I went to a private elementary school where I had the same teacher for 1st through 6th grade. Not only did the kids bully me, so did he. And he encouraged the other kids to do it, even my friends. I’m relatively certain, looking back on it, that it was in part because I’m Jewish.

He also once did something that would 100% have put him on a sex offender list today. Once I started crying because of how they were treating me and he put me on his lap and kissed me on the cheek and started calling me a little baby. But it was the 80s, so apparently that was okay.

I discovered he had an email address a while back and I sent him an email telling him that he fucked up my childhood and that he, as a professed Christian, now knows that he will go to his grave unforgiven because there is no possible way he could do enough to earn my forgiveness.

He replied, I deleted it without reading it. Fuck him.

The bigoted piece of shit also was in the Peace Corps in the Cameroon and because of that, thought it was totally appropriate to dress in the traditional clothing of Cameroonian people every Halloween. Unsurprisingly, the two Jewish kids and the two black kids in school were treated the worst by him. One of the two black kids was a girl who very definitely had dyslexia. Wow did he humiliate her over it constantly.

The funny thing is that he basically terrified me into not explaining what he was doing to my parents explicitly enough. They saw weird signs, but also always told me that I’d be treated worse in public school, which was proven untrue when I went to middle school, because as shitty as middle school kids are to each other, at least the teachers generally didn’t take the side of the bullies and encourage them to bully harder. They only knew when my mom ran into one of the people I went to school with in a supermarket who told my mom that she felt so bad for me when we were in that hellhole.