[ileonichwiesz]

That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)

One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.

[janwillemb]

Thanks for sharing this. It is so sad! Sorry that there are people like that. The only thing we can do now, is be better people than those horrible teachers.

[jagged-chisel]

Oh god, what’s the deal with horrendous people becoming teachers? Lately, I’ve been, uh, “reminiscing” about how terrible adults were to kids when I was a kid (I’m gen X.)

It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.

[janwillemb]

Same (GP). Schools were really unsafe places for children back then. It always strikes me of you see movies about schools in that period, that the story is often that children get horribly bullied and are called ugly, etc. I am glad my children grow up in better times.

[senbrow]

Low barrier to entry and hard to get fired once you're in.

Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.

[ngc248]

Kids come and go, whereas the teachers stay there. I feel a lot of school teachers are jealous of the kids and hence all the bullying by them.

[amenghra]

Are you familiar with the kids story book Iggy Peck Architect by Andrea Beaty? Same story, with a happy ending though.