We have all had bad teachers, how about some stories. Here is one from me.
High School- Biology 2- First thing as soon as the bell rings teacher says, “Get out a sheet of paper we are going to have a quiz on chapter 6”.
The students respond that he has not assigned us chapter 6.
He says “Ok, read chapter 6 now and we will have the test at the end of the period”.
While he proceeds to the back of the room and puts on a Pink Floyd tape, we proceed to try to read and process chapter 6 in 45 minutes while listening to loud Pink Floyd. Just before the bell rings he says “Now we are going to have a test on Chapter 6” The bell rings, “We are going to have it first thing tomorow”.
The next day he opens the textbook and starts asking questions that make it obvious this is the first time since last year he has looked at Chapter 6. First question is “What is the title of Chapter 6”.
Last year was a bad year for me, teacher-wise. Let’s see…
My Freshman Algebra teacher (who shall remain nameless. ¬.¬). Most horrible class I’ve ever been in. It was the same thing every single day; come in, sit down, correct homework, do homework, leave. And we sat in the same seat day after day for the entire year. And when people were asking questions on the homework, if someone didn’t say something, instead of interpreting it as someone (i.e. me) understanding the work and not commenting, or doing the homework (I was typically many questions ahead of the class) he thought the person was just not working and called on them (usually me.) He also came up with stupid nicknames for people that he thought were witty. I don’t know anybody who actually thinks he is a good teacher. Especially me, because the year before, I had taken Algebra, and gotten within the highest 2 percent in the state in standardized math scores, but they put me in Algebra for a second year anyway! Arrrrggghhh. And I figured 9th-grade Algebra would at least go a bit faster than 8th-grade Algebra, and I might actually learn a few things, but it went slower! I didn’t learn a single thing that entire year!!! I’m STILL pissed off. This teacher also confiscated my TI-82 for “playing games” when I was writing a program to solve an equation in the book.
Then there was my Freshman Wellness teacher. No, not Health, “Wellness.” Yeah, I don’t get it either, it’s some kind of Health/PE mix that some Hippie came up with. Frankly, I’ve NEVER had a health/PE teacher that wasn’t either an incompetent bimbo or a total asshole. Last year the teacher was particularly bad. He wasn’t a bad coach, but typically the better someone is at coaching something, the worse they are going to be as actual teachers. Basically, we all got to the class, opened our books, looked in the syllabus what we had to do, and did the work. The teacher probably spent 1 day actually talking to the class. The rest of the time he sat in the corner doing stuff on his computer (presumably managing grades, but he could’ve been looking at porn for all we know.) And I could’ve sworn I saw him fall asleep in class at least once. I spent the whole time in that class sitting in the back, programming more stuff (games this time. ;)) on my TI calculator. But that teacher was totally incompetent, and I’m pretty sure we could have run the entire class just as well if he hadn’t even been there.
Ah, yes. Your stories are amusing, and I’m glad we have no teachers exactly like that. What we DO have is FAR MORE TERRIFYING.
Last year, a new english teacher came to replace one that had left. My class ALWAYS gets the new teacher, so having this guy for english was no new thing. Until he actually started… erm… “teaching”…
First off, he spoke in a pure monotone. Absolutly NO life to his voice whatsoever. THis was irritating, but nothing really awful. It was only the beginning.
ONe day, towards the beginning of the year, we (myself and a small group of friends) were walking back from gym class in our old school building. We were walking towards our lounge area, when we spotted him leaning against the wall, staring at something in our lounge. Not blinking at all, just watching something with INTENSE interest. He was also, when we happened upon him, licking his lips.
Startled out of his thoughs but our giggling group, his head jerked up and when he saw us, he gave us a nervous smile and practically ran away.
We looked into out lounge and saw another friend of ours asleep on a couch, her kilt riding up on her legs. SHE is what this teacher had been looking at.
This is only one example of the behavior that earned him the nickname “The Pedophile”. He ALWAYS in our class, stood behind his desk with one hand subtly moving around in his left pants pocket.
