Crazy Teachers.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Every one of us had at least one. There was the single Home Ec teacher who was doing the fingerless Shop Class guy who had pictures from the Gym teacher of…

Or something along those lines.

Sometimes, it’s an Ivy-Level Disaster

My own experience was in the late '80’s.

Boulder, Colorado: Mr. Hahn was clearly a nutjob*. He had a coffee cup full of mold on his desk, he waxed his sparse upper lip hair into Dali curls with his own earwax in public, and had tenure.

Now, I grew up in a school system that was a bit on the funky side. The Principal at my elementary school once said “What they really need is a drunken Irish poet.”

But they couldn’t do anything about this Bozo, except work around him. Getting yelled at by him was a great way to get your grade changed (for the better) by the folks in the office.

So, anyways, a few years later… Something happened, and Mr Hahn took his mom hostage. And set the house on fire. I dunno what happened to him after that, but I bet he’s still doing that earwax curl on his moustache.

*EVERYONE knew he was nuts. Even the folks at the local hobby shop, who had hired him to do their money after hours. They wouldn’t let him be in the store alone.

2

As a new teacher, my goal is to become that crazy teacher. Well, you know, minus the hostage situations and such- just good natured, old fashion crazy.

How might one go about starting such a legacy? I can’t grow a crazy mustache, sadly. But if I did, man, now THAT would start quite the story.

3

It’s a tie between three for me. My anthropology teacher in high school dropped the f-bomb constantly in class and yelled at us loudly if we didn’t do our work or didn’t do it well. But he taught me more about writing than any other teacher I’ve ever had, including my English teacher.

In college, I had an Egyptian art history teacher who used to shriek, “Spoon feeding! I will not do it! Read the damn book - I won’t read it for you.” He’d get so mad he would turn purple and this vein would start to throb on his bald little head. (No, not that one. The one on his shoulders.) He was wonderful - really knew his stuff, gave insightful, thorough answers to our questions and was inredibly impatient with people who didn’t pay attention or do their work.

In grad school, I had this fantastic philosophy teacher who talked like Yoda. I loved that guy. His class was mindblowing - my head hurt whenever I left. Ahh, those were the days.

Why is it that the craziest ones are always the best?

4

Sister Loyola Marguerite of St. Pascal Baylon Elementary School in St. Albans, New York.

She was about 70 years old at the time.

She was our first grade teacher.

She loved to beat our knuckles with a ruler. She loved it.

She would make us buy candy “for the poor” (proceeds supposedly for poor pagan children of Africa), then walk around the class and take candy from students she didn’t like to “show us how to chew properly”.

I hated that crazy bitch.

5

I had a teacher in high school who told us the best way to go “ditching” was to take a straw and use it to breath when you’re laying face-up in an actual ditch full of water.

We watched the entire Rocky series one month to learn the “geography” of Philadelphia.

He snorted Ajax off the desks after he poured it on there to clean graffiti done by the previous class.

Also, the football coaches who taught math classes were basically worthless when wearing that hat.

6

The story about the civics teacher in my high school was that she’d had, a few years before, a nervous breakdown in class. Chastising a student apparently slid right through berating and was well on its way to assault and battery before some folks got her under control.

My 10th-grade art teacher had some “I paid for his podiatry school so use his title” hangup that required her to remind us all on a nearly daily basis that her husband was a doctor.

I dated a girl in college who’d had a teacher in high school who insisted that California, Oregon, and Washington overlooked the Specific Ocean.

Pretty mild, all in all.

7

I was definitely my students’ crazy teacher. I don’t think I did anything too insane (usually - there was that time I kicked a kid), but I drew on my experience as a student in, you know, the US on how to base my teaching, which was quite different from typical Bulgarian teaching methods (which involve a lot of rote memorization and any infraction is dealt with by yelling at the kids). I tried to teach through entertaining activities as often as possible, which led my students to think of me as a. cool and b. a pushover. (Also, I was younger than most of the other teachers AND I was a foreigner.) Oy. Yeah, I do not miss my career as a teacher very much.

The weirdest spectacle I ever observed in a classroom was my Intro to Archaeology professor have a total breakdown when some guy got up in the middle of class to leave. This was a large lecture class, it’s college, whatever. But she started screaming at him to sit down, and then went on a rant about how disrespectful we all were. The guy tried to tell her he had a midterm he needed to study for, but it didn’t make a difference.

