I was in MathCounts in middle school. MathCounts is a competitive math club for middle schoolers. Think of it as just taking the SAT for fun.

The club advisor was a woman that we’ll call Ms. Audrey. She isn’t actually a teacher, and really her position in the school is sort of a gray area. All we really know is that she’s been with the school since its inception, and she holds a lot of influence over the school’s admins. It may be because the school admins view MathCounts performance as good marketing to show that the school is doing well academically, but that’s just my speculation.

In any case, her life is math. That’s basically all she does. She even has a husband with a doctorate in math. Actually, she would have been the most valid candidate to be the club advisor, if not for the fact that she was extremely harsh and abusive toward the club members. If a club member gets a question wrong during practice tests, then she would single them out and have them stand in front of the room, and force the member to try to solve that question correctly while yelling at him that he should have solved it correctly the first time. Of course, a student doesn’t willingly get questions wrong, so when this happens, the student has no idea how to solve the question the correct way and the entire club ends up wasting a good 10 minutes watching that one student try to solve the question through trial and error. It’s terrible for the student and it’s terrible to everyone else watching.

To make up for the inefficient use of time, Ms. Audrey mandates that club members need to spend 3-4 hours after school on the club, Monday through Friday. Essentially, we finish school at 6pm earliest, and we regularly go past 7pm and sometimes into 8pm. She also hosts additional “optional” practice sessions on the weekends and over the holidays. Also, she assigns practice tests as homework.

She once kept our competition awards hostage. When asked about it, she just said that she needed it for something and that she’ll give it to us “later.” I later secretly went in to the room and took my award anyways.

Once, she lost one of her binders. I’m not sure what was in it, and frankly, I don’t care to wonder. But she seemed to have thought that it was really important, because she launched an entire “investigation” into who took the binder.

Her idea of an investigation is to wait until a club member is alone, then ask that club member to sit in the teacher’s lounge. She would then “leave” to do something else and let the student sit for 10 minutes. When she returned, her entire demeanor was different, and she would insist that the student “confess for what they did.” She would say that other club members saw that student do it and that she already knows that the student did it, but she just needed the student to say it. She would threaten severe consequences unless the student confess. And she would pressure the student until they start crying. If still the student didn’t say anything, she would conclude that the student was innocent and didn’t take her binder. Repeat for the other club members until she found someone who confessed. Of course, it turns out that nobody took her binder.

I think none of the club members knew any better, and so none of them left. A lot of members were also pressured by their families into staying because “Ms. Audrey is overqualified and she gets results.”

I’m not quite sure what it is about me, but when I joined, Ms. Audrey kind of fixated on me. She somehow came to the conclusion that I had “enormous untapped potential for math,” and she made it her job to try to activate that untapped potential. To be entirely fair to her, I was good at math. I was a quick learner and I was able to solve some of the problems that other people couldn’t solve. But I think she vastly overestimated my potential, or at least she was terrible at activating my potential. And very quickly I became a major target of a lot of her abuse, when I wasn’t living up to her ideas on my mathematical abilities. I ended up hating math as a subject, and when I finally got to high school, I had an entire career plan shift. Now I’m a biologist, where I don’t need to touch math at all.