He also took to giving my friend and I weird looks while flashing obscene hand gestures at us.
This man is creepy and scary and he HATES my class.
If ANYone in our school turned out to be a murderer, serial rapist, psycho bomber… well, we know it would be him, and we know we’re the targets.
So how’s that for a bad teacher?
If that’s not good enough, I have other examples…
Well there’s always the 9th grade health teacher. Oh dear, he got to retake his teaching classes this summer over a sexual harassment case from last year, wonderful man isn’t he? I swear we did nothing all year, except for his half hearted attempt to teach us a little psychology, that failed so he gave up. The week before open house we worked like mad, our entire grade was based on that week. We copied pages from the health book and made posters. Just so our parents would think that we did stuff. Ha! Then he had us watch something about the immune system from the disvcovery channel. That was our final. That’s it. Evil man.
Oh well, I go into the rest of my teachers later
Kitty
On the whole, I had it pretty good, especially since I spent 12 years in the public school systems of various districts in Arkansas. There were a couple of real beauts, however. In fourth grade, we had a science teacher whose ideas of pedagogy extended no further than “Guess what I’m holding in my hand” – she once spent an entire class period calling on each kid in the class in turn to define “model”. She received numerous answers that were perfectly accurate and useful definitions, but she refused to accept any of them and continued to iterate through the entire class. Finally at the end of the period, she said in a self-satisfied tone: “A model is something that stands for something else.” This was the only definition she was prepared to accept. She also seriously mispronounced many words, particularly scientific terms, and insisted that the students do so as well; “cass-ter-istiss” for “characteristics” and “ca-PILL-aries” for “capillaries” are two that stick out in my memory. I knew enough to know when she was wrong a lot of the time, and got myself in trouble frequently until I figured out that I needed to go along with whatever she said in order to survive.
Then there was my eighth-grade algebra teacher. She seemed to take a dislike to me right away, but we managed to get along until just after the middle of the year. I’d struggled along with "C"s up to that point, but three weeks into the second semester I had an “F”, which meant a deficiency report. My parents got all over me, and I resolved to redouble my efforts. I’d been ought for almost a week with a throat infection at the time and had two pop quizzes to make up; I studied my ass off for two days straight and took both quizzes in one session, acing them both: 50 out of 50 possible points on each. I knew I’d done well; what I didn’t know was that she’d given me the exact same quizzes she gave the rest of the class a week before, and had already returned. She assumed that there was no way I could have done that well on my own and accused me of cheating; I had to spend hours convincing the vice principal that I’d done no such thing. At that point, I was ready to write off algebra for the rest of the year, transfer to a standard eighth-grade math class (I was in a special advanced section; most eighth graders took standard math rather than algebra), and take algebra again in ninth, but the guidance counselor convinced my parents and me that I’d lose credit for the whole year, etc., etc., and I should try to stick it out. I managed a “D” for that grading period, a “C” again for the next, and fell apart completely with an “F” the last, which meant that I got to do algebra over again anyway. Didn’t do much better that time, but at least I got along well with the teacher.
My 6th grade teacher asked me to go to bed with him. In so many words.
Bad enough for you?
Actually, that’s not a mispronunciation. That’s correct. It’s just you wacky Americans who pronounce it differently.
My high school history teacher arranged the class so the five prettiest girls sat in the front row. He consistently referred to the boys he did not like as homosexuals. When I got stuck with him for comparative religions some years later he dispersed stunningly bad information (Buddhists perform animal sacrifices? I had no idea!).
He was the head of his department.
At least he was sober, unlike my third grade math teacher or my freshman math teacher.
Same for my health teacher, for some reason the girls in skirts were also the only ones who ever had to write on the board or put up posters too. Also got all the pretty girls to either bend over the front desk or he’d lean over to look down their shirts while they were sitting at their desks. Evil man.
Kitty
I had an art teacher who told our class that I had died of an overdose when I was absent for several days. I was attending a funeral out of state. When some drunk guy was hit and killed on the interstate next to my apartment complex, she loudly expressed her surprise and disappointment that it wasn’t me when I showed up for class.
