My Personal Narrative (Your Corrections are welcomed.)

I have to say the confidence and the self-esteem that I had established, based on my perpetually high scores and excellent performances before, were cruelly and completely smashed after the incident.
It was at the beginning of the first semester of high school that the story happened. We were having a lecture on politics. Miss Yang, the teacher, seemed not in a good mood and her speech was drowned out by the students’ uproarious talk and laughter. She was obviously annoyed. Making futile effort to talking them out of making noise, she got sorer and sorer since the situation did not change in the way she expected. Spit out! Suddenly she shouted at me when she saw out of the corner of her eye that I was chewing a piece of gum which I had never taken seriously before. At first I was wondering what was the matter or whether she was shouting at me, but later our eyes met and the sight of her purple face put me on the edge of some dark pit. I was made aware of the matter and felt unprecedentedly frightened and restless, waiting for the easily predictable subsequence. It did happen. She rushed toward me and dragged me straight up from my seat and out of the classroom. At the moment, all my classmates were shocked and I, of course, thunderstruck. I can still see her raging stare and feel the savage hold she caught of me.
I was placed in the teachers’ office, scared and helpless, and was ashamed beyond words when feeling the wondering sight from the other teachers in the room. It was after all the first time in my life that I had been put in such an embarrassed circumstance. I saw her describing the whole story fiercely to the teacher in charge of our class, with her voice quivered and her fists clenched, as if she had been crying. Finally I got the meaning in her words that I had chewed the gum in class with the intension of putting her uneasy. I couldn’t believe my ears, nor could I help feeling sickened, nor could I imagine what she was aiming at by saying so. I instinctively began to explain for myself when all the curious teachers were listening that I had never done it on purpose if I had really hurt Miss Yang’s feeling, but they told me that I had better save my breath and confess my wrongdoing. They were constantly putting the blame on me and emphasized that I should accept whatever teachers said rather than leave any chance for me to say what I had to say. I had no right to explain it away. I apologized for my fault of chewing gum in class but refused to admit I had done it with the intension of hurting anyone, which caused their stronger resentment as a result. With my mind half empty, I heard the class teacher told the others in a strange tone that I had been a good student with the top score of the entrance examination when entering the high school and naively dreamt of having the situation changed merely by these words. But shortly I found I misjudged the situation. I was more severely reprimanded by all the teachers in the office for being conceited and arrogant due to the good results in the past exams. Meanwhile I sensed clearly a trace of mockery in Miss Yang’s eyes; maybe she had got enough support. I was irritated. I have to admit I was so immature to deal with the circumstance that it was later made worse. I chose to defend myself — I asked them not to assume my fault at will without seeing the whole story with their own eyes and insisted I was still a qualified, if not the best, student not without good-natured quality. They showed strong astonishment how I dared to talk back in this way and appeared to fly into a rage from shame. I guess they had never been denied before, especially by a student. Consequently they roared with anger, their fingers pointed straight at the top of my nose, that I was ill-bred and presumptuous enough to have shown disrespect toward teachers and some of them even defined me as the black sheep of the whole class. And then, probably after feeling bored of assailing me in a single direction, they turned to find fault with my clothing and hairstyle which I thought, and still do, nothing but just the appearance any unsophisticated student should be in. I was speechless with despair and disgustedness. I can imagine how ashen-faced I was at that time. The only thing that could save me was to disappear out of the room to take a deep breath or even to disappear permanently from the world.
I did disappear out of the room after I was forced to write down a self-criticism. What a nuisance! I wrote all that they wanted to read just because I yearned to get rid of the terrible nightmare to keep enough to myself. I was really wounded and haggard. Various ideas flashed through my mind. I did taste what so-called low-grade students who were prone to be overlooked had felt when suffering the unfair and merciless insult from their teachers.
I do not mean I was free of fault. I apologized to Miss Yang for chewing gum in class and for the negative influence my behavior had brought to her, and this I did with all my sincerity; the teachers wanted to punish me as a warning to the other students, and this I completely understood and still do. But did they understand me? Or did they understand our starved desire for mutual equality and respect between teachers and students? They impugned my capacity as a qualified student no matter how excellent I had persistently been or how unwitting the mistake I had committed was. Some even did so just because they felt they had lost their face. I had done something wrong and then I was turned into a mean person with the most nasty moral character and without the least high quality. I began to make sure a ridiculous truth that teachers were wont to disassociate themselves from any fault; the sole and only thing students could do was to believe in or even to worship teachers and whatever teachers said or did. I was disillusioned. All the respect toward teachers that I had stood for for years was shattered out of being.
The equality between teachers and students never exists. Teachers are subconsciously prone to the sense of superiority because of their broad and profound knowledge and rich educational experience. However, those who hurt their students of tender age for personal reasons have lost the basic quality of humans; they are far from superior; they even do not deserve to be teachers. At the age in their lives when most of them are extremely sensitive, the students can be easily broken in dignity and in confidence; their values or even their lives can be irremediably ruined. If the teachers put their own children in the students’ position, are they willing to see their own children going through such kind of heartbreaking experience?