When I was a high-school sophomore, the English teacher was going over each student’s grade status about a month before the end of the school year. He gave everyone’s name. He came to one girl and said–so help me this is a direct quote–“It isn’t that she’s stupid, she’s just too lazy to get off her dead but!”
Post something one of your teachers said, whether about you or about someone else in the class, from grade school all the way through college.
One of my classmates was treated by her oh-so-artsy mother like an art project. She’d always have the cutest things (within the limits of a school with uniforms); she once came to a school day trip to a nearby hermit on a pine forest with a pinafore, more ribbons than anybody over the age of 4 should ever wear, a Shirley Temple 'do, and without a lunch. Her mother had been busy making her pretty, how could she be expected to notice what the day’s activities were? I mean, seriously!
This lasted until her brother was born, when we were 14. Suddenly, Bel, who had previously not been allowed to dress herself or comb her own hair, was a broken toy tossed aside to make room for the shiny new dick-owning baby.
Shortly after, the art teacher asked Bel “how can you be so horrible at drawing? Your mother is an ARTIST!”
An artist? Maybe. A bloody imbecile? For sure, dude.
I had a math teacher in high school who was decent to all the girls, but absolutely savage to any boy who wasn’t athletic. I used to sit behind a stoner kid (needless to say not an athlete) we’ll call Larry, who had long, fine blonde hair that probably hadn’t seen a comb for several years. It was a tangled mess - not a fashion statement, just neglected.
In retrospect, the hair was probably a sign that something was seriously wrong. The right thing to do would have been to find out what was up at home, and maybe get some help for Larry. But the math teacher instead choose to torment Larry. “Hey Larry! Ya got BIRDS living in that nest? How come you never comb your hair, huh?” This was a regular feature of math class.
This has made me curious. I’m gonna Google Larry now and see if I can find out whatever happened to him.
My senior year of HS I had a physics teacher. Frank Werner and yes that’s his real name. He was also a football coach so he called everyone in the class by their last name. In addition to physics he liked to talk to us about other non physics related stuff.
So in this one class he’s talking to us about how different life is going to be after high school and how our focus will change and at one point he asks if any of us have a job now that we think will be our career later in life. I raise my hand because at the time I had just started working singing with a fairly busy musical group and making money doing what I love for the first time in my life.
It went like this.
“Who has a job now that think will be their career?”
I raise my hand and he replies
“I don’t mean hooking Jones” cue riotous laughter from my classmates.
So, my HS physics teacher called me a prostitute in front of the entire class.
I found out later that he was hoping to date me after I graduated. I don’t think so. :rolleyes:
CairoCarol, you didn’t go to school in Indiana, did you?
Hah hah, no, but interestingly enough Larry Bird is one of the few athletes I actually can identify and describe. Perhaps my choice of the pseudonym “Larry” was subconsciously influenced by Larry Bird.
My Google search of bird-nest-hair-guy didn’t reveal much. There was a court case in California regarding false advertising of mattresses that named a person with the same name of “Larry”. It may very well be the same person (I like the idea of a stoner ending up as the marketing manager of a new-agey mattress company), but there are perhaps 2-3 people in the US with that name. So, not conclusive.
One day in sixth grade we were given a current-events test. The teacher asked the questions orally one at a time, and each of us wrote out our own answers. For one question the answer was NATO, but I wasn’t sure whether I should abbreviate it or spell it out. So I asked the teacher out loud:
“Should we put NATO, or North Atlantic Treaty Organization?”
At my inadvertently having given away the answer to the entire class, the teacher turned red with rage and ripped me a new one right there in front of the class, finishing by yelling “HOW STUPID CAN YOU BE?”
Nobody’s perfect, but I’d like to think I’m a damn site smarter, kinder, and happier than she was; that was thirty years ago too, so I’m probably a lot less dead. Up yours, Mrs. Silk.
I did a practicum in a 5th grade class, the teacher was an older guy who told me he liked having us college kids “help out” so he could go flirt with the secretaries. His room was divided - on the left side of the room was a cluster of 6 desks. He proudly informed me those were his star pupils, he taught to them. The rest were savages who would be lucky to make it to high school, so he didn’t care if they learned anything. This information was given to me in front of the class.
(Ironically, one of his “star” students ended up knocked up at 13 and one of his “savages” is now a well respected attorney)
This happened to my older sister not to me. Sis had been in a kitchen fire when she was four years-old. The side of her face is badly scarred and unfortunately quite visible. When she was in high school (1960’s) her history teacher was talking with the class about civil rights.
He said to the class, “they will never accept blacks in America until they accept people who look like Sis”. :eek::mad:
Can you imagine? As if her life wasn’t hard enough. Asshat.
Senior year, calculus class. In spite of being in advanced math, I was a bit of a slacker, barely pulling the overall B-average I needed to assure a price break on car insurance, otherwise my folks would not allow me to drive. So I was pretty sporadic about doing homework.
One day in class, the calc teacher was answering questions about the previous day’s homework. Somebody asked about a particular problem, and the teacher, with class participation, began to work through it on the blackboard. As he set up the problem for solution one way, I asserted that it could be solved another way. After a bit of back-and-forth about it, he asked if I had done the homework. When I answered no, I got a solid 2-minute lecture, right there in front of everyone, about doing the homework, learning this stuff, whatever; I don’t remember the exact content, except that it was all acutely embarrassing, and it pissed me off, since I knew I was right. He went on to solve the problem his way that day, but the next day he admitted to me - privately, not in front of the whole class - that I had in fact been right, the problem could have been solved my way.
