I can’t think of one who was egregiously bad. Some were all that good at their jobs, though.
My junior high math teacher. I did relatively poorly in math those two years. When I got to high school, I got a different teacher. My grades in math those four year were the highest in the school – and the work was more and more advanced. It may have been the nature of the course, but I tend to think the junior high teacher just wasn’t very good at getting the concepts across.
Was a while back, college.
A Russian woman teaching psych. Nobody could understand. one. fucking. word. she. said. Her accent was so thick and her grasp of English so poor, it was literally impossible. Several of us tried (very nicely) to ask her to slow down or clarify what she was saying, but she seemed incapable of either cracking a smile or understanding why we were getting frustrated.
She may well have been amazingly well-versed and qualified (probably was) in her subject, but was utterly incapable of conveying information to a US class. Along with quite a few others, I dropped her course. IIRC I don’t think she lasted very long in that particular gig.
Along the lines of the “lazy teacher” vibe, I’ll add another. (I swear I had some amazing teachers as well) My Junior year of high school, one of the electives offered was “Law.” Seeing as how I had an interest in the subject, I decided to that the 4-point class because, while it might affect my weighted GPA (I was taking 6 and 5 point classes), the information would be useful and informative.
Well, I didn’t realize that the apparent reason the majority of my classmates were taking it was because they were preparing for their upcoming trials. Far from sheltered, I was exposed to many different stories and backgrounds and while I didn’t necessarily fit in, we all got along and I made some friends out of the year.
Well, the teacher’s style wasn’t “teaching” as much as it was to have students read aloud from the book, section by section. I got the impression that she’d “given up” some years back and just was an auto-pilot until retirement. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for the 8 or 9 kids who didn’t read well, or the guy who sat in front of me who got his tongue pierced midway through the year and it got infected. Oh yeah, he still had to read because it was his turn.
Basically the entire year was like the South Park Christmas episode where Jimmy is singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
I’ve had a fair number that were bad teachers. They knew the subject but just didn’t know how to teach it and their classes were teeth-grinders.
But the worst Asshole Of The Year teacher that I ever had was Mr. Edwin Goff. That is his real name. 11th grade U. S. history, 1964-65 at St. John’s in Houston, TX. I don’t know if he’s still alive or not, and don’t particularly care.
The man took every opportunity he had to humiliate me. I was going through a very bad time at that point because I had been bullied so badly for the last several years, so when he joined in on the bullying, that was devastating.
I sat in the front row of the class (assigned seating) and the final straw came when one day he “accidentally” dropped an eraser and asked me to pick it up. When I bent over to get it, he stuck me in the ass with a pin. The class erupted with laughter and then cracked up again when he said he did it just to see if my butt was alive or dead. I picked up my books, walked out of the room and went to the study hall. I never returned to his classroom, even after catching all kinds of hell for not doing so.
The following year, I was at another school and heard via the student grapevine that he had gotten caught shagging one of the other teachers on his desk and they both got fired. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I wouldn’t have put it past him.
Miserable POS.
A couple come to mind.
Surprisingly, none are gym/PE teachers.
First Example: 2nd Grade teacher. Trie dto put me on the short-bus for being left-handed. In her mind, “it just isn’t proper.” Thankfully, the school secretary went to our church, and knew me and my family, and she intervened to keep me out of “special education.”
For being left-handed.
Next: 4th grade teacher. She hadn’t had an original thought in decades. She just copied (mimeographed?) re-hashed, fill-in-the-blank lesson plans/quizzes, and did nothing in the way of lecture/instruction.
If you had put a vaguely human-shaped cardboard cut-out behind the teacher’s desk, I would have received the exact same level of education as she provided.
Next: 9th Grade Civics Teacher: he showed up, took roll-call, and told us to read certain portions of our textbooks, and answer all the questions at the end of the chapter. He then disappeared until about 5 minutes before class end, and collected our work.
Oh, hell yeah.
Sixth grade. New teacher that was pretty bohemian. Had us write congratulation letters to her husband because she had just become pregnant. I told my Mom.
She took a poll one day to see which presidential candidate we preferred, Nixon or Humphrey. She then pointed and laughed at the Humphrey kids and mocked them as dumb.
I started wearing glasses then and was self-concience. Every day she would tell the class how handsome I looked. I wanted to melt below the floor.
Also, she would frequently bring up how Jesus was hung on a pole, not a cross. Forget the cross. It was a pole goddamit!!! Over and over almost every day. Told this to Mom also.
One day I came home to find my mother and every other classmate’s mother in our living room. They were lighting torches and had the pitchforks out, and were heading down to the school. That teacher lasted about one day after that.
Thanks Mom!
I’m sure my parents might say my first chemistry teacher in 10th grade. He’d often talk about a local bar and mentioned that he’d grade our exams there as well. I never noticed him being intoxicated in class, and I liked his teaching style. He’d tell us to read chapter 4, and then tell us that the next two class periods are going to be lab only, no lecture. He was removed a few weeks into the school year.
This one’s easy for me…my 5th grade teacher.
