Gwendee,
Try not to feel bad. It’s very difficult to stand up by yourself against everyone else.
It took a lot of courage for you to tell us about it. Don’t feel bad you didn’t stand up to her. Your child could have suffered some serious consequences as a result.
There are three that stand out for me…
Art, grades 6-8. I was never the most gifted person artistically, but my 5th grade art teacher really helped me develop an appreciation for it. Unfortunately, she left after that year, with the main reason being she did not get along with the teacher I ended up having 6-8 (the teacher who replaced the one from 5th grade also left after a year for the same reason). Individual expression and interpretation were more or less forbidden with this teacher. I learned the hard way that if you called her out on this fact, any chances of being fairly graded went out the window. I can’t tell you how many projects she kept changing to the point where they’d eventually be ruined. Any interest I had in the subject was gone after three years with her.
Physics, grade 11. Actually a hell of a nice guy who was a highly respected teacher at one time. By this point, however, his passion for teaching was long gone. Our “lab” periods would often consist of cut-and-paste projects that anyone with more than a third grade education would be embarrassed to have to do. Pretty much the only homework we had after the New Year was a weekly one-page report on a scientist chosen from a list he gave us the day we came back from Christmas vacation. He took a sabbatical midway through the following year and never returned. From what I understand, the administration liked him too much to fire him, but were able to talk him into retiring a little sooner than he’d planned (I was in his class for the 1996-97 school year and he had said he was going to retire in 2000).
Science/social studies, grade 7. Not a bad teacher at all and I actually got decent grades in her classes, but just didn’t like me for whatever reason. It all started one day early in the year when I mistakenly left my textbook in my locker. I asked her if I could go get it and she refused, then went on about a five-minute rant calling me every name in the book. We’d never had any issues prior to this, but for the next few months, she never missed an opportunity to take a shot at me until I eventually fired back (she weighed close to 300 pounds and was unable to walk up or down a flight of stairs, a fact I pointed out to her when she told me that I was the “personification of laziness” after getting a poor grade on a test). Maybe in some weird way, she wanted to see me stick up for myself, because she never called me anything after that day. Just about the whole class hated her by then, though. Even my parents (who were generally the type to automatically side with authority in such matters) went off on her at a parent/teacher conference to the point where they nearly had to be escorted out of the building.
I’ll pick this up from a former thread, since it’s more appropriate for this one:
I was in 2nd grade in 1952. I’ve had some wonderful teachers over the years, but I’ll just tell you about my 2nd grade teacher. I don’t think she’d be allowed to teach today. At least I hope not.
Miss G. was painfully thin, and wore the same thing ever day: a starched long-sleeved white blouse and an ankle-length straight black skirt. Her brown hair was in little rings, covered by a hair net. Wire-rim bifocals. High black laced shoes. No makeup. No jewelry. Nobody had ever seen her smile.
She was more of a disciplinarian that a teacher. She would give us an assignment every morning, and you wouldn’t be allowed to eat lunch until you were finished with it. I was very meticulous in my work, so most days I starved, and ate my lunch in the bus, on the way home.
In the back of the classroom was the “cloak room,” hidden by heavy doors that lifted up, like garage doors. There was neither light nor fresh air in the cloak room. If a student misbehaved, he had to stay in the cloak room until given permission to come back. The rest of us were instructed to ignore any crying or screaming that came from the cloak room.
Another of her favorite punishments was to not allow the kid to go to the restroom, for the rest of the day . . . then ordering the kid into the cloakroom for going in his pants. It wasn’t unusual for all of our coats to smell like piss or shit.
One PTA meeting, Miss G. told our parents that she hated children . . . especially boys.
I wasn’t the only kid who started having nightmares while I was in Miss G.’s class. These nightmares continued for several years.
I want to say that the Houston ISD has the worst teachers ever I laid eyes upon, and I could not fathom why they were able to stay on . I was not aware of tenure and such and the whole “if I work for the county/city I get pension/benefits dealio”
Anyways, I had this fourth grade spelling/language teacher, just the worst…I was out sick for the first few days of school and I was struggling behing the others when I came back. I don’t even think the teacher even realized I was out for three days. We had to fill out a form, and then she asks us if anyone did not understood the form. I was the only one who raised my hand and she just blew up at me. Then I had to as a Fourth grader explain to her I was out for three days with pneumonia. Through out the year she would do spelling tests, and with her speech impediment/lisp/deepSouth accent, we could barely understand what she was saying. No use in complaining to the principal, as she even said one time on the intercom, “I know some of you were concerned about the lack of bathroom stall locks in the girl’s restrooms, but we can’t afford it.”
I have a few options; my parents would definitely pick the (now deceased) teacher I had from age 6 to 8, when we moved away. In the first week, she divided all the kids into little angels and scum. Once you were in one group, it was a Herculean task to move out of the angel category, and impossible to cease being scum.
Aside from general needling and insulting, she never bothered me that much, (though I was definite scum), but she did some horrible stuff to other kids.
