People Open Up About Their Prodigious Revenge Stories

“I’ve always been a shy person, and I grew up in a large, urban area. In high school, I had friends, but we were the nerdy type and thought of as losers. I was one of two girls in our core friend group of four kids.

Of course, we eventually went out with the guys in our group. The youngest in our group was one of the boys, ‘Doug,’ in ninth grade, and the oldest was a boy, ‘Clayton,’ in eleventh. The other girl (‘Sarah’) and I were in tenth.

I went out with Doug all through high school, for which I was relentlessly teased by people outside of our group because he’s a bit more than a year younger than me. Sarah and Clayton married in college, and are still happily married five years later.

Doug and I, for our part, got married once he finished college, and we have been married almost four years. We have a one-year-old daughter, ‘Raquelle.’

Both Doug and Clayton eventually got careers in IT. Sarah and Clayton have their own, one-year-old daughter, ‘Amber.’ Sarah has a small but thriving home business selling refurbished furniture on eBay, that she and Clayton find on weekends.

The reason I give so much backstory is that our friend group is pretty isolated. Chalk it up to years of bullying, being made fun of, excluded, you name it. It happened to all four of us in school, even in primary and middle school.

Even now, in my later twenties, I don’t really have close friends besides Sarah, Clayton, and of course my husband Doug who is my best friend. This is true, even though we moved all the way to the Midwest for Doug’s career (we’re still close enough and well off enough so that we can regularly fly out to see our friends and vice versa).

Doug makes more than enough money to support all three of us on his salary alone, especially in our state, and always says it’s okay if I am a stay-at-home mom.

However, in this new environment, I thought I might have a fresh start.

To work on being more outgoing, as it were. No one in my new town knew me from when I was a kid, and a total reject. Doug’s father passed away, and so his mother lives with us and has generously helped take care of Raquelle.

We all talked it over, and agreed I could go back to college to get a teaching certification for my bachelor’s degree (math). Fast forward just a few months, and thanks to an accelerated program and shortage of maths teachers in my area, I got my teaching license quite quickly and easily.

I also made a few new friends in the teaching program, which helped my self-esteem.

So, I put out my resume and within just a few short weeks, I get hired at an independent studies charter school. I was looking to get hired at a regular high school, but whatever.

It was a credit recovery school. Basically, the idea was that kids who washed out of the regular school district or couldn’t succeed there for whatever reason could try to succeed in our setting. We hosted grades nine through twelve. Students would make appointments and come in on their own time, meet independently with teachers, be given assignments and projects, and basically earn a legit high school diploma eventually.

I knew it was kind of weird to go back to a place (high school) where I never fit in, but I thought it would be totally different from the perspective of an adult.

The school was one large classroom the size of a basketball court, with administrative offices, science labs, even an exercise room for PE all around the perimeter.

About fifty student desks were lined around the center of the room in rows, and around these desks were about a dozen teacher desks. Generally, we’d have two teachers per subject area (ie, two English, two math, two histories, etc.), and we each had our own roster of students and ensured that they visited all teachers for whose subjects they owed credits.

Although the school officially had over two hundred students on the various rosters, there were rarely more than ten or so students in the school at any one time, due to different appointments throughout the day.

That meant that there was tons of downtime where the teachers would just shoot the breeze with one another.

The school had a female principal, a male vice principal, and a male counselor. The other math teacher was male, both English teachers were female, both science teachers were male, the PE teacher was male, the art teacher was female, and the history teachers were one male and one female.

There was also a male computer teacher and a female music teacher, both of whom came in once a week.

I could see right away from day one that all the teachers were good friends with one another. That’s not a bad thing at all.

Lunch is at noon every day and the school shuts down for a whole hour. Typically, the other teachers would all go out to lunch with one another, or break off into twos and threes. I didn’t really know anyone so I didn’t take offense to anyone not inviting me to go to lunch with them.

I thought, well, maybe give it a few weeks and it will change. I had that old feeling from when I was a kid, of being rejected. Still, I was the new person, so I tried not to take it personally. Besides, forming relationships, colleagues included, is a two-way street and I could reach out, too.

Til then, it was lunch at the desk. Sometimes I’d facetime hubby, who usually had lunch at that time, too, but I was proud of him for making friends at his own work and tried to minimize taking up his time.

I didn’t really focus on that too much, though, and just did my job.

Students tended to like me and after just a few weeks it became noticeable that my students made more appointments to see me than other teachers’ students made to see them. Every time a student finished a project or assignment for a teacher, whatever the subject, they would turn it into their ‘main’ teacher, the one who had the student on their main roster.