My high school geometry teacher was the worst. His idea of teaching was writing the day’s assignment on the board, then reading the newspaper while we worked. He also made up numbers for the theorems used in proofs, and we had to solve proofs using his numbering system, not by actually listing the theorems. Argh. I did get a different teacher the second semester, though…
–tygre
Lounge area? Man, my school had exactly three air conditioned rooms (this was five years ago), a cruddy cafeteria and a policy which was enacted in my freshman year that totally eliminated study halls. And you people are lying around sleeping? Sheesh. Must be nice!
I had an eighth grade teacher that routinely sexually harrassed the girls. He told one girl that if she was a runway and he was an airplane, he’d land on her. That has to rate as one of the worst pickup lines in the world. And for a fifty year old man to use it on a thirteen year old girl… Anyway, her parents complained, but the teacher was a good friend of the principal and his only “punishment” was to take a voluntary year-long sabbatical. To the best of my knowledge, he’s still teaching there.
Right now, I’m going to a tech school in a state (LA) with one of the lowest teacher pay scales in the country. As you may imagine, I’m getting some real winners here. One teacher went over the syllabus with us, then never said another word for the rest of the course. Another consistently showed up for class 15-45 minutes late or not at all (and I mean EVERY DAY! He was on time exactly ONCE the whole class), read in a monotone straight from the book in every class he taught, then had the audacity to tell us that he got up every morning at 4 AM to prepare for his classes. He was also about as bright as a fence post and routinely passed on urban legends as fact. In one course he taught, he spend over half the course teaching us the wrong material! His tests were always either the crappy kind published by the textbook company, or written by him in horrible-looking cursive.
I had an English teacher who marked according to how well you behaved in class. I spent the year doing no work, but chatting quietly with my friends, and got an A. Other students, who were a bit louder between times, but did all the work, failed. Apparently she associated good behaviour with good work. She was a bit senile - took her three years to notice I’d had my long hair cut short.
I once had a teacher for phys. ed. (sport) who announced on the first day that he hated sport, and if any of us didn’t want to participate, to feel free to sit around and chat, or read.
In a similar vein, my substitute French teacher didn’t speak French at all.
Often, during flu season, we’d turn up to class only to find that so many teachers were sick that there was no one to take our class. We’d wait outside the classroom for 15 minutes or so, and when no one showed up, we’d take off.
Our electronics teacher used to let us go out to smoke.
Our sheetmetal teacher spent one lesson telling us about how his wife (a drug addict) committed suicide.
On a side note, worst school policy that ever came through was needing a permission slip to go to the toilet, and having to collect the key from one of the teachers. Now, the school I went to was originally an all-boy school, and when girls were first introduced, they built another wing to accomodate all the extra students, and put the only girls toilets in that wing. To get to the toilet, you had to get permission from the teacher, and wait for the teacher to write out a permission slip. Then you had to head over to the textiles rooms to find the teacher in charge of the key. She wasn’t always there, and sometimes you had to search the whole school for her. Once you got the key, you made your way to the only girl’s toilets, did what you had to do if you hadn’t already had an accident on the way there, take the key back to her, make your way back to class (showing your permission slip to any teacher you encountered on the way there) and slip back into your seat, only to be told off for taking so long. Gee, it was fun. That policy lasted a matter of weeks, but I still remember it.
This goes back a few years…
I remember my 3rd grade teacher Miss Hutchinson. She figured as long as she taught some information, it didn’t necessarily have to be accurate. One time the math question in the special “THINK!” section had the old chestnut: “A ball and a bat cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball?” She insisted that the book answer was wrong and the ball cost ten cents. I tried to debate it as best as a third grader of my limited abilities could, and she told me in front of the whole class that I and the book were wrong and ended discussion.
Another time during our very brief foray into Astronomy, she explained to everyone that the North Star was the brightest star in the sky other than the sun. When I told her this was not so, she said that I was again wrong and that it was no big deal.