(my bolding) - is this a translation issue, or did your school actually take children to visit a hermit?. How did he take it? I’d think getting away from hordes of children would be one of the advantages to being a hermit.
I was in 4th grade and was having trouble adjusting to a new school that I was being bussed to. A lot of the work was way too easy for me in my class and I asked my teacher (at her desk and in private) if I could have extra/harder/more challenging work.
She immediately raised her voice and in a sarcastic sing-song loud enough for the whole class to hear, proclaimed that I was her “little genius” and led the whole class to a chorus of laughter.
For the remainder of the year, every time we took a test, my test score was read out loud for the entire class. “Lets see how our little genius did…!” followed by the entire class laughing. I stopped being interested in school, caring about learning, or caring about doing well in her classroom.
My grades started to plummet. Where I used to read one book a day, I stopped reading.
My parents pulled me out and into a different school after that, but all that summer I had sit-up-in bed hellish nightmares of being forced to back into her classroom.
I was a totally geeky little kid. In fifth grade, we had done a unit on ancient Greece, and shortly after I saw a picture in the newspaper of a local building (maybe City Hall?) that had a quote from Plato* on the facade. I was very excited and brought it to class to show our teacher, and went up to his desk a few minutes before class. He looked at it, and then began class by saying something like “We can get started now that delphica has interrupted my preparation time to show me HER FASCINATING DISCOVERY OF A … BUILDING” and he rolled his eyes and got a big laugh from the class.
Previously, I had really liked this teacher, but looking back, he was one of those people who should not be teaching middle school, because he seemed to actively be interested in being popular with the popular kids and ignoring/looking down on the nerdy kids. It seems profoundly weird to me now that an adult would be that caught up in being viewed as popular by 10 year old kids. I have heard this is somewhat more common with new/young teachers, but at the time, this guy was probably in his late 40s and had been teaching for years.
*I don’t remember if it was specifically Plato, but something along those lines
In high school, we had an English teacher who would frequently make remarks like “you did all right on this assignment … if your life goal is to be a maid” or a mechanic, or other things she viewed as low class jobs. There were kids in the class whose parents were mechanics, or maids, etc. It struck me enough that it’s stuck with me all these years, but only as an adult did I realize how shitty this was. Plus, I’m pretty sure the dad who was a mechanic was quite successful and was probably in a higher income bracket than this teacher. I actually think that teachers ARE underpaid but it still doesn’t make it right for her to use this as a way to embarrass a student in class.
There was one particularly tough teacher in my high school who taught almost all the advanced math and sciences classes. There are so many stories of what this guy did I couldn’t even list them all. The most memorable had to have been the time he stormed into 3rd period Spanish to admonish a student who had failed the exam in his class during 1st period that morning. He flew through the door, interrupting Spanish class, ran straight up to the boy I’ll call Ricky and shouted, “there you go Ricky, an F! Go home and hang that on your refridgerator!” as he slapped the test on Ricky’s desk. And as fast as he appeared, he turned around and ran back out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
These stories are unbelieveable. But this one:
Wow. A teacher mocking a student for learning. Holy shit.
When I was in 8th Grade I really wanted to make all-county choir. The day of tryouts I’d dressed up & everything. ( I NEVER dressed up for school) I’d worked very hard practicing my pieces. When they announced over the intercom who had made all county and they got to my name, I literally cheered & jumped up and down for joy. That is, until my homeroom teacher snapped at me to “quit acting retarded”. Boy, that took the wind right out of my sails. I never liked that teacher as much after that, and it’s what I have the most vivid memory of being in All-county, 20 years later 
My first high school English teacher called my mom to complain I read ahead in the Reading textbook and now I’d cause trouble by being ahead. Not all teachers want to challenge a student to learn, some would rather do the job they have that day and leave it at that. Mr. Aubrey wouldn’t even stand if he could avoid it, rolled his lard-ass everywhere in the room in his chair.
Was the book To Kill a Mockingbird?
While I stand by what I said earlier, and I agree with your post, there is something to what the teacher said.
I started taking part 1 of a class last September, then part 2 in January. Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, part 2 got cancelled, so I joined a different part 1 class. I may have been a little disruptive, since when the tutor asked us a question that we, as a group, needed to think through together, sometimes I’d blurt out the answer.
Yeah, I’m one of those.
No, it was a textbook; there were abridged stories and discussion questions, probably 300+ pages long. You can’t hand me what’s essentially an anthology of stories I’ve never read and tell me I have to wait for everyone else before I go on to the next story - that’s madness.
The trouble I caused went like so -
Mr. Aubrey - “What are you reading?” (Classmates look up.)
Me - “[Insert Chaim Potok or Douglas Adams book, coulda gone either way at that age].”
Mr. Aubrey - “Why aren’t you reading the textbook like everyone else?” (Classmates stare at me.)
Me - “I finished it.” (Many eyes are rolled across the classroom.)
Mr. Aubrey - “Then either reread it or sit quietly w/ your book closed and wait for the class to discuss it .”
W/ one exception I didn’t do anything while reading that disrupted the class; that time I was reading HHGTTG after I finished an exam early and laughed so hard I had to leave the room.