There was a girl in my brother’s class who basically all the parents watched out for; her parents were teens when she was born, and her mother just buggered off and literally left her on her 19-year old Dad’s doorstep. He certainly cared a lot about her, but he had no freaking idea how to care for a child. He used to wash her clothes by simply encouraging her to wear them in the bath. That sort of thing.
This teacher, for some reason, thought this amiable, always on the edge of foster care little girl was the worst child that ever drew breath. Anything that went wrong was blamed on her, and she’d get screamed at until she couldn’t stand up for crying.
One one occasion, she got the blame for breaking a photocopier, then the kid who actually had broken it, her next door neighbour, confessed to her mother that it was her fault. Both kids got dragged back to the school by the mother, so the one could confess, and the other get an apology. Apparently the bitch listened to the guilty kid, replied (the same person who screamed herself hoarse at the previous ‘guilty’ child) “Hm, well I’m surprised at you”, then walked off, completely ignoring the still crying kid she’d blamed.
She was actually the head as well, so it took a major effort from the PTA to get her fired, a few years after I left.
My second awful teacher, my physics teacher when I was 13-16, had an irrational hatred of me. Apparently each class had a scapegoat, and I missed the first class of term, due to being on holiday, (with full permission,) and that meant I was It. I had 4 detentions in the 7 years I was there, and three were from her- including a double one for not having my notes in the right order. I wasn’t allowed to sit with my friends, and she would take any opportunity to make me miserable.
I remember us having a mini test, and her coming over to hand out the results, and yelling at me for over 10 minutes- I’d missed the class we were being tested on due to being off ill, and had got something like 7 out of 20. Pretty poor… except when she handed back the paper to the girl next to me, she’d got 4/20. Her reaction to the other kid? A little laugh, and a comment of " Oh well, we all have bad days, dear". When she’d gone, we realised that out of the 4 of us sitting at the table, I had the highest mark.
Physics was one of my favourite subjects before I had her, and I was good at it, but after 6 months of her classes, I was regularly throwing up from stress before class. Which meant I got sent home, which meant I missed her classes again, which meant her bullying got worse.
Just to make it worse, at parents evening, she was utterly charming to my parents, and told them I was very good at the subject, no critisicm at all, so my parents believed she was a lovely woman that I just had it in for for some reason and ignored every complaint I made.
I nearly did take a bit of vengeance on her- several years later, she came into the zoo I worked at (which my family ran), with her husband and two kids, and I very, very nearly went up and told her in front of them all how crap a teacher she was, and how she’d ruined all the pleasure I had in the subject she taught. I thought better of it though; I doubt she would have cared, and unlike her, I didn’t want to upset kids for no reason.
My worst was a physics professor in collage–think 350 freshmen, add in a ex-eastern European with a speech impediment, bad attitude and very loose dentures.
You would think that when there was a line of 90 students outside the advisors office with torches and pitchforks, somebody would grow a clue. Nyet.
My son had a lying bastard for a science teacher in 6th grade. I was not having it when I found out he was getting saddled with the dipshit again for 7th grade. Had to wait 5 days for the principal to return from his vacation. Was told that there was nothing he could do. I calmly told him he was fired. As he was sputtering in Portuguese, I pulled my son from the school and sent him elsewhere. Both the principal and the teacher were gone the next year–this was a charter school, and they only got money for the number of butts there were in the seats, and they were causing a exodus.
Personality wise, I think the worst had to be a particular 8th grade teacher who had the unfortunate combination of no sense of humor, and a need to be thought of as “cool” by the 8th graders.
I never took him seriously- he had this absurd Magnum PI mustache, and was about as far from cool as he could be in my opinion. As a result, I wasn’t particularly respectful, and had a habit of doing things that would make him look stupid or catch him flat-footed in front of the other students, and he basically seemed to hate me for it.
I spent most of the year with my desk halfway out in the hallway, where I’d screw around and generally misbehave, and I’m sure he was hoping my grades would suffer and my parents would straighten me out, but I kept making 95-100 averages in his class, and actually in the last six-week grading period I made a 100 average overall. I think it ultimately got his goat that I could fuck around and disregard him so thoroughly and still blow his class away.
Academically, the worst teacher I ever had was our business school professor for economics and finance.
He had a way of teaching the subjects in a way that it was basically learning a series of equations. “Price elasticity is calculated like so…”. Our grade was something like 10% homework, and 40% midterm and 50% final exam. He’d devise these diabolically complicated exams that required us to integrate all the various one-off equations we’d learned over the course of the semester and solve some single problem.
Of course, he’d never gone into how you might actually integrate these equations, or how they all interacted, so the average scores on the tests were in the 40% range, with a lot of disparaging commentary in the margins, and then everything would be curved, but an abnormal proportion of students got C’s for a graduate class. It was so bad that out of a class of about 50 full-time MBAs, there was a petition and mutiny of sorts to get this guy removed after we had economics from him so we wouldn’t have to deal with him for finance. Didn’t work, but it was a noble and valiant effort.
I had a horrible Calculus teacher my first year of college, but I don’t count that because she was a TA (we never saw the professor she worked for). She’d basically give us the assigned reading, do a couple of examples, then sit down and work on her own stuff. She was very put out if we asked any questions, and about half the students dropped the class before they were stuck with her for a semester. The rest of us stuck it out because it was a tough class to get, and the seven of us managed to muddle through.
