the mystery called "Teacher".

Teachers are weird. it's not that I'm anti-teacher. there are a lot of great teachers out there. but the fact is, teachers are strange individuals. i guess you've got to be a little strange to be a teacher, because no normal person would voluntarily agree to have a job standing at the front of a room full of noisy kids, and try to forcibly make them memorize a bunch of names and dates while ducking their spit balls and yelling for quiet. honestly, who wants a job like that? i think teachers have to take a special class in college that teaches them what to say in certain situations, because they all pretty much say the same thing, you know? if you do something disruptive, it's always, "That was uncalled for." then there's the classic, "This is a classroom, not a playground." preschool teachers have their own parlance. they all say things like, "Use your indoor voice." and there's the Teacher Glare. all teachers have a Teacher Glare. if you don't glare well, they don't let you become a teacher. the Glare is very useful when a teacher can't think of anything to say to a misbehaving student. i think i broke a world record recently by receiving the Glare from about ten teachers at once. it was not a comfortable experience. one thing that teachers do that annoys me the most occurs in this scenario: I'm in the middle of writing, and I discover that I do not know how to spell a word that I wish to write. so I ask my teacher, "How do you spell 'carrot'? " And then the teacher answers, as all teachers answer, "Look it up in the dictionary." HUH??? how am i supposed to look it up in the dictionary if i don't know how to spell it?! maybe i think 'carrot' starts with a 'K'. So i look through the entire 'K' section in the dictionary, and i come across the word 'Karat', and write it in my essay. so my sentence looks like this: "Orange vegetables, such as the karat, contain a lot of vitamin A.", not realizing that karat is the weight measurement of gold, and not a sweet root vegetable. so i get points off my essay, of course. because it's all my fault. i was told to look the word up in the dictionary, so i spent half an hour searching every word until i found it, and, lo and behold, it's the wrong word. the teacher knows how to spell carrot, right? most educated people do. so why doesn't the teacher just tell me how to spell it, and spare me a lot of stress and aggravation? is it really so difficult?! oh, teachers. i can never figure them out.