I had two art teachers that never taught me anything. If I didn’t hate kids I’d become an art teacher. 
I’ve had several bad teachers - for example, 2 out of 3 of the professors teaching Computer Science @ MSU were complete asses when I was there, and one of the two was also a complete sexist.
But the worst was in 7th grade. The teacher of ?what subject? - can’t remember. It didn’t matter, because all he did, was come into the classroom, and say ‘take out your books and read pages XX-YY’.
We’d start reading.
Then, he’d start talking.
About his divorce.
I could repeat the whole, wandering monologue in my sleep, because it never varied.
About 2 months into the school year, I got called into the principal’s office for standing up in class and screaming “SHUT THE HELL UP!”.
It was worth it.
Ah yes, Mrs. Belden, in seventh grade art class. I loved crafts and drawing, she loved being a bitch, and looking down her nose at your taste, or concept of art. And she played favorites in class too. Some of us had a secret saying, *"If you want to get an A you need to be Beverly ****."
She was my 5th grade teacher and also my gym teacher.
She had no issue with me, I was a little jockette, good at sports and good in class. But there was a boy in my class who I think, under today’s undertstanding of the disorder, would have been called autistic. He would sit in his seat and not cause trouble in class, but he was clearly not connecting with the schoolwork or his classmates in any way. He would make odd gestures and sounds and sing and mutter to himself. We were all used to him as he had been in our class since kindergarten. Why they continued to pass him through year after year when he’d never done any classwork, I’ll never know, but the main point here is that he harmed no one and never disrupted class in any way.
This teacher would amuse herself by picking on this boy. All day long, over and over. It was both horrifying and nauseating. He didn’t understand the things she said to him, but he clearly understood the nasty tone in her voice and would often start to cry. That only spurred her to greater efforts. One time she refused to let him go to the restroom, even though he’d raised his hand and politely waited to be recognized. She made him stand in the front of the classroom while she criticized his drinking habits, the smallness of his bladder, and how stupid he was to interrupt her class. Of course the inevitable happened and eventually he wet himself. She still wouldn’t let him leave. Just handed him a towel and made him clean up the spot from the floor.
I used to ask to use the bathroom just to get away from her for a couple of minutes. I was so outraged and appalled over her treatment of this boy. I never summoned the courage while in that school to say anything about it to anyone in authority, but once I’d gone on to high school, I went back to the grade school and asked to see the principal. When I told him my story, he said several of my classmates had come to see him in the intervening years and that she had long ago been let go.
Leaving out the three child molesters that were active at my school during the years I was there (all of whom I had as teachers at one time or another).
Year 2 teacher: for some reason she decided my problems with spelling and mixing up “d’s” and “b’s” were a personal and deliberate insult to her. She tried to make me do extra writing and revision every day before school and during recess and lunch break until my mother went to the parish priest (it was a small catholic school) and both of them then went to the nun who was headmistress and kicked up a stink. She backed off a little but still made me hate school all that year.
Year 9/10: Had a science and maths teacher who was more interested in discussing music and the latest bands with a few of the ‘cool’ kids than teaching. The rest of the class was 1/2 of us trying to actually do the work and the other 1/2 goofing off. So many parents complained about him that they eventually fired him for under-performance.
Technical College: Had a guy who taught drafting and road design who was universally despised as a poor teacher. I was in subjects where, when he arrived for the first class, the students who knew him would walk out and cancel their enrolment and hope they wouldn’t get him next semester. In the time I was there I knew of two student petitions to have him removed from teaching.
He owned a restaurant which was his second income and if you had him for night classes (usually 6pm-9pm) he would arrive a bit after 6, set 2 1/2 hours of work and then leave at 7pm to go manage his restaurant.
That all ended when the head-of-school showed up at 8pm one night looking for him. Of course we all rather gleefully informed him of what had been going on for months. Apparently he had been filling in his time sheet, and being paid for, the entire 3 hour class. They tried to get him on fraud but he lawyered up and it was easier (and cheaper) to let him ‘retire’ at the end of the year rather than fight the court case.
French Teacher: he was Irish and he had learned to speak French in Cameroon.
No one in the class had a clue what he was saying. In either language.
My worst teacher was my second grade teacher. I don’t recall her name. Fortunately I was quite sick that year and fell a bit behind my classmates. Several of them were delayed quite a bit more in math by the things she taught them wrong, like
17 + 25 = 312 (they never learned to carry the 1)
But I was much better off for never having gotten that far.
Apparently she was quite troubled and was literally taken from the school early the next year by the “men in white coats”.
My calculus teacher in my senior year didn’t really teach us calculus at all. The 16 of us who started the class ended at 7 and we basically taught ourselves out of Thomas’ text. Actually ever since then, working out or re-working sample problems myself has always been the way I’ve learned things so ironically I probably owe him a lot.
First grade teacher - Mrs. Thompson. My mother was usually pretty hands-off with teachers, believing that as professional educators they knew what they were doing even when their methods weren’t in line with what my mom would have chosen. But she tangled with Mrs. Thompson a couple of times.
