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Well, my proudest moment might sound a little strange, but nevertheless it’s my proudest moment. Out of all the things I’ve done, like with helping out with the walk-a-thon for New York and Washington DC, or getting awards, and getting an A in Biology and Chemistry, I’m prouder of this: getting my music teacher fired. Lol. Okay some of you are probably saying, “Oh cool, I wish I did that. I hated my music teacher!” Others are probably saying, “That’s terrible, Yves, why would you do something like that?” Well, I’ll tell you why.
Mr. Dressel, my music teacher in 4th and 5th grade was evil. Well, okay not as simple as that, so I’ll tell you more. Mr. Dressel did so many evil things to us 8, 9, and 10 year-olds for two whole years. For example, he threw an eraser at my friend, Clarissa Floyd, slammed the door on another student’s foot, and the worst… I’ll explain the worst more. He had this microphone connected to a speaker and I don’t know what he was thinking, but he used it to teach the class. Maybe he thought he was a talk show host? It was very strange. “And today we are going to sing ‘On the Road Again.’” He said that into the microphone, but under no circumstances were we to go near the thing. And no, he didn’t sing into it, *thank god* he only used it for when he was talking to us to tell us what we were going to do. Which I think was completely useless because it was a small room and we would’ve been able to hear him just fine without the microphone. Ooops…I’ve strayed from the topic. Lol. Okay, anyway whenever someone did something wrong, even just whispering while he was talking, he would yell into the microphone and his eyes would bug out. Lol. I mean, whispering when someone else is talking IS rude, but I don’t think he had to yell into a microphone. That was terrible for those of us sitting in the front row, including my friend Krista Barkley and I. Krista would get headaches all the time because of Mr. Dressel.
And you know, my class wasn’t the only class he did that to. Remember Clarissa? She was in the other 5th grade class and Mr. Dressel did stuff like that too to her class also. He didn’t even just do it to our grade either. We know for a fact that he also did all those things to the 6th graders, except for them, he swore.
So Krista and I were sitting in class one day talking about Mr. Dressel. Then I got the idea to make a petition against him. We were hoping to get the principal to make him stop. I remembered reading in the Student Code of Conduct that students have the right to petition in an orderly manner.* So I suggested we do that. Krista thought it was a good idea so she made a petition and during class we passed it around for people to sign it and also took it out to recess to have more people from all the classes sign it. We even got signatures from the 6th graders and they decided to make their own petition.
So one day during recess both the 5th and 6th grade petitions were out and going around for signatures. One of our teachers, Mr. Bhrams, saw the 6th grade petition and tore it up. Okay, that was wrong because we have the right to petition, everyone does. It’s even in the Constitution. But since that teacher obviously chose to ignore all that, us 5th graders hid our petition for the rest of recess and limited signatures to be signed in the school and in recess only when there weren’t any teachers around, especially Mr. Bhrams. Then when we got all the signatures that we wanted, we had one of our classmates that worked as a helper in the office take it to the principal. Then we waited.
The next week, Mr. Dressel said that he found out that our class had made a petition about him and what he did in class. He was awfully calm about it and that made me nervous and I was beginning to think that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. But actually, it went well because he said he wasn’t going to do any of that anymore. After that, he never yelled into the microphone, even though he came close a few times, but he stopped himself. But what was the best part though, is that he wasn’t in school the next year. We got him kicked out! Our teacher told us that he went to another school and they even announced it in an assembly that he transferred to another school and they were looking for another music teacher. But we knew the truth, we got him kicked out!! Woohoo! I was so happy and it was all thanks to Krista and I.
*In our Student Code of Conduct it says:
“Petition
Students have the right to present petitions. However, the collecting of signatures on petitions shall not disrupt classroom procedures nor interfere with the educational process.”
We never interfered with anything. We went around to people who were already done with their work or when there was free time in class. And that was totally uncalled for when Mr. Bhrams ripped up the 6 th grade petition because there was absolutely no learning process going on outside during recess.