At least now I have a convenient scapegoat to explain my inability to spell particularly well. Miss Hutchison mistaught me!
I have another one, this about my seventh grade gym/health teacher. He was a football coach who had no interest in teaching health. He did not keep a grade book but instead asked us at the end of the term how many absences we had and what we thought our grade should be. One of his methods of teaching a chapter was to assign each student a page and then have them stand up and summarize it. One day he could not think of anything to do so first period moved the football equipment from the locker room to the equipment and second period moved it back, third period moved it again, and fourth period moved it back, etc. They were also questions as to what was in the cup of “coffee” he always carried with him.
Okay, my teachers weren’t that bad. But I had a couple of dorks guiding my education. The two that spring to mind are what I called the “Word Counters”. Not that they would count words, but we students would. Make sense? Didn’t think so. Allow me to expound.
5th grade social studies. Our teacher, Mr. McLaughlin was extremely boring - not the most gripping speaker in the world. His speech was littered with “uhs”. There were running pools on who counted the most “uhs” in one class.
Example: “In, uh, 1963, in, uh Dallas, uh, Texas, our, uh, president, John F., uh, Kennedy, was, uh, traveling in a, uh, motorcade, when, uh, he was, uh, shot by, uh …”
That isn’t an exageration. I think the record was in the 300 range.
The other was 11th grade English. This guy’s word was “okay”. Every single sentence he uttered was begun and ended with “okay”. And what a stimulating curriculum he presented. Our book for the semester (yes only one book) was “Of Mice and Men”. He read it to us in class, aloud, in this really thick French-Canadian accent, rather than assigning us to read it ourselves. Junior year in high school and we were being read to like kindergartners. Sheesh.
Alright, so he never propositioned anybody, but I thought he was pretty bad.
Your teacher read to you in class… our teachers only ever set us books to read that had been made into movies. Then they would show the movie in class.
Our first year of secondary school (Year 7), we were set the book “The Rats of NIMH”. I’d read it at least two years before this, and while I enjoyed the book, I doubted it was suitable for our age group (12-13 years old). When they showed the movie in class, I was disgusted - why did they expect kids to raed the book if they could just watch the movie instead? This went on throughout my entire education until I dropped out in the second last year. I grew fed up with the lack of teaching going on, and when they failed to set any books in English that year (but assigned us two movies to watch and report on), I decided it was the last straw.
Most of the people I went to school with can barely read and write. I’m just lucky - I was always interested in reading, and did so without any prompting. My brother is 21 years old, and has the reading skills of an 8 year old (he was professionally assessed a couple of years ago - but I can assure you, he hasn’t improved in that time).
Funny teacher story:
My thousand year old 8th grade English teacher was practically deaf. Literally. Usually this worked greatly to our advantage. During tests, while he sat at his desk in oblivion, the class would actually discuss aloud the answers. He never had any idea. Unfortunately, one time during class the fire alarm went off. As we started to gather our things, the teacher checked his watch and yelled at us to sit back down because class wasn’t over yet. “But…there’s a fire alarm!” we protested, to no avail. He refused to let us leave because he didn’t hear any fire alarm and thought we were trying to trick him. We even opened the classroom door so he could hear the alarm better but he still didn’t believe us. Finally another teacher came back in and got us when they noticed that our whole class was missing. Lucky for us it was just a fire drill our we would have been in trouble!
Teacher rant:
First off, this does not apply to ALL teachers, so please don’t get in a snit about what I have to say. There are a lot of wonderful, underappreciated, underpaid, hardworking, intelligent, caring teachers out there and I have no complaints about them.
