Disclaimer: This story is inspired by real experiences, but names, characters, and certain details have been changed for privacy. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Also, this is my first blog — please be kind! 🙂 💜
✨ The Lasting Impact of School Experiences
They say not to look back — to keep your eyes on the road ahead and leave the past in the rear-view mirror.
But she was six when the world shifted.
Before that, she’d been a girl who danced through the kitchen, who scribbled stories in bright felt-tip pens, who beamed in every photograph like the sun lived behind her eyes.
But around her sixth birthday, something changed.
It started with a new classroom.
A new teacher.
Mrs Lingard.
On the first day, Mrs Lingard seemed lovely — warm, sweet, with a singsong voice and promises of fun. The little girl was excited. She wanted to impress her. She wanted to be liked.
But by day two, the mask slipped.
Mrs Lingard’s smile turned sharp. Her warmth became ice. And the children whose parents had flashy cars and manicured lawns quickly became her favourites. The others — the ones with muddy shoes and second-hand cardigans — learned to shrink.
The little girl tried to be invisible. The classroom wasn’t a haven anymore — it was punishment.
She stopped raising her hand to answer questions.
She stopped humming on the way to school.
Silence crept in. And with it — fear.
The Poster
One afternoon, the class was asked to make posters about an upcoming school trip. She worked so hard on hers — colouring it neatly, writing slowly and carefully, just the way she thought she was supposed to. She was proud.
But when she handed it in, Mrs Lingard held it up in front of the whole class.
“Watch closely, everyone.”
Then she ripped it apart — not gently, but with gleeful cruelty.
She mocked the spelling. The drawings. The effort. The class laughed.
Tears welled up before the girl even realised.
“Crybaby,” Mrs Lingard snapped.
She tore the poster straight down the middle. The sound was louder than scissors — sharp, final, brutal. Her pride shredded with it. The pieces fluttered to the floor.
Then she shouted at the girl to pick it up and put it in the bin.
And do it again — during lunch.
Alone.
She was just six years old.
She would never forget the sound of that paper tearing.
The laughter.
The cold weight of the word “crybaby” still lodged somewhere deep in her chest.
Mrs Lingard’s laugh wasn’t the kind that filled a room — it was the kind that emptied it of hope.
That day, something cracked.
Labels
Mrs Lingard began to label her:
Slow. Silly. Thick.
Reading became a battlefield. Letters danced on the page. Writing became a source of shame — a mess of red pen and sighs.
Years later, a compassionate English teacher would explain that her brain worked differently. Dyslexia, it was called. Not stupidity. Not failure.
But back then, no one explained anything. They just laughed — or ignored her.
Especially Mrs Lingard.
If a wealthy child made a cruel comment — like the time one said she looked pregnant in her PE kit — Mrs Lingard didn’t scold them.
She laughed too.
Once, she even muttered that maybe her parents should start buying vegetables instead of “cheap processed rubbish.”
The girl burned with shame.
Her parents worked hard.
There were always vegetables in the house — not organic, not branded — but they were there.
It was never enough.
The Sickness
Her mother tried. She marched into school with her head held high and came out with red eyes. She raised complaints. Wrote letters. But nothing changed.
The system closed its doors — and stood guard behind them.
Then came the day the girl felt sick during class. She whispered to Mrs Lingard that she didn’t feel well. Could she go to the toilet?
“Don’t be pathetic,” came the reply.
Moments later, she was sick — on herself, on the floor.
She cried, dizzy and humiliated. The sick clung to her jumper, sour and sticky. Her face burned.
Mrs Lingard didn’t offer tissues. She offered punishment. Made her clean it up. Made her sit in the corner, stinking of vomit, while the other children whispered and gagged.
No child should carry memories like that.
But she did.
A New Name on the Door
Eventually, the year ended. And with it came a new classroom — a new name on the door.
Mrs Why.
She didn’t care about brands or postcodes. She cared about people. She was strict, yes — but fair. And slowly, under her quiet encouragement, the girl began to unfurl. Just a little.
She wasn’t healed. Not yet.
But she had space to breathe again.
But Kindness Can’t Undo All
Still, some damage doesn’t vanish with kindness.
In her final year, she met Miss Elliot.
Not cruel like Mrs Lingard.
But indifferent in a way that still stung.
The same polished children still ruled the classroom.
When they mocked the girl’s charity shop uniform, she finally spoke up.
But Miss Elliot just shrugged.
“They’re just toughening you up.”
She was still a child.
She needed protection — not armour.
How were comments about her appearance, her money, her clothing supposed to toughen her up?
Years Later
Years passed. The girl grew. Changed schools. Learned to keep her head down and her walls high.
Then one day, in a corridor, she overheard someone whispering about Mrs Lingard — that she had left suddenly. The rumour was that a parent had stormed into the school and “sorted her out.”
A punch? A threat? No one knew.
But the classroom door had finally closed behind her.
For good.
Now
The girl — now a woman — still carried the weight of those years.
Sometimes, she caught herself shrinking under imagined criticism. Still feeling not good enough. Not clever enough. Not enough.
Sometimes she’d wake with the echo of laughter or the sound of paper tearing in her ears.
But one day, she sat down and wrote.
Not for revenge.
Not to name and shame.
Just… to release it.
Because healing, she had learned, wasn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen. It was about returning to that cold, scary classroom — not as the frightened child, but as the adult who survived it.
To take that small, trembling girl by the hand, look her in the eyes, and say:
“You didn’t deserve any of it. And I’m so proud of you for surviving.”
She doesn’t carry Mrs Lingard anymore.
She carries herself.
To Every Teacher, Everywhere:
Be kind.
You may forget a single day in the classroom.
But a child may remember it for the rest of their life.
A Note to Anyone Who’s Been There
If you ever experienced school as a place of cruelty — whether from teachers, classmates, or both — please don’t punish yourself.
You were a child. You didn’t deserve that.
You were failed by the very people who were meant to protect and uplift you. But you survived.
And now? It’s time to let go of the shame that was never yours to carry.
I’m proud of you.
Go live the life they said you never would have. Proof them all wrong!
© 2025 Louise C Kay. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce without permission.
Louise C Kay 
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