Any age level, from when you were in the youngest preschool to graduate school. I’m excluding nicotine and caffeine, they’re drugs but that’s not the point of this thread.
For me, yes. My jazz band director took up a cocaine habit to lose weight. Most of the music teachers: choir, band and orchestra definitely enjoyed the occasional liquid lunch. Even though they’d all have a smoke afterwards, you can’t cover up the smell of Jack Daniels and it definitely wasn’t just a little nip.
Not to my knowledge, and I am attentive to the nuances of others’ behavior.
Yes, but more of a technicality. When I was an undergrad, I took a class on the Rise of Modern japan. We had a take home/essay exam (basically you were given three questions to write short essay answers too due the next day before 5pm), and when I came in to drop off my copy (this was @ 1994, so it was a hardcopy 
) the Professor was greeting us all and thanking us for contributing to the class with intelligent discussion and open minds. He had a 1.5L bottle of Sake and was having a drink with us as we came in, and needless to say, we all stayed until the last paper came in and finished the bottle with the 14 or so of us.
I won’t say he was drunk by the end, but he was certainly happy, as were many of us. And no, I wasn’t yet of legal drinking age, but I was close, and I believe all my classmates were either my age or over. So close enough for government work.
My 6th-grade teacher often came to class smelling of alcohol. He was clearly drinking, but we never saw him drink and he never acted intoxicated.
When I was in high school, there was a guy that they hired to teach the freshman science class. We always figured that his scientific and teaching credentials were a little suspect, because he was a terrible teacher, and generally clueless (I think that the school was desperate to get a teacher to fill the role). He was regularly seen entering or leaving the bar that was up the street from the school, and we were fairly sure he was half in the bag while teaching. He only lasted one semester.
We had a teacher who always drank from a mug filled with clear liquid, who allegedly got hepatitis.
There were several teachers I had, or went to their school, over the years that everyone knew were alcoholics.
In high school there was one teacher who was always leaning against the chalk board, or touching it. The story was he did that to stop the room from spinning.
Definitely. In our Catholic school in Pakistan there were a couple of teachers who were frequently pickled in class. If they were too far gone to teach, a “monitor” would be dispatched to report to the Disciplinarian that the teacher was ill. Another teacher would then take over the class.
One of these teachers was later outed as buggering boys (12-15 year olds) who he would offer one-on-one tutoring in his home. This was quite common (tutoring, not buggering) especially for gifted students, and incredibly looking back now, parents continued to send boys for tutoring even after this, because his pupils did do well on exams (O-levels and A-levels).
10th grade World Cultures teacher. 1st period, she was frequently late and hung-over, and sometimes clearly drunk. We loved the hangovers, she’d sit at her desk with sunglasses on, then take out a box full of sunglasses and slowly polish them one by one for about half the class while we read or played folded up paper football and stuff like that. Then half way through she’d say the class was done early and we were off to cause trouble. Drunk was entertaining, she slurred her words and stumbled around, told us how she used to be a model, and also decided half the class was enough.
We had a guest speaker in college that was very drunk, the drunk of slurring words and trying to standing as still as possible. She was drinking “water” out of a water bottle and was getting drunker as the talk went on. When her 20 minutes was up she literally stopped mid-sentence and left.
A very popular coach at my kids’ high school was let go for long-term drinking problems. He’d become too much of a liability.
Oh, I forgot my AP Chem teacher. He never seemed intoxicated at school, but he used to always talk about grading our homework and tests at a bar near the school. He got replaced midway though the first quarter. I assume he might have been the type that drinks from happy hour until 8 or 9 pm and then sobers up for the next day.
I had a sociology professor who lectured drunk as a skunk. Like spitting/slurring drunk. He was also brazenly involved with his grad student, who relished the attention. I got an A (I assume everyone did).
Only on the one occasion, but it still stands out in my memory. My tutor was drunk as a skunk and asked me if I really (something). It was a totally inappropriate question, triggered because I’d dissected the arguments in a text. Imagine an essay like “Failures in arguments against the death penalty” attracting the question “Are you really a Republican?”, but a slightly more inappropriate question that you would only ask if drunk because, in theory, you shouldn’t be marking on the basis of your, or your students, political, sexual, religious or racial affiliation.
I’ve only had limited contact with the humanities and social sciences, but sadly my limited contacts all lead me to believe that actually marking on the basis or political, sexual, religious, racial or academic affiliation is common.
Not that I can think of. But I’m a pretty oblivious person, and until I was about 15 had never been aware of anyone being drunk (my parents hardly drink, and never to excess), so I could easily have missed it. When I went to school (the 90s) it was still a thing for some teachers to go to the pub on a Friday lunchtime, culturally that probably wouldn’t fly now.
The only definite occasion I remember was on the first year French trip (a 3-day trip with around 50 girls age 11/12, driving over from England), where all of the teachers accompanying us got clearly drunk in the evenings (the coach driver was also obviously pretty tipsy, and didn’t appear to have sobered up before driving on one day, I remember a bunch of us discussing it at the time). They brought back a pretty impressive quantity of wine between them as well- they’d all bought extra bags and suitcases to fill with bottles.
Apparently the previous year several of the teachers had got so far out of it that they decided to let themselves into one of the girls’ dorm rooms (all the teachers were female, incidentally) and sing them lullabies, but they didn’t get quite that far in our year.
I wouldn’t say I got taught by teachers who were drunk or taking drugs, but if I found out a few were, it wouldn’t be a surprise at all. I had the odd class with a teacher who was, in retrospect, probably hung over but nothing especially memorable.
No obvious drunks but my 8th grade biology teacher stands out as the single most incompetent teacher, ever. He spent every single class period ranting off topic, frequently about Kirk Douglas being gay. He sounded like a precursor to Fox News.
Possibly. No one was ever falling down drunk or otherwise so intoxicated that it was impossible to miss. But in retrospect, I can think of 2-3 teachers who might have been a little tipsy on the job, a telltale behavior being the tendency to babble stories and opinions irrelevant to the lesson plan and never actually getting around to teaching.
It’s also possible that they weren’t intoxicated in the classroom but they were drinking so much outside school that it had a negative impact on their teaching ability.
Oh yeah, forgot, I got high with my 12th grade English teacher on a …er… field trip?