Label Me Not: Bad Teacher

It’s a feeling that we’ve all experienced at some point during high school: the apprehension that follows receiving a class schedule. But I find that it’s not seeing your classes for the first time that’s frightening. The scary part is seeing who teaches those classes.The reasons behind all this fright are the stories that follow certain teachers. Sometimes those are just as, if not more, vicious than the stories and rumors that follow student. They can also thoroughly sway a student’s decision to take a teacher’s class.Here’s the thing about rumors: they’re hardly ever true. And I’m speaking from experience.Every year I have the luck (or lack thereof) of getting “hard” teacher. And every year I slump to my counselor’s office to try to switch out, because every year a seasoned student warns me about the class. My counselor, of course, declined my request and I would slump back to class with a frown and dread, all because I had a bias that wasn’t ever backed up by fact.Now that I’m the seasoned student I’ve learned a valuable lesson that I will pass onto you: save yourself that trip to the councilor’s office.Most of the terrible stories about teachers are told from the mouths of students who have a personal hostility, so the stories shouldn’t be weighed heavily in your decision making process. Now with such sites like “Rate My Teacher” and “Teacher Complaint” that thrive on negative feedback from angsty students, these scary rumors are circulating like mad, and these sites are not to be trusted. There’s a statistics term that explains these sites very well, it’s called “volunteer response bias.” Volunteer response bias occurs when a survey, or in this case, a website is open to the public to voluntarily respond to (get it?). And it’s considered “bias” because the only people who’d choose to post would be people with strong enough opinions to do so, and in most cases the negative opinion outweigh the positive. So with this being said, a website with the word “bias” attached to it should not be the deciding factor into whether you take a teacher’s class or not.The ending to my story is a happy one. The weeks that followed my return from the counselors’ office were the most brain stimulating weeks that I’ve ever had at school. It’s common to cringe at the term “brain stimulating,” but I mean it in the least painful way. I learned more with the “hard” teacher than I thought was possible, and the experience thoroughly prepared me for a college classroom. This year my schedule is saturated with “hard” teachers, and it’s funny to see the reaction people have when I show my schedule to them because they don’t really know what it’s like to be in those classes, they’ve only heard the stories.So the next time you pick up that fresh class schedule, leave the apprehension at home and forget all the stories that you heard about a particular teacher because every experience is different. Think of teachers like food – just because one person doesn’t like it, doesn’t mean you won’t.Mya McannOpinion Editor