It soon became clear that students on my roster were finishing their assignments and graduating at a faster rate than my peers. I didn’t plan for this to happen; it just turned out that way.

Over time, holidays would pass and our school would have mandated social and team-building functions (ie, potluck in the breakroom, etc.).

It seems like I was making progress socially. I was always positive and nice to my peers and would be myself around them, try to tell them about me, and learn about them. They were being nice to me, too, at least to my face, so I thought I was finally fitting in.

One day, however, the principal called me into her office to tell me that someone had told her that I was smug and antisocial and that it wasn’t good for the school environment for teachers to ‘bully’ one another. I was flabbergasted and of course, my initial reaction was to ask who told her this, but the principal said it was confidential, and to just ‘work on being nicer.’ I didn’t want to seem intransigent or defiant, so I apologized for hurting anyone’s feelings but also pointed out that I was trying my very best to fit in, and I had been working there the shortest compare to everyone else, so of course I didn’t want to overstep.

I also pointed out that students on my roster were graduating at a good pace (I didn’t throw shade at any of my colleagues). My principal agreed with me on this and praised me heartily. The vice-principal happened to be walking by, and he overheard the principal praising me.

He too threw in the comment that I was an exemplary teacher, the students were praising me in private to him, and that the school had ‘big plans’ for me, especially since we were on pace to outperform another independent study charter school a few miles away, which competed for the same state funding.

This pleased me of course and took the edge off the butthurt of people telling the principal I was not nice. A small (maybe big) red flag was that they told me that students graduating meant massive funding for our school, funds which the regular district didn’t want the charter school to have.

And, that if all teachers could ‘get more students to turn in work,’ we all might get bonuses. I mean, all that is good, but both of them spoke about student graduation only in terms of how it could benefit our own pocketbooks.

Ever since I started working at the school, what had originally been five students, ten at the most working in the classroom at a time became twenty or more (almost every one of them a kid on my roster) every day hanging out for hours and hours doing their work in our quiet classroom environment.

I thought this was great because this meant they could graduate sooner and get on with their lives.

Gradually, however, I noticed that some of my peers looked resentful when the classroom was so full. I strongly suspect this is because they had grown accustomed to having long stretches of time to simply mess about online at their desks, playing with their smartphones, and gossiping.

Our school had a policy that unless you were on a break, you had to be at your desk and make yourself available to grade student work in your subject area. They didn’t like grading my student’s work, because eventually, ‘credit’ for that student graduating would go to me, their main teacher.

I certainly didn’t mind grading work from students who were on other teachers’ rosters. That’s the whole point of our job. Gradually, I came to realize that the school didn’t focus so much on actually teaching the students anything and making sure that their diploma actually meant something, then just rubber-stamping their work and saying it was satisfactory, using the fact that we were licensed, credentialed professionals as an official backup.

Really, any reasonably intelligent adult (or even kid) could do the type of work some of my colleagues were actually doing.

What would happen was, say, a kid on my roster is behind five credits in English if he wants to graduate. I would then send him to the English teacher to request a packet of English work.

The kid would do the work, give it to the English teacher to grade, she would sign off on it, I would input the grade on my computer, and the kid would be one credit closer to graduation. It soon became clear to me that the teachers weren’t even actually looking at the packets before giving them a grade, really just pulling grades out of their butts.

I would never dream of doing that on any student’s math work. That’s the way they’d grade for me, but they’d do it in a slow way, so as to reduce the speed of students graduating from my roster. As in, they’d let piles of my students’ work sit on their desk ungraded, while they played Clash of Clans at their desk.

I never said anything, and was always polite and friendly to them, even though I knew at least one of them had badmouthed me to the principal. Needless to say, even months into my new job, I wasn’t making friends with my coworkers. I was nice to them, and it seemed at face value that they at least respected me on a professional level, at least to my face, so I’d accept that for the time being.

The big switch came when the principal actually singled me out at a staff meeting as an exemplary teacher. She said that I had come from (big city) and have succeeded to an amazing degree and that I had set a record for how many students were graduating high school on my roster.

From that point on, I sensed that people were being cold to me. It felt a lot like high school, except unlike high school where other girls would openly mock me as a tall skinny no-butt giraffe, adults did it in colder ways.

On rare occasions where the whole classroom was empty, or if I’d run into groups of them in the breakroom, they would talk about all these fun things they did together after work, or talk about the big party they were all going to have at such and such venue, and how everyone was invited. Except, obviously…

Well, I didn’t really mind, actually. I wasn’t going to let them being petty ruin the good feeling I had from helping students and feeling like I was making a difference. I was still very nice to everyone and kept up my positive attitude.

