Question
A Cruel Teacher
It has been twenty years since I was in Mr. Brill’s tenth-grade biology class, but I still get nervous thinking about it. Mr. Brill was a tall, (1) man who resembled the skeleton at the back of the room. His meanness was (2). For his most difficult questions, he would call on the shyest kids, those most vulnerable to the pain of embarrassment. And when they nervously (3) their answers, he would (4), as if their poor performance were a personal victory for him. The discomfort of some of his victims was almost tangible, nearly as solid as the wooden pointer which he sometimes loudly slammed across his desk just to shock us. He seemed to (5) situations just to make us miserable. For example, if our fingernails were not (6), we were sent out of class. As if we needed clean hands to dissect a frog! One time I worked extremely hard on a paper for class, but he accused me of (7). He said I must have copied it because I was too dumb to write anything that good. Without a (8), he gave me an F, which ruined my average and demoralized me for the rest of the year. All of us students would imagine ways to get even with him, but we were too afraid to (9). Why a teacher like that was allowed to continue teaching was an enigma to us, one I still have not figured out. In all the years since, I’ve never met a person who was such a (10) on the teaching profession.