Incident one - coloring assignment (do they even do those anymore? They don’t seem very academic to me, but this was the 70s) - assignment was to color a picture of a bowl of apples. Mrs. Thompson gave me a failing grade because I colored the apples yellow and green. She said that apples are red. My mom brought her examples of the Granny Smith apples we ate at home and made Mrs. Thomson retract the failing grade.
Incident two - like in most schools, there was a list circulated to our parents of the supplies they needed to send to school with us. One of the items parents had to provide was a personal box of Kleenex to keep in our desk. Mrs. Thompson wouldn’t let us throw away a Kleenex after one use. She insisted that we hold onto them for three or four uses. My mom threw a fit. Reminded Mrs. Thompson that she was buying the Kleenex and if I wanted to throw them away I could.
Mrs. Thompson didn’t really seem to like kids. She was very old and I suspect had been working too long and should have retired.
Had a finance course at the U. of Georgia which was broken into M-W-F segments, with M&W being two-hour long classes.
The professor would begin the class with a single problem, spend over an hour doing the problem, ending up with an obviously ridiculous result. The second half of the class always began (there was a 5-10 minute break) with him explaining that this nonsensical result was because of a very common error that students made, back here (points to step 2 or 3), with him then spending the rest of the class re-working the problem with the error corrected.
Obviously not the horror story that many have recounted here, but one of the biggest wastes of time in my life.
Then there was the college professor (English lit) who had a poor sad-sack son who I briefly befriended. The guy became very clingy (ewww) whereupon I told him to chill the freak out and perhaps it’d be best if we didn’t hang out so much.
Of course, I failed her class on the final, even though I went in with a 91 average. :rolleyes:
Had a math teacher in high school who probably should have retired a decade previously. Guy was like Grandpa Simpson - you could get him started telling stories about “the old days” that would ramble on and on and on until the bell rang.
I had an English teacher in Jr. High who was arrested for using another man’s credentials. Not a bona fide teacher at all!
My husband and I, attending the same high school 13 years apart, had the same worthless social studies teacher (who was also a coach.) We called him Screwy Louie Lastname. He was pretty much the equivalent of **agilpro’**s teacher, with the added fillip that, before every test, he would tell us what all the questions were going to be…as well as what all the answers were.
Math and nuns don’t add up. I am ancient and still remember two things:
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First grade nunster teacher, math sheet, got all the answers right. Coloring the pictures on the sheet after you finished was a bonus you got if you finished early. I colored the horse on the top of the sheet blue, my favorite color, and got a zero because horses aren’t blue. Don’t remember her name.
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Fifth grade teacher, Sister Mary Immaculate (not making that up), got a D in math because I stacked my books in the order of my classes instead of from big to small. Really, she told my parents that at the teacher conference. I was really, really good at math and they couldn’t understand the grade given the papers and tests I brought home. I begged my parents every day not to make me go to school because she was so mean to me everyday. Years later my Mom told me that bitchster Immaculate told them at a conference that she just didn’t like me:smack: I have a PhD in engineering. I aced every math class I ever took (after learning not to color horses blue) except for that year. Arrrrghhh.:mad: Luckily she did not turn me off to math.
When I was in seventh grade, I missed six weeks of school due to whooping cough. The following six weeks, I was there part time, as I was still too weak to make it through a whole school day. My doctor’s note ran out at eight weeks, but I was still too weak to walk to school at that point, although I was at least coming for the whole day. I was still having paroxysms of coughing, although they were down to once every day or two instead of many times a day.
The day my doctor’s note ran out, my PE teacher told me I had to do the 2-mile run. (We’d been doing a running unit, and it was the last day.) When I finished it, she told me, “OK, that was your pre-test. Now go run your post-test. You will be graded on improvement.” I walked the whole thing and failed PE for the semester. I then missed several days of school because I overexerted myself, and I came back with a new doctor’s note that said I was not to be required to do anything I didn’t feel up to for the rest of the year.
Mrs. Gomboa
She was my science teacher in public school in the 6th grade. She was an extremely angry and violent Vietnamese woman. On one of the first days of class she called me out for talking to someone next to me (first offense). She moved my desk into the far back facing a corner and said that I was no longer allowed to look at the board for the rest of the class. I talked in her class, therefore I have no business there. She was serious too, as my desk never left that corner.
I would turn around in my seat to look at the board. I was still being graded obviously and I would be in trouble at home if I failed. She would scream and cuss at me and then send me out of the class for disobeying her. The people in the front office refused to believe anything I said about what was happening.
She also had this thing where she loved to slurp raw eggs in class. She would keep one of those little half dozen egg cartons on her desk and every now and then would grab one, crack it on the desk, look up at the ceiling, open wide, and pour it in. Her love of eggs and her nasty demeanor led me to refer to her as Mrs. Gomboa Constrictor (lame 6th grade joke.)