Inside I felt SO bad and so left out, however. I didn’t tell my husband about basically being shunned at work, and instead, I focused just on my success in getting students to graduate.

Anyway, some of my students would actually quietly complain to me that ‘Miss So and So doesn’t even grade our work.’ I’d NEVER badmouth my coworkers, especially to the kids (it’s important to have a united front of course), but on the sly, I’d separate those work packets that were clearly not graded properly and look them over myself as best I could.

Although I was only licensed to teach math, if, say, a history packet seemed incomplete, and yet had a ‘B + nice work’ on the cover, I’d sort of quietly, as diplomatically as I could, staple a new cover sheet to it, ask the student to finish it for real, and submit it again to the teacher.

I’d make sure the student asked the teacher to grade it in front of him or her as he or she was eager to see the results of all their hard work. Although the teachers HATED it when my kids did this, I did make sure my students’ work was as legitimately graded as possible.

Somewhat surprisingly, students appreciated my determination that they didn’t slack their way through what was obviously a trashy school.

When it came to other teachers’ students coming to me with math packets, I did the professional thing and actually went over the packets, and gave the tests and quizzes as prescribed in the employee handbook for our school and as is mandated by our state.

The other teachers didn’t like this, I guess because they were used to teachers just rubberstamping the work as passing, regardless of whether or not it was competently done. Invariably, teachers preferred to send their ‘math’ kids to the other teacher, because he had no problem just breezing through the packets as if they were flipbooks and assigning whatever grade he dreamed of.

However, even though for him to just scribble ‘C+, please show work for each equation’ on packet covers took no time at all and he could go back to searching up profiles on mingling sites (I found out eventually that he was already married), he resented the fact that he ‘graded’ perhaps twenty math packets in one day, whereas I graded maybe five because I graded them and assigned the tests and everything, which of course took time.

Eventually, other teachers began to grumble, too, how I was taking too long to grade their kids’ packets and thus slowing down their students’ graduations, whereas mine were graduating relatively faster.

I began to hear rumors that kids only came to see me, especially the boys, because they had crushes on me.

Naturally, the rumors eventually spread that I actually WAS abusing the kids. Other rumors spread that I was unqualified to be a math teacher, what was a woman doing being a math teacher anyway, I was just trying to hook up with young studs, all sorts of nonsense.

Still, more rumors spread that I was manipulating my graduation rates and that it was all fraud somehow. My husband Doug had actually come to see me on a couple of occasions at the school to go with me to doctor’s appointments, so the staff knew what he looked like.

One day I had my phone out on my desk when Clayton called to tell me the news that he and Sarah were coming to visit next month. Unfortunately for my reputation at that school, Clayton’s contact avatar showed hugely on my phone screen when he called in the middle of the day, and one of my busybody coworkers happened to be walking by my desk, saw my phone, and made a face of barely concealed contempt.

Needless to say, rumors soon spread that I was being unfaithful to Doug with some other young man, along with all the high schoolers who I supposedly worked with off the clock. Still, I tried to grind it out.

But, I would plan my revenge, too, if it came to that.

I’m mature, but I’m not above getting even. I went through twelve years of misery growing up. I’d be darned if I resigned myself to a lifetime of misery, as a grownup.

I flatter myself that I was at least sort of cool in college.

Heh.

The first thing I did was let my principal know what was going on. My plan was if she addressed the bullying at a future meeting and put an end to it, then hey, I wouldn’t even need to get revenge. I’d just go back to doing my job and minding my own business.

I was kind of hoping the principal would back me up, as up until now, aside from the red flag about being obsessed with the school getting tuition fees and not with students learning anything, she seemed friendly enough if a bit detached from her school’s day to day operations.

I told her that students would tell me quietly that Mr. So and So or Ms. What’s Her Name told them that I was going out with a student or being unfaithful to my husband. More than one kid would tell me these kinds of things.

I knew my kids weren’t trolling me as over the months I’d established a good rapport with all of them.

The principal basically gaslights me and tells me I’m being paranoid. ‘It’s a high school,’ she says, ‘in high schools there are rumors.

It’s part of the territory.’ Yeah, I reply, but the rumors are usually from students, not adults. She doesn’t really address this, other than to tell me that I needed to grow up and not let petty things like supposed rumors bother me.

She tells me to ‘be the bigger person.’

Nah.

