14-year-old gets even with English teacher after being called a nerd in front of the whole class: 'That was the last time he picked on me!'

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Nov 12, 2025 2:00 PM EST

Teachers can leave a lasting impression… but not always the great kind.

Everyone remembers that one teacher who made them feel inferior in the classroom. Regardless of whether or not it was intentional, a teacher has the ability to make someone feel smaller, less competent, and less intelligent, sometimes just with a few choice words.

In this instance, we have an English instructor who seemed to go out of his way to shame the high school students in his classroom for doing subpar work. That doesn't mean the students who shirked their responsibilities or didn't complete assignments (not that reprimanding them publicly would be a decent thing to do either). Instead, this guy was reading essays and short stories from students that he believed were poorly written, as if to expose those flaws to the entire classroom.

It's a pretty savage method of instruction, one that you would think plenty of parents would complain about. However, no one seemed to be willing to stand up to this guy… no one, that is, except for this student!

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  • A group of high school students sits at desks in a classroom, taking notes.
    via Unsplash+ (Yunus Tuğ)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • This student decided he had had enough of this ridiculous practice. When he was forced to read portions of his most recent assignment out loud to the class, his teacher had the audacity to call the author a nerd, as if he had the maturity level of one of his students. This, however, gave the author an idea. By the end of the reading, the teacher would come to regret his methods…

  • "My English teacher singled me out for being a nerd, so I gave him exactly what he asked for"

    I was around 14 and attending class with one of the few teachers at my school who wasn't a robot. Mr. Misse was incredibly smart, witty, and
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  • eloquent. Unfortunately, he was also a b y. The kind of by who makes his life's poor choices his students' problem.
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  • Mr. Misse had many preferred b ying tactics. One of them was selecting homework or classwork from students and reading it slowly to the class in a mocking, monotone voice that reduced
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  • even the best work into an embarrassment. Mr. Misse would only stop reading once he realised the text had promise. For
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  • middling to poor texts, he would exhaustively read them all, making you stand up next to him, as the class would giggle and laugh at your work.
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  • But sometimes, he went a little further. Especially with those in the class he felt able to mock with impunity. In this case, it was me.
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  • At the time, I was obsessed with my slightly above-average intelligence and was a bit of an annoying know-it-all with few friends. Looking back at it, I
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  • deserved to be mocked. But I still don't think it was fair that much of the mocking came from teachers.
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  • So one day when he was particularly annoyed, Mr. Misse decided he was going to up the ante slightly. We were reading from some old book, and we
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  • came upon a passage that was a dialogue between three characters; an older man, a younger woman, and a know-it- all. He selected himself to voice
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  • the older man, a girl to voice the woman, and then said, "And since so-and-so is a total nerd, why don't you voice him, CodenamePingu".
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  • For once, his mocking hardly landed. I heard some suppressed giggles, but its uncalled-for nature meant an eerie, uncomfortable quiet fell on the class.
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  • A high school student sits at her desk writing in a notebook.
    via Unsplash+ (Yunus Tuğ)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • So I decided to comply. Maliciously. I deployed the most irritating, snot-filled, stereotypical nerd voice. One so obvious and filled with ridicule, the class laughed at first. Every word, every syllable of
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  • my readings was drenched with this unbearable quality. Mr. Misse chuckled too. But I kept going. For the length of the passage,
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  • which was supposed to last a good ten minutes as our class readings did, I kept doing this voice. The laughter was quickly replaced with an excruciating silence.
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  • I looked up after one of these to see Mr. Misse's usually haughty face filled with a sense of either shame, guilt, annoyance, or all three.
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  • After about three minutes of this painful charade, he uncharacteristically stopped the reading, and we moved on to another exercise.
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  • And that was the last time he picked on me. Addendum: The irony of this whole encounter is that despite the embarrassment Mr. Misse caused me, I still remember him fondly. Stockholm Syndrome,
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  • perhaps. But despite these antics, Mr. Misse was an original thinker who used his problematic personality to drive us to perfect our English, both spoken and written. His jokes and perspectives on the world were
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  • his own, and his deep and cutting cynicism felt like a window into another world. One far removed from the perennially bubbly and overly optimistic attitude of the suburbs I grew up in. I hope he's doing well.
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  • Orsombre • 35m ago Your nerd voice confronted him to the painful truth that he acted as a bully.
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  • MrZJones 1h ago I did something similar but I wasn't even trying to be malicious. You remember the monotone drone that most kids use when reading from the textbook, right?
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  • Once in middle school, I was called on to read some passage from the history textbook, and, being sick of the drone, I read it with emphasis, trying to make it sound like I was interested in it and to make it interesting for others.
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  • The teacher gave me a bemused stare and never called on me to read again for the rest of the year.
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  • A group of high school students sit at desks in a classroom. One male student, wearing glasses, raises his hand.
    via Unsplash+ (Yunus Tuğ)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

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school english teacher petty revenge teacher petty entitled people karma high school Terrible Teacher immature high schoolers entitled people
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