As the school year progressed she started getting progressively more physical. One time I turned around and she kicked the class trash can at me. Another time she threw a book at me. I kept trying to tell the people in the office, but I was a trouble maker because this abusive woman said so. I hadn’t been in any trouble at that school prior (at least not anything to get me written up or sent to the office) but when I finished her class she had me on the books owing a full 20 hours of detention and 4(!) Saturday school sessions, which I never showed up to because I went to a private school.
I think it’s pretty crazy that a public school in California was so accepting of that kind of behavior.
Mostly I was blessed with great teachers (Mrs. Garcia and Mr. Zito, I still remember you with adoration!). But these three were destructive:
CONTROLLING BITCH
In 1968, my fifth grade teacher was extremely controlling and took it upon herself to monitor behavior that fell outside her role as a teacher. For example, she’d make sure we cleaned our plates at lunch time. One day, lunch included tomato juice, which my best friend hated so she didn’t drink it. The teacher took the tomato juice back to the classroom and told my friend she could not leave school until she drank it.
My friend balked and wouldn’t drink it, so the teacher made her stay after school, without notifying her parents, for something like 2 hours until she finally choked it down. Meanwhile the parents became frantic wondering where their daughter was and as I recall they did make a fuss, but to my knowledge the teacher was never disciplined for exceeding her authority. Things were different in the 1960s.
LAZY DISHONEST TEACHER #1
Two years later I had a science teacher who was both lazy and a pathological liar. All we did in science class was watch movies and listen to him tell patently ridiculous stories like how two of his toes had been bitten off by a shark. We asked him to take off his shoes and socks so we could see the mangled foot, but he wouldn’t.
As an important part of our grade in that class, we had to write a term paper. I wrote quite a good one, and was satisfied that I would easily get an A in the class. However, someone stole the paper from my locker the day before it was due, presumably to hand it in as their own work. I didn’t think anyone would believe me, so I helplessly kept my mouth shut and awaited the overall grade, which I figured would be a C because of my failure to hand the paper in.
Lo and behold, I got an A in the class anyway. I’m pretty sure what happened is that he didn’t bother to read the papers, he just assigned grades based on what he thought his students were like. Luckily, I seemed like a smart kid. I’ve often wondered what grade he gave to the person who took my paper.
LAZY DISHONEST TEACHER #2
Finally, I had another lazy teacher for high school biology. He made no plans to care for the animals in the bio lab over the Christmas holidays; when we returned they were all dead. Well, except for one fish. When we left, there was a tank full of 6 or 8 medium-size fish. When we returned, there was one big fish.
This teacher’s grading, at least for me and my best friend, was unfairly harsh. I got in trouble with my parents for getting a B or a C in the class, and they refused to believe me when I said his grading was wrong, I deserved a higher mark. My friend’s parents were more sympathetic – they knew her work should have earned her an A, so they went to the school administration and complained.
Meanwhile, my father had contributed a lot of science equipment to the school (he worked for Becton Dickinson, and had access to lots of cool laboratory supplies).
Presumably due to the complaints of my friend’s parents, the teacher was fired. This was a small independent school, not a public school, so such an outcome was possible. When the teacher cleared out his belongings, he took all of the science equipment that my father had donated. My father was furious but did nothing. After that my parents believed me that my grade was unfair, but it stood on my record anyway. (Fortunately it didn’t really matter as I wasn’t headed into the sciences in college anyway.)
One of the problems in college is they only gave out teacher reviews to the students at the end of the course around finals time so by that time all the students who had gotten frustrated and left, were not there to grade the teacher. So then the teacher actually looked good.
I started high school back in the late 1970s; my English lit teacher was in her first, and, as it happened, last year of teaching high school. She was a newly minted secondary school teacher, so she couldn’t have been more than 21 or 22 years old.
Her method of teaching us English lit was to regale us endlessly with stories about how hot her husband was, and to make friends with the class preppies/princess clique. That, in turn, led to her openly mocking the students who were the usual victims of the class bullies (who were the preppy/princess clique).
Her tests were half-assed; we’d regularly fail them as she would spring them on us announced. For example, prior to a unit of Julius Caesar, she gave us smoe background on Shakespeare, and told us not to worry about trying to take notes. This information was just for background to better understand the Elizabethean era and the type of playwright Shakespeare was. Next day in class was a full-blown exam complete with fill-n-the-blank questions, true-false, and short essay answers. The only person who passed was one of my pals who had taken notes despite the teacher admonishing her for being a square for taking notes when she’d been told not to.
My high school did year-end culmulative finals; about six weeks prior to the end of the school year, this woman realised that we hadn’t covered 2/3 of the currilicum, so she gave us enormous lists of stuff we were supposed to read and know prior to the final, and good luck to a bunch of 9th graders cramming into six weeks about 6 months’ worth of material.
She was sacked when the admin were baffled why no one got higher than a C in her class, especially as it was the advanced 9th grade lit class. Strange woman.