I should have mentioned that I had brought my cellphone in with me, and had been recording the principal’s responses to what I had been saying. This was good for the case I was building, because, as if on cue, the vice principal comes walking by once again, ‘World’s Greatest Chad’ coffee mug in hand.

‘Oh hey, Mr. Vice Principal Dude, come in really quick!’

I thought the Principal was going to tell him about my concerns about the rumors that I was basically both an adulterer and also trying to go to jail for having illicit fun with minors.

But no, instead principal and vice-principal complain to me that I am being too thorough in my grading of math work from students on other teachers’ rosters. I explain that I’m trying to do my job according to the employee handbook they themselves had given me, and according to the two-day training seminar (standard for all teachers of independent studies schools where I live) they had mandated I attend before my first day of employment.

They tell me that I needed to ‘play ball’ and that our task was to get these kids out the door with that diploma in hand. I counter with, what good is a diploma if they don’t actually know any history or how to read or how to use the scientific method or whatever.

The principal actually calls me a ‘pretentious, wannabe female Jaime Escalante’ (famous calculus teacher). They both strongly encourage me to use my ‘professional judgment’ (ie, place my teaching license in jeopardy) by assigning passing marks to work that is clearly not passing. I get all of this on record, and I make sure to email a backup copy of the mp3 to my outside email address.

Our school plays it slick when it comes to the school board inspecting our paperwork. Whenever the principal knows the state is coming for an inspection of our packets (an audit, they like to call it), they have each of us take extra special care to grade about three or four packets in our subject area very thoroughly.

These packets are placed in a file cabinet in the middle of the classroom, so as to imply they represent our average work. All other packets with trashy grades on them go in these other file cabinets in the back, that the school never invites the inspectors to look at.

We tend to empty out students’ folders into these file cabinets after they graduate. The school had a policy that once a packet was three months old, we only had to retain the cover with the teacher grades and comments to save cabinet space, thereby destroying evidence that the actual packet behind the cover was never actually done properly.

The phony cabinet in the middle of the classroom represented ‘active work.’

The only two sorts of friends I made at the school were the music teacher and computer teacher, who taught small labs only once a week, and both of whom had other, full-time jobs and were married (not to each other) and had families.

The music teacher taught at a local community college and did the charter school just as a side hustle, and the computer guy consulted and made six figures. I, therefore, didn’t feel too much guilt about what I was going to do. Still, I quietly hinted at my plan to both of them on the day they came to campus, and both of them were like, ‘do it!’

After the principal and vice-principal (and the counselor too, who also ‘just so happened to be walking by’) all encouraged me to basically commit academic fraud, I thought, screw ’em. I also suspected and later confirmed they had a secret buzzer system to surreptitiously call one another from their desks, which is why they always happened to be available at the same time when necessary or convenient.

I snuck toward the filing area where all of our bogus student work credits were stored, and day by day over a period of three months took video of hundreds of packet covers, all of them labeled with academic grades, teacher comments, and teacher signatures.

I of course also continued the videos to show page after page of blank work and incomplete work, nonsensical work… English packets especially were rife with ridiculous gibberish, sometimes even mocking the teachers, like, ‘Ms. English teacher lady is a witch and she doesn’t even grade our work LOL!’ and the cover would have Ms. English teacher lady’s signature along with ‘A+, fantastic!

You are such a talented writer!’

Sure enough, after three months, the secretary (who was also kind of snooty and played on her smartphone and uploaded selfies to social media all day even though she was like fifty-five) shredded mountains of bogus work and filed only the covers.

Throughout this whole time, I’d been slyly walking about the classroom in such a way that other teachers would think I wasn’t trying to look at them or what was on their computer, and I’d catch video of them on social media or shopping on eBay, while they have a student interviewing right in front of them, what the actual heck.

At home one day I asked Doug how to do a remote microphone that I could control from far away. He’s like, what for, are you trying to be James Bond? But he’s so smart and it’s child’s play for him, so he personally rigs one for me at work.

Basically, it’s like a wireless mic that isn’t a detectable Bluetooth, and he sets up a way for me to turn it on and off from far away. I’m like, that’s awesome, can I have ten? He smiles but he asks no questions because he’s awesome like that.

The next day, he has a dozen of them. I want it so that there’s no way for my devices to appear when the other teachers turn on their Bluetooth earpieces.

I’m always the first at work because my coworkers tend to be irresponsible bums, so even though everyone is supposed to be at their desks by 8:00 am, most of them drift in at 8:10, 8:20, and so on.

I’m there at 7:30 just in case. I know the code of how to get in on the keyless entry side door, let myself in, and slip a mic beneath everyone’s desk. Each mic has this mini watch battery that’s supposed to last quite a long time.

