Been both bullied AND a bully. I liked dishing it out a lot more than taking it.
I never knew that a teacher could be a bully until middle school.
I had an algebra teacher who looked and sounded like a poor man's version of Charles Nelson Reilly. He hated me from day one, doing whatever he could think of to embarrass me in front of the class. Kind of a psycho, really. He favoritized the girls in his class, too, calling them "privileged characters" (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean). One day, a boy and a girl got up to go to the bathroom sign-out sheet by the door (only one kid could go at a time, no one else could go until that kid came back). They raced each other to the sheet, the boy got there first. While he was writing his name on it, Mr. Psycho decided to put down his chalk, walk over to the boy and slam his hand down on the kid's head to forcibly twist his neck to face the girl.
"Do you know what that is?" he asks. "That is a girl."
All the girls were laughing at this point. This was par for the course behavior for Mr. Psycho.
But then it suddenly got very quiet in the room when he picked the boy up and threw him over two student desks, while hollering, "YOU DON'T RACE A GIRL TO THE SIGN-OUT SHEET IN MY CLASS!"
I remember thinking this is your last day as a "teacher," bitch.
Nope. He "taught" there for years, afterward. I saw his name in the paper, later on, as an appointee to the school board. So. He went on to make policy for the whole damn district.
As long as you have powerful people watching your back, you can even publicly abuse kids, and nothing will happen to you.