Diabolical Desk Dumping
School in the 1980s was vastly different from today’s learning institutions, especially in a low-income town with teachers who had been in the same classroom since the 1950s. There was no innovation in learning, no computers, and no motivational posters with kittens (which is my preferred way to be motivated). Most teachers acted like military commanders rather than educators. But the worst I encountered was in second grade - Mrs. Rundquist.
She was tall and trim with hair that looked like steel wool. She wore big glasses and polyester pant suits and rarely smiled. She told us she pierced her own ears when she was younger, and that’s why the holes in her ears looked more like puncture wounds. This gave her the superiority to tease me and some of the other girls who were reluctant to pierce our ears. Forgive me for not wanting to have a gun loaded with needles directed at my head! I would frequently wear stick-on earrings to jazz up my outfits and she would tell the other kids in the class, “Danya is wearing ‘chicken earrings.’” It was humiliating. And seriously, who mocks 7 year-olds to their peers for wearing sticker earrings? What a mean bitch.
Mrs. Rundquist also had ludacris rules for library books. After checking a book out from the school library, we had to get her permission to return it. This approval was earned by her opening the book to a random page and if we couldn’t answer a question from that page, we were told to re-read the book before taking it back. It didn’t matter if the book was a total suck-fest, we had to finish it before getting something better. This led me to read mostly Beverly Cleary and Laura Ingalls Wilder. They were guaranteed winners.
But by far her worst offense was a practice I call “Diabolical Desk Dumping.” If a student did not meet her standard for desk cleanliness, she would walk over to the student, and put his desk on its side to make all the books, papers, and other school supplies dump on the floor, and then walk away and continue class. The student was required to sit on the floor and clean out his desk until it met her satisfaction while the rest of the class kept learning.
That winter I had a series of upper respiratory infections. Most nights I fell asleep in an upright position so I didn’t hack myself awake. I spent most days blowing my nose at my desk and coughing and sucking on cough drops. Occasionally I would get tired of walking across the classroom to throw my tissue away so I would collect them and put them in my desk to throw away later. Gross, right? It really was. Like I said, I was not a particularly tidy child.
One afternoon after an especially snot-filled spell, I amassed about 10 peach-colored tissues in my desk as well as some cough drop wrappers. Rather than compassionately explain to a sensitive 7 year-old child that what she was doing was unsanitary, Mrs. Rundquist walked up to my desk, pulled it away from me, and dumped all of its contents on the ground. When I knelt down to begin picking up the mess, she leaned over me and whispered, “Throw your tissues away.” It felt like the Wicked Witch of the West was breathing down my neck. I choked back my tears because the only thing more embarrassing than crawling around on the floor trying to collect your pencils would be to do so while blubbering. The memory of those peach-colored tissues scattered on the floor is why I still can’t use a tissue any color other than white.
Disturbingly, it never occurred to me that this would be unacceptable behavior for an adult. It had been widely known that the teachers at this school were pretty hard core, but most parents didn’t know how crappy these adults were being to their kids. When I got home from school that day I told my mom what went down. She was horrified. As the secretary to the Superintendent of the school district, she made a complaint to him the next day. My desk was never dumped again.
So, Mrs. Rundquist, because you made all of second grade feel like a total freakin dumpster fire, you are on my grudge list. Bitch.
Grudge List: My husband teases me about my long-harbored anger towards certain people for bizarre reasons. This series is dedicated to exploring the origin stories of these grudges.