I bring the old smartphone that I don’t use anymore and make sure it has a huuuuuuuuuge capacity SD card that my husband got for me installed. I connect it as wireless audio input for the mics. I then hit record, and every day for two weeks I hear the teachers, most of whom are wearing Bluetooth headsets ever since it became uncool to yell gossip across the room, talking trash all day long.

Totally unrelated to work. Saying the most inappropriate things about other teachers, the principal, even the kids. Of course, these teachers are too stupid to simply text one another if they really want to sneak around and talk trash. To them, the Bluetooth thing is easier.

It stung, but I knew I struck gold when I heard them spreading false rumors about me, calling me a witch, a pretentious, big city loser with no friends, they’d definitely get me fired. They’d also talk about how they didn’t grade and just pretended to, that they were so glad that they could sit all day instead of teaching in the district, how it was a cushy job, how they were tricking state inspectors during audits.

Every day, during my lonely lunches, when they all went off to, I dunno, Applebee’s? I loaded the previous day’s MP3s into my real phone and edited out the dead air and kept all the good stuff. I then emailed these as separate, dated files to my outside email address.

This whole time, I continued to grade as normal, and take my time doing my job CORRECTLY. I knew I was going to pull the trigger soon anyway, but the last straw came when my latest student finished her last credit (coincidentally, a math one that I graded thoroughly) and now had enough credits to graduate.

Every time a student graduates, we’re supposed to blow party horns and give them a little congratulations trophy, and they’d get their diploma in the mail a week or two later. Students had the option of attending schoolwide, formal graduation at the end of the school year in June if they had graduated anytime during that year from September onward.

Most tended however to go right into the workforce or to the local junior college or state school.

So, I blow my little party horn for this girl, and everyone in the classroom, students, and teachers, claps enthusiastically. The girl’s mom and dad and little brother come that day to the classroom and insisted on having a photo with me and they all gave me a big hug.

Later, I reviewed the audio recordings of that day, and when the girl graduated, other teachers said really mean things about her and her family, a lot of it totally racist (this family was Hispanic; all the teachers and admin, including me, are White).

It just so happened both the music teacher and computer guy were on campus that day.

So, in true ‘Half Baked’ fashion, at the end of the day when the classroom was empty of students and teachers had the last five minutes to close down their computers, I walked from teacher to teacher, purse and other small belongings in hand, saying ‘screw you, screw you, screw you, (pass by computer guy) ‘you’re cool, (pass by music lady) you’re cool, screw you, screw you, screw you…’

I walk into the principal’s office while the other teachers are still in shock. She’s at her desk, and I know where her little buzzer button is beneath the desk (the computer guy told me about it because he was the one who installed it) and said, ‘I’m quitting.

I don’t want to be part of your criminal school.’ And just in case the buzzer was just a buzzer and not also a speaker, I pressed the PA button on her wall and said, ‘Ms. OP is quitting today because you’re all a bunch of hateful, unprofessional, mean-spirited jerks, except Mr. Computer and Ms. Music; you’re cool.’

I decided to finally take my darling Doug up on his offer for me to be a stay-at-home mom. And I’m cool with mother in law. She can stay.

I emailed our school district’s superintendent, our city’s mayor, state governor, the entire school board, and our local newspaper with all the files of photos, audio, and video I had taken, along with a terse, one-page summary of what had been going on.

Within weeks, every single one of the teachers and administrators, except the computer lab guy and music lady, who I made special effort to prove had participated in no wrongdoing) had been fired and had their credentials at least suspended, and in most cases revoked outright.

Only innocent parties like custodial staff and the like emerged with their reputations unscathed. All of the teachers who worked at that school and had been named in the school board’s inquiry as having participated in fraudulent practices were blacklisted from teaching there, or anywhere.

After a few weeks of initial turmoil, all students currently enrolled at the school were, due to parental pressure, allowed to keep their existing credit completion status. Students who had already graduated did not have their diplomas rescinded. All students were given vouchers to enroll at the competing, independent charter school down the road.

My own, former school was shut down and stayed abandoned for a couple of months, but eventually turned into an electronics store.

All the other stuff happened within a month of my quitting.

But I told my hubby about it on the very day I came home.

His eyes lit up like Christmas and the raging justice he developed was so hard that I was knocked up with our second child even before my back hit the mattress.

Clayton and Sarah thought it was pretty LOL. I’ve since made new friends around town to go along with Computer Guy and Music Lady and college friends, especially with other moms. Doug is killing it at work and is thinking of starting his own company.”