She never treated me poorly. In fact, just the opposite. Early on in the school year she singled two other boys and me out as the “smart kids” in the class. From that day forward, many days she would go on about [his name], [his name] and [my name]. She gave us special assignments to complete while the rest of the class was doing drudgery work.
At the time I suppose I thought this was cool, but in retrospect the other kids in the class must have hated us! You wonder what good she thought doing this could possibly accomplish.
But this is small potatoes. Though it was over 50 years ago, I can still picture this teacher. She had a cruel smile and a sardonic manner. What I will never forget is that we had one girl in our class, Virginia, who was very quiet and never participated in class discussions or answered questions. She wasn’t retarded (sorry, that was the word in those days), but she was what you might charitably call slow.
This teacher seemed to absolutely delight in picking on Virginia. She would absolutely humiliate her regularly, calling her stupid and other unthinkable names. On more than one occasion, she reduced her to tears.
How is it that so many who go into the teaching profession seem to have this horrible sadistic streak? What does it say about them that they take out their frustrations on little kids, for God’s sake?
I have often thought about poor Virginia over the years, and wondered what happened to her. That kind of treatment can leave lifetime scars. I hope she made it through all that somehow.
There’s another story I tell from my school days to illustrate how much things have changed over the years (in terms of what you could get away with then that you never could now).
Again, this doesn’t involve me directly. This was one of the gym teachers at my high school. You remember Joe Camel, the Camel cigarettes spokes-animal? He had kind of thin lips and a real wise-guy expression on his face. I swear this gym teacher was the model for him.
He was a sloppy, slovenly guy with a big gut hanging out (real gym teacher material, right?) He just seemed to always have an attitude of some sort. I remember junior year my debate partner and I got excused from taking gym class so that we would have a free period to practice. My partner presented a note from the speech team coach to this guy on the first day of class. The gym teacher looked at it and said in a loud, sarcastic voice: “Hey, fellas…this kid’s on the speech team. Haw, haw, haw!” Real class guy.
But here’s what I’ll never forget. In our high school, lunch periods were staggered, so that some kids would eat in the first period and then follow that with a class, whereas others would have a class and then take a later lunch. If you finished lunch early, you were permitted to go to a study hall or otherwise hang out for the remainder of the period. My friend and I would usually go to the gym and sit in the bleachers, where we would look on as a gym class taught by this guy was in session.
There was a kid in this particular class who must have in some fashion taken exception to the gym teacher — my guess is that he had taunted this kid once too often in his usual manner and the kid finally spoke up.
Somehow, the way they decided they would settle their differences was by having a boxing match between them! As God is my witness, I saw this with my own eyes. The teacher and this kid put on gloves, and in full view of the rest of the class and those of us looking on, this 40±year-old man and a 10th grade kid boxed.
Despite his fat belly and generally out-of-shape appearance, the gym teacher had years of experience on his side and made pretty short work of the kid. I have no idea what the repercussions of this incident were…but can you imagine something like this happening today?
I had a teacher in fifth grade who was physically abusive. He once threw a dictionary at me because I was drawing in class (if the kid next to me hadn’t warned me to duck it would have hit me in the head). I once saw him grab a kid by the shoulders and shake the kid so violently I thought his neck would snap. I saw him punish a kid who was talking in class by stuffing paper in the kid’s mouth, taping his mouth shut and putting him in the closet. I saw him punish a kid by making him sit on a chair on top of a table and yanking the chair out.
The odd thing was that none of us kids thought to report him. It didn’t occur to me until years later that this teacher was breaking any laws or rules. He was an authority figure, so he got away with it.
The same is true for me many times over. I can’t understand why none of us ever figured out there was something we could have done about this abuse by telling our parents or asking a lawyer for help. We knew that lawyers sometimes helped people who had no money. But none of us ever tried to do that.
I am a teacher. My observation is that teaching often attracts narcissists.
I am currently working with two very unpleasant people who frequently
insult and belittle others in an attempt to prop up their own fragile egos.
The power and attention in the classroom is probably what attracted them to
teaching.
Thank you very much for what surely seems like an honest observation.
However, I would like to ask you if you believe these people really decided that teaching was their first choice. Or did they have to settle on being a teacher only after being rejected for other careers they would have preferred?
I’d like to know whether you know the answer for certain. If you don’t, I sure would appreciate you taking your best guess - especially if you have any supporting reasons.
Thank you.
Don’t know the answer for certain.
Both of them started their teaching careers in their 30’s, so my guess is
that they had tried other jobs before becoming teachers.
I try to avoid both of them, so I really have not had many detailed conversations
with either of them.
The illiterate cow who was my 7th grade English/History teacher (I’d forgotten! I had this loser for TWO periods every day!). She lost all control of the class, even wimpy and submissive-to-authority me, early on. Not that I acted out, but I didn’t pay the least bit of attention to her, either. I remember playing checkers while she played films. She was so dumb that even the dumb kids, the ones who could hardly have told you what grade they were even in, were trying to get out of her class. The school had to adopt a policy that NO ONE could transfer out of that class. The school had been so proud of itself for hiring this Black teacher in our predominately White community that it was terrified of backpedaling and appearing racist.