It didn’t help that she was a HORRIBLE professor. I dunno, maybe she was a great archaeologist or something, but her lectures were painfully bad. She could probably tell we were all dying of boredom, and resented it.

8

I had a chemistry teacher in HS who had been a demolitions expert in Viet Nam who loved to show us how different things blew up. LOTS of different things. He was also very shellshocked and if you made a loud noise, hed’ drop behind the desk and nothing would pry him out.

9

Business and Professional Speech my junior year in college (1976). The class was taught by a good-looking female TA who hated the cops and hated the military and was an utter bitch overall. The guy who sat next to me was a retired captain from the Marines, and I was still a private investigator, having just served as a deputy sheriff.

One Monday I walk into class and the shit hits the fan. She comes into class and proceeds to totally melt down. She apparently got busted over the weekend. As best as I could make it out from her screaming, her boyfriend got busted for something and was cuffed and stored in the back seat of a patrol car. She claimed her boyfriend was letting himself out of the car, but the officer claimed she was letting him out. Apparently he warned her twice and busted her the third time. Somehow, this became my fault because I used to be a cop.

She got on my case and I told her that first, you can’t open the car door from the inside and second, assuming you could, if I had been been the arresting officer, it wouldn’t have happened that way. She got her snotty attitude on and asked why. I said that the first time I would have warned her boyfriend and the second time, I would have slammed his head in the car door. There wouldn’t have been a third time.

She nearly went apoplectic, screamed and ran out of the room. My ex-Marine buddy high-fived me and the class applauded me. It was great.

10

An old grade school teacher that I had for both 3rd and 4th grade, was known to put gum on the end of noses if she caught you with it. She would also make anyone with hair in their eyes pin it up with bobby pins, boy or girl.
And when the boys kept coming in from winter recess with soaking wet pants, she would get out her box of skirts, and make them put a skirt on, until the pants dried.
She was also one of those women that tucked her hankie up her sleeve, after every nose blow. Ewww.

This was only 1974 mind you. WE all loved her by the way. But today, she would be strung up for all her “abuses”.

11

Good grief, these stories make me glad I’ve never had teachers that were worse than boring.

I think Clothahump’s tale trumps them all, so far.

12

My pre-algebra teacher was also the wrestling coach. He gave extra credit to anyone in his math classes willing to sell candy for the wrestling fundraiser. Also, at least once a year, all his math classes had to sit through tapes of Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling and “Vision Quest.”

13

Nobody really weird. One of my history teacher would whip a hockey puck at the wall near a kid that was sleeping or goofing off. It’d get your attention really quick.

14

My freshman English teacher would wear knee length skirts over her ankle length night gowns, fuzzy house slippers and only bathed about once a month. For christmas we all gave her bathe sets. She also tended to have arguments with her self quite loudly.

15

I’d like to preface this by saying that I wasn’t a horrible child. I was the picture of perfection if you showed me respect, however those few teacher who disrespected me, not matter what age I was, got hell ten times over for it. This was actually a topic of conversation before I started my classes, between the principle (at my elementary school onwards) and my teachers.

I had a 6th grade shop teacher who wasn’t so smart, he had us write our names on the chalk board if we misbehaved, and he made a show of it. Fortunately, before me, there were apparently no intelligent students in his class who didn’t like to do school work.

He said “XXX, Stop what you’re doing and go write your name on the board! IF you get a mark on the board after your name is up there, DETENTION!” And then you would walk up there, erase the name that was up there previously, and then put your name. Me and a few buddies decided we’d test how far this thing went, and it eventually got up to about eight of us who would rotate our names on the chalk board 4 or 5 times, and then class was over and we’d leave (with no work accomplished). I should mention that this wasn’t the shop class you get to make stuff, it was the one where they taunt you for 90 days and pretend you get to make stuff.

I had a gym teacher who had a bad attitude and horrible halitosis, which was nothing of not exacerbated by the facts that I was a horrible trouble maker and devilishly clever. Oh, and I hated running. So one day I made it a point to “slow run” the track in front of him, until he decided to start yelling at me in the middle of the class. I made it a point to make funny faces the entire time, until he asked me “What’re you making faces at?” and I responded “I smell something horrible, at first I thought it was just Body Odor from the gym, but oh my god it’s your breath!” He stammered and said “Maybe that’s your breath bouncing off of me and back to you!” (I kid you not - I’ll never forget those words). The entire class of 60+ students started laughing at him, at this point. His face turned bright red and this vein that went from his temple to his forehead almost exploded.

In retrospect, I almost of feel bad for almost giving the guy an Aneurysm.

