When you hear the word “bullying”, the first thing you probably think of are cruel school kids who make someone’s life impossible. This is not what happened with Mark; fortunately, all was good with his classmates. Instead, he was the victim of bullying on the part of his teacher. Can you imagine? A TEACHER. He experienced a great deal of unpleasant moments, and he’d like to share with you how he managed to overcome this problem.

Mark was a senior in high school at the time. He was a solid C student in math, having struggled with it throughout his school years. He’d always liked math though, and was eager to know more, which is why he usually posed a lot of questions to the teacher during lessons. Last year he ended up with a new teacher, Ms. Roberts, who was known locally as a genius at math. She was also infamous as a heartless and nasty woman, but Mark thought this wasn’t something to be worried about. Anyway, he took up her classes in the hope that he could improve his math grades given that she was so good.

The initial lessons went alright; Mark was his usual enthusiastic self, asking lots of questions. Maybe they were somewhat dumb ones, but hey, as far as he understood it, any teacher would be glad to help such an interested student. Sure…it didn’t take long for her to come up with phrases like "And here comes the slow boy again", "Surprise-surprise, you don't understand it again", "Do we have to go extra slow for you today?" In front of everyone! And everyone laughed. For some reason, Mark became a real red flag for her. Every single lesson he was at the receiving end of new creative insults from Ms. Roberts. He certainly wasn’t the best student there, but he wasn’t the worst one either, and he was never able to understand where such contempt for him came from.

You might say that Mark should have just taken a deep breath and kept his cool for a couple of semesters. The problem was that with those math lessons several days a week, it was getting harder and harder for Mark to drag himself to school every day. So he tried to solve the problem on his own by trying to act very friendly and calm towards her. It backfired and she became even nastier. Alright, time for plan B, he thought. He decided to confront her directly by asking: “Ms. Roberts, could you stop insulting me in front of the whole class?” All he got in response was “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And by the way, I wouldn’t expect a C at the end of the year if I were you”.

That required extreme measures. He went to see the school principal about the problem, who sent someone in to examine her during class. She acted respectful and normal for one day, and then went back to bullying him with twice the enthusiasm. That was enough. Mark went to the local radioshack, bought a recorder, and secretly taped every insult she threw at him for the rest of the school year. One day, he asked her a question during class. Her response even now is still burnt into his brain: "I've be