As I am mixed-race Black/White, I thought this was a splendid opportunity for my parents to speak up, since the racism charge wouldn’t have been an issue, but I couldn’t get my folks to do it.
I did have a problem with her race, though, since SHE made a big deal out of it. She was always trying to bond with me, and get me involved in some of her pet activities, most of which had some religious aspect to them, as if I must have shared her cultural beliefs just because we shared skin color.
Mrs. Jones. Hate her to this day. The kicker is why none of us liked her. In the 60s, my parents were militant pro-education black activists - the way to beat the man was to be better than him. Better educated, more polite and cultured, more hardworking, well-spoken - avoiding all the stereotypes people associated with blacks at the time. The second black family to move to our street was eerily similar.
Mrs. Jones was Black Panther-style militant, wearing “African” clothes, big afro, and everything was about race. Everyone who had her in our family was constantly taken to task for not “acting black” enough to suit her - especially because there were few black kids in the school. I was the one she hated most, since I was the first Brown she ran into and the most precocious. During one of our earliest exchanges she asked in front of the class why I don’t act black, and I replied, somewhat puzzled “I am black. I just act like me.” My brother got her the next year and was miserable.
Before the last of us hit college, she’d quit teaching and gone into politics, and was a councilman for years.
We had a high school teacher who seemed really cool and like one of us, and then that seemed kind of creepy. I think he hit on some of the girls in the class, he certainly triggered the skeevy vibe for some of the girls.
The year - 1995, my second semester as a returning-to-college student. The place - Biology 2, lecture class with around 200 students. For Bio 1 there was an excellent professor who knew how to teach, and I aced it. For Bio 2 there was a woman who was an adjunct, and she had an attitude.
Around the second week or so she was lecturing with an overhead projector. It was an early morning class, and some stragglers came in a few minutes late. They quietly took their seats, but this began to annoy the prof. She glares at us, says this is unacceptable, then attempts to lock the doors. She was unsuccessful at this, which made her look stupid and wasted time.
After returning to the lecture, a young girl asked her to briefly return to the prior overhead slide because she hadn’t finished copying the notes. Prof refused, saying she didn’t have time to waste and that it was all in the study notes anyway. So… the girl got up and headed for the door. This is where prof made her second dumb move of the day. She stopped and asked the girl where she was going. The student replied, “Well, you’re not going back to the slide. And since it’s all in the notes anyway, why do I need to be here?”
Prof had no answer to that, and the class tittered. And at that point prof did the single stupidest thing I’ve ever seen a public speaker do. She glared up at us and said, “Anyone else have anything they want to say?”
So who do you think raised his hand?
I told her she was behaving amateurishly, and that I felt it inappropriate that she attempt to lock the doors to a class I was paying for. As an older student I was funding my education myself, and if I was late one day I expected to be admitted. And she should basically shut up and teach biology. The class applauded.
So I made it my business to ace that class as well, since I had more or less thrown down the gauntlet in public. Didn’t make me popular in the biology department, though I later gathered she wasn’t well liked there either.
In second grade, Mrs. F. (who was built like a Mack truck and had an expression suggesting she was constantly tasting vinegar and sour lemons) made me stand out in the hall as punishment for reading ahead in the Dick and Jane book the rest of the class was laboring over.
I still carry the scars of that experience. :eek:
Interesting thing to consider. As often happens in threads about “the worst” my “worst” is absolutely wonderful compared with what others of you have experienced.
Just reading the thread title I knew what my answer would have been the year I graduated, but with age (and perhaps a bit of wisdom) I’m able to recognize that what felt like being picked on was really just having my feet held to the fire, and not mean at all.
There were a few burnt out teachers in my high school, just showing film strips and passing out word searches, and running out the clock to retirement. After I graduated it was learned that one of the language teachers who’d taught while I was in high school had forged his teaching credentials.
The teacher I’ve encountered who was the worst was my son’s first grade teacher. She was his second one that year following a move. He started the year with an absolutely lovely, nurturing, patient, kind, young, eager, fresh faced, blonde lady in her 20s who made every day fun. When we moved he ended up with Mrs. R. When I met her my first thought was that to still be teaching at her age she must really love it.
As time went on I concluded that she must have had other reasons to continue working. The first time I heard my son say she was mean I listened but also thought that she just seemed mean compared with Sweet Polly Purebred back in NY. Strict and mean are not the same thing, I told him. He told me again that she was mean, that she hurt kids, and screamed in their faces. My son, as a first grader was invested in people pleasing and pretty much did what he was told, so what I heard was observed rather than experienced by him. One afternoon I had occasion to be in the school and I saw her (in 2004) pulling a boy out of her classroom and up the hall by his twisted ear while just screeching at him.
I was too stunned (and okay, I’ll say it) scared to intervene on his behalf. I felt bad about it then and I feel bad about it now. I talked with some other moms. People had complained about her to the administration, apparently to no avail. The speculation was that she had incriminating photos of some administrator or school board member. I understand she has since retired.