I also had one teacher who would give you the answers to the test, if you asked her for help. “How do you do this equation?” And she’d write the entire thing from start to finish. After two or three people asked the same question (during a test) she’d do the example on the board.

I had one teacher who liked to prank the kids, and one who liked to pal around with them (it was kind of creepy, actually). Other than that, my teachers were pretty normal and, i might add, awesome.

16

I had a series of weird history teachers in high school.

The first one told us, on our very first day “We won’t do any of the geography program this year because frankly, geog. bores the piss out of me.”. He’d often spend the whole hour talking about movies - he was a great raconteur too. He took the class on a week-long field trip to Firenze because he had a friend who worked as a guide there, and he wanted to see hime again. He was the good kind of crazy though, I really liked him.

And then there was the chalk-chucking, racist one.
He never really said anything outright offensive, but he’d always make snide remarks or questionable insinuations, between two laser-guided bits of chalk to the forehead. The man was a *mean *shot.
Then one day, a guy arrived late to class. Didn’t apologize, sat down, teacher didn’t say a word, kept right on with his teaching. 30 seconds later, another tardy student shows up, an Arab girl. She apoligizes, goes to sit down, teacher says “I don’t know how they do in your country, but here we knock on doors before we come in. Get out of my classroom.”. The guy before hadn’t knocked, either. An indignant silence fell over the classroom, we all looked at each other… then, as one, packed up and left the class. Proudest memory of high school.

The last weirdzo in the line was also my last history teacher ever. The guy was something of an anti-smoking freak. Whenever he saw anyone either smoking or lighting a cigarette, he’d powerwalk straight to him, angrily pluck the ciggy right off his mouth and stomp it, glaring all the way. Didn’t say a word. And it didn’t matter whether it was a student, a teacher, cafeteria staff, janitors… he even did it to the principal once.
During recess we’d watch him do berzerking zig-zags throughout the yard, stomp-stomp-stomping, always with that murderously angry glare. It was the weirdest kind of OCD I’ve ever seen.
His teaching was also somewhat… unique. He’d often act out the bits of history he was talking about - that year the program was Napoleon to 1918. I can still see him strafing us from behind his desk-slash-trench. “Boom ! Takatakatak ! 8 million dead ! What, you find that funny ? BOOM ! Another million dead ! Still laughing at the carnage ?!”. All of that with the utmost seriousness (and indignation when we chuckled at his antics).

17

We “congregated” verbs.

She read “Down at the Dinghy” out loud and pronounced it “dingy”–along with several other mispronunciations.

Here’s how we read Julius Caesar: Every day when we came in she would be writing on the board. She would fill the board up with the text of the Shakespear play, give us all time to write it (for some of us, wayyyy too much time). Then she’d erase it and write some more. Time to write it down. Erase it and write some more. Etc. Through the whole goddamn play.

It was printed in our textbook.

Okay, maybe she wasn’t crazy. She had some odd ideas about teaching, though.

18

Well, one of them was this guy. Even without the knowledge that he was molesting boys, I was afraid of him. He was scary, mean, and inappropriate.

At the same school, I had history teacher who wanted all of his students to parrot back the same information to him. We spent all year writing an essay about why Democracy did not develop if Russia and the only way to pass the class was to hand in the exact same essay as everyone else in the class. Like Hilarity N. Suze’s teacher, he did a lot of blackboard writing. We’d do this sort of group writing, he’d put it up on the blackboard, and we’d copy it down. At the end of the year, we’d all regurgitate it back to him. He would end up with 20 identical essays, the same essay students in his classes had been handing in for decades. I can’t tell you much about why democracy did not develop in Russia, but I am very good at memorizing large passages of text.

19

Mad respect for that one. Well played.

The only example that comes immediately to mind is my high school chem and physics teacher. Short little dude with a huge inferiority complex. He enjoyed zapping kids with what he said was a Tesla coil, and berating anyone who was slow to answer with “It’s NOT AN ‘UM’!” - because, naturally, that’s what we said while we were trying to come up with the answer.

My fifth-grade teacher was crazy awesome, but he knew very well what he was doing and cared a lot about his career, which made it IMO better than a guy who’s naturally cool but couldn’t care less.

20

Mr. Caruso would duck down behind his desk and rub cologne ads torn out from magazines on his face.

Mr. Umanski was a pervert and would try to get get skirt wearing girls into compromising positions. “Katie, would you please crawl under the computer table and plug that cord in?”