I cut her some slack as worst teacher because she was clearly struggling. She wore the same pair of jeans to every class, rotating among maybe five different t-shirts, and looked exhausted and half-starved. I Googled her a few years back and she’s a full professor somewhere out east and looks well-fed, at least.
It was second semester college physics for me. He just the sample problems from the book. Asking him to explain it made him stumbled…and then fall down a steep hill.
Fortunately, the physics department had all the students take the same mid-term on the the same day. So, they could go the other (more competent) physics professor and listen to his lecture. Unfortunately, that lecture was when I had to go to work. :mad:
Worst teacher I ever had was my senior year of HS. The class was ACG (American Comparative Govt). Every morning we would walk into class(1st period) and he would be sitting at his desk with the newspaper opened and the overhead projector was on with the first transparency already shinning on the board. He would look up tell us to copy it down because we there will be a test in x number of days and after a few minutes he would ask if we were done and then put another transparency on the projector and this would go on each day for the whole semester. I basically learned absolutely nothing from him.
You’re the man now, dawg!
Yes. It takes a whole lot of stones to terrorise an elderly woman over something that happened twenty-odd years previously. :rolleyes:
There was the nice oriental gentleman who was hired to teach computer science at the university I was attending which had a substantial hearing impaired population. The school was, in fact, know as an excellent place for hearing impaired students to get higher education. Unfortunately English was not his first or even second language. The poor ASL interpreters in the class would be signing “something starting with S?” instead of what he was actually trying to say. He also set a midterm where you had to come in and write a program longhand. He then took what you wrote and typed it into the computer. If it complied and provided the requested output you got an A. If it either failed to compile or provided the wrong output you failed.
I had two majors, Education and Information Technology. I was intending to become a computer teacher. Once of my education professors for a class on instructional methods was taking us through the section of the class on effective and ineffective teaching methods. She went through the possible methods starting with the most effective and working down to the least effective. I don’t remember what them all now but the point of the story is that the least effective is standing in front of the class reading out of a book. You can guess how she delivered this information to the class or she wouldn’t be on this list. An expert in teaching methods teaching how to use effective teaching methods to prospective teachers uses the least effective method possible to do so.
The final example is probably the worst and shows why religious schools can sometimes be better than secular but have built in pitfalls of their own. At the university I attended the head of the teaching department was an 82 year old nun. This was in the 80s so she probably started teaching sometime in the 30s. That was part of the problem. the other part was that she was senile. I was working on a semester project and we had to consult her before we could begin our project. I was working with another student and we presented what we wanted to do. The nun not merely suggested but told us to add something to our project. Not wanting to get on her bad side we agreed. At the end of the semester we get the results of our project back and she ripped us a new one for including the item that she “suggested.” She tore the idea apart and told us it was entirely inappropriate. We went to our adviser for the project and they agreed that the idea had been hers but declined to point that out or do anything about it because they were afraid of the old bat. We all agreed that the education program would probably not be up to snuff until the head of the department died.
“Can you describe the worst teacher you ever had?”
Yes. Yes I can. But I will not because I don’t want to go to jail for double homicide. But those bitches deserved it so I don’t feel bad. I also once threw rocks at a teachers house like the OP which to this day, 17 years later, I still feel terribly guilty about.
The worst teacher I ever had was actually very smart and easygoing. The problem was she didn’t care what we did as long as her classroom wasn’t disrupted. The only class I ever failed was 10th grade Geometry.
I’d get to her class and promptly go to sleep. I barely failed, if she had made me stay awake a week or ten days I probably would have passed. I guess making me repeat the course was supposed to import some sort of lesson. Ha! I showed her, I didn’t learn anything useful from high school!
But it wasn’t her fault I was an ass.
High school english teacher. She wasn’t vile, or evil or anything like that. She was just really stupid. We spent the last two years of high school doing primary school exercises, like placing lines between synonyms. Every student in my class had a better grasp of english than she did, and some students, me included, got lower exam grades than we should have because she didn’t know enough of the language. Sometimes, while talking to you or someone else, she would wrap her leg on the back support of your chair, and do some sort of very awkward stretching-exercises. We complained and complained, to the administration, the headmaster and to our primary teachers, but she never got fired.
High School Algebra II. My math grades before and after that were all As - that year mostly Cs. He was hired as the football coach and given that class basically because he couldn’t screw us college prep kids all that much and the business kids weren’t expected to do much in the class anyway.
I’ve been lucky- I’ve had many excellent teachers, more good/very good teachers, and none who were flat-out terrible.
7th or 8th grade English, a stereotypical mean old lady who would not suffer anything beyond sitting quietly in her class, accepting blindly whatever she taught, and staying out of her hair while she coasted toward the finish line (that is, retirement).
A student once suggested to her that she was wrong about a particular topic (the details escape me). Her response was, and I quote verbatim: “I don’t make mistakes.”
My Grade 2 teacher put me off school for about eight years.