are right next to each other as some say.
Then there's real Jesus. His name was Joshua and his peeps called him the Logos way before logos were even a thing.

I believe that the Hebrew brand name was Yeshua. Be careful of brethren that call him this though, some of em are totally nuts.
And the rest are merely kind of nuts