However, it seems to me that it is a little TOO easy for some people to become teachers these days. All through high school I felt like all my teachers were full of crap and I knew more than they did. And looking at some of the people I know now who are actually teachers, I don’t understand how they were able to get passing grades on tests and assignments and then become licensed as teachers. Wouldn’t you think that someone who can’t spell would be noticed in high school and then in college and teaching courses and someone would say, “Hey, you have to learn to spell first before you start teaching anything to our young!” Case in point: my sister-in-law, who I love dearly but don’t think she should be teaching anything. She can’t spell for sh*t! She actually spells the word “those” as “thoughs”. She uses “congrates” in place of the word “congratulations”, etc. Don’t even get me started on “their”, “they’re” and “there”. It boggles my mind that someone who is supposed to be teaching people how to read and spell can’t spell or pronounce words herself. (Granted, she is only teaching 2nd and 3rd grade right now and probably won’t run in to all that much trouble, but I still think it’s pitiful that a teacher doesn’t know the things she’s supposed to be teaching!)
P.S. Please don’t correct me if I made any mistakes. I’m not a teacher. 
To (not in verbatim) quote Adam Carolla on Loveline:
“Becoming a teacher is like working in the Army. You advertise it as being our nation’s heroes, one of the most honorable jobs you can possibly get. And sometimes - very rarely - that’s true. But we all know most of the people are there just because they couldn’t get a better job. It’s like that in the Army, and it’s like that with teachers. Don’t try to glorify it, most people wouldn’t be there if they could get a better job.”
It’s funny because it’s true.
Anyway, I have some other bad teacher stories. Okay, not necessarily bad teachers, but moments that practically made me hate the teachers.
The only thing worse than a teacher who is wrong when you are right is a teacher who REFUSES TO BELIEVE YOU AFTER PROVING YOUR POINT. Example:
In 3rd grade, I was doing some sort of study on angles, and one of the questions was “What are 4 places where the hands on a clock align to 90° angles?” Well, 3:00 and 9:00 were obvious…and 6:15 wouldn’t really work, because the 6 would be a little off center, but 6:16 or 6:17 would work. So I put that as my answer. He marked me wrong! :mad: Then I tried to explain that, while my answer wasn’t totally accurate, there was NO WAY you can go from being an obtuse angle (i.e. 6:05) to being an acute angle (i.e. 6:25) without being a right angle at some point in between. He refused to believe me, and marked me off for that problem. I’m still bitter.
::does a bit of quick algebra:: And the exact answer to that problem (one of them) is that the clock will be at an EXACT right angle, at exactly 6:16.363636363636363636.
Oh, and the answer the math teacher gave was “3:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 3:00 PM, and 6:00 PM. Those are the only times.” What the hell is that crap!?!?!
Anyway, another case of a bad teacher was in my 8th-grade English class. Actually, it wasn’t technically an English class. It was an “I.E.P.” (Individualized Education Program) which I didn’t even need to begin with. We never did any work in the class, and when we did, it barely affected our grade at all (not that I’m complaining, I actually got to spend a lot of time doing more important things, like programming. ;)) Anyway, there was one particular incident that got me really pissed off.
There was a substitute (I forget her name by now), and we were doing an assignment where we had to discern full sentences from sentence fragments. Sound easy? Too easy for 8th-grade work? Yeah, I thought so too. But apparently, even the teacher couldn’t get it right. One of the sentences was “One day it was sunny.” Granted, nobody would ever actually use this sentence without another one following it, “the next, it was…” But damned if it isn’t a sentence. It has a preposition (“one day”), a subject (“it”) and a predicate (“was (sunny)”). It fits all of the requirements for being a sentence. But the teacher disagreed. I knew I was right. But this time, I wasn’t just going to mumble and accept her answer. I wasn’t going down without a fight! >=] I argued with her for a good five minutes. She ended up marking me off for that problem, but not before I was able to get the whole class to agree with me (Victory!)
I think something like that also happened a 3rd time, but I don’t remember exactly what happened.
I had a business-ed teacher in high school who told my largely Hispanic and black class, “Well, you better listen up in this class, since we know none of you will be doctors or lawyers.” Same teacher expressed profound surprise that I knew what Bastille Day commemorates - her actual words were, “I can’t believe you know that. And you’re Mexican!”
I went to that class exactly twice. I couldn’t take it anymore.