Dizzy Gillespie had an evening concert at our high school (early 80’s). During the day, our jazz band got to play with him for the school. Our jazz band teacher spent some quality time on their bus beforehand.
My high school football coach my junior and senior was an alcoholic or at least turned into one after his 1 year old daughter died. He would celebrate victories by getting destroyed before we even got on the bus back home. He made it several years after I left because he was a great coach but was eventually fired and died of cirrhosis about 15 years later.
We had a teacher that must have come to school high/drunk after she was fired. She was fired for taking her shirt off in the classroom and teaching in her sports bra on a hot day. Then a week or so later she came to school topless hanging out the driver’s side window of her car yell about how now she was showing her breasts to the students.
My clinical skills instructor (a professor at the med school) would nod off while observing us students doing histories and physicals on patients. I wondered why. Then one day I mentioned I had a headache, and she offered me an oxycodone tab from her purse. She said she took them regularly for her headaches. This was in 1980 or 81. I actually declined the offer.
Never. The closest I came was in fourth grade, when as a summer-camp-like thing I was an extra in a production of Oliver hosted by the local high school drama teacher. He was fantastic and it was a great experience, but the next year he got fired, and the rumor was that it was for sharing a joint with a high school student behind the auditorium.
There was one professor who always had a cup of coffee in class, and there was speculation that it didn’t actually contain coffee or tea, as was said of the coffee cup Jackie Gleason used to drink out of at the end of his variety TV show.
It was easy to believe, because he routinely berated the entire class. One time he re-assigned a problem set because he didn’t like how the class performed on it. But the truth is, he didn’t give enough information on his assignments. We ended up finding which book he stole the problem out of, getting the needed information, and passed it around the class. Not a fun class.
In grad school there was one professor who was rumoured to be an alcoholic. He certainly had a lot of broken capillaries in his nose and he seemed to be in a semi-permanent state of befuddlement.
I had an alcoholic science teacher in 9th grade. He actually talked to us about how to mitigate a hangover. (Lots of water before bed.) I saw him hungover a few times, but never drunk that I recall. He was also really into stuff like UFOs, cryptids, ESP, etc. He was one of my favorite teachers.
We had a teacher in medical school, a psychiatrist, who told us an alcoholic “was a patient who drinks more than the doctor”. I had a patient who claimed to have eight drinks a day. It was perhaps slightly concerning this teacher did not feel that made him an alcoholic…
The most beloved teacher in my HS was rumored to have a bottle in his desk that he sipped during change of class. He was never obviously drunk. When I was at the U. Illinois, a colleague was required (under the threat of being fired) to come into the chair’s office every morning and take an antabuse tablet. It made you sick if you drank alcohol.
From 5th - 7th grade I went to a private Christian school in Illinois. I remember some very good teachers there, but there were a couple who to this day who strike me as strange. At the time I only thought they were odd, but later in life I realized their behavior was probably substance related. Both of them disappeared after my 6th grade year so I’m not sure if they were fired but it would make sense. At the end of the year our class gave one of them a cheap framed painting of Jesus and he just broke down in tears at the front of the room then sagged into a chair saying “This is a picture of my best friend”… Thinking back on it it the mannerisms were similar to what you expect of somebody nearing rock bottom. He’s also the only teacher I’ve ever had who yelled at a student from the front of the class and threw something against the wall. Not towards the students, but again definitely an anger control issue. Wow, nowadays he’d have been removed right then I think, I guess back in those days they might have wanted him to finish the year with a degree of dignity.
My freshman year of highschool. Our PE teacher, and he taught something else, (I’ve forgotten what) He was constantly drunk. I hated him and would pick fights with him to be sent out to the hallway
Now that you mention this, I suspect this happened to one of the most popular teachers at my junior high a couple years after I had him, when his teenage son drowned in a lake. 
A few years after that, I was waitressing at Denny’s, and he was part of the AA group that would fill our back room several evenings a week. I hope he was able to remain sober; he’s still living in the area but has long since retired.
Had an art teacher in Junior High. Yeah, that fella was smoking some weed.
There were HS teachers we joked were drunks, but I never really registered if they were soused at work.
Now if you asked the undergrad students in the various PolSci and SpComm classes I taught while in law school… 
There was an English teacher, a sixtyish woman, who supposedly mixed booze with the coffee in her thermos. There were a couple of times she looked soused. A friend’s mom claimed she really did have more than just coffee in the thermos. She was a teacher, but worked at a different school. The athletic director would booze it up during ball games (I saw him ralphing behind the football field right after a game) and sometimes had alcohol on his breath during school. He was a beloved figure in the community despite his drinking problem.
Drugs, no. But there were 3 teachers and an assistant principal that were known to be drunks. Smelled like it and slurred their words.
I was in the AP’s office once waiting for them to come in and bitch at me for something or other. I went through their desk looking for pre-signed hallway passes. Instead I found a half gone liter bottle of peppermint schnapps. This was in high school in the late 70’s.
Not related to the OP, but when I was a sophomore I had a history teacher who had an office on the other side of the school library. I went in to put an overdue report on his desk. He wasn’t there and he left his desk unlocked so of course I rummaged through it. In the large bottom drawer was a loaded revolver in a holster and a small wallet. I opened the wallet and there was an ID card and a badge. None of us knew the guy was a part-time/special Deputy. Most of us lived in homes with guns in them. But I still wonder what the Sheriff at the time would have thought about him leaving a loaded handgun in an unlocked drawer in a school full of kids.
I love that you made this distinction.
Huh, learn something new every day, I guess.
I know it’s not healthy but does it actually make him an alcoholic? I thought a big part of being an alcoholic was the booze negatively affecting your daily life.
My 10th grade English teacher, who looked like a over- caricature of a bearded Al Pacino, seemed high as a kite every day. He also had the sleepy eyes and Tommy Chong voice of a smoker. This was confirmed when some of the girls in class boasted of going to his house and smoking with him and his wife.
In college? Between hungover, drunk or high, you would cover about 1/3 of my profs.
A big part of alcoholism is booze affecting things like relationships and jobs. But more than moderate drinking has many negative health effects. Add in problems like falls, poor nutrition, financial difficulties, concurrent psychiatric disorders, other drugs etc and things can become quickly problematic. A few habitual drinkers are high functioning despite often having massively elevated alcohol levels - but this is not the norm.
Thus, alcoholism is best understood as a spectrum. If a drink is defined as 12 oz of beer, 5 oz of wine or 1.5 oz of liquor - more than 14-22 drinks a week (varies by country and sex, also partly due to presumed weight differences) likely puts one at risk for liver disease and many other health problems. 56 drinks a week almost certainly does, and many other things as well. This definition does not capture things like binge drinking, which may cause other problems. The way an alcoholic describes “two drinks” may differ from the way I do, above.
One of my uncle’s teachers was a known alcoholic and the district was planning on letting him quietly retire at the end of the year. Then one day he was teaching under the influence and shoved my uncle’s head into a plaster wall. My grandmother raised holy Hell and threatened to sue the school (very uncommon for the Mad Men era). They still wanted to hush everything up and let him ride out the year and tried to convince her she was overreacting. He ended up being forced to resign.
We were convinced our ninth-grade English teacher was under the influence of some recreational drug, because she was constantly spaced out, very slow to react, had poor personal hygiene, and looked very unhealthy, almost zombie-like. Later the truth came out. It turned out those symptoms were caused by powerful anti-psychotic drugs she was prescribed. A year or two after I graduated, she took herself off the meds and ended up physically attacking the vice principal in front of her students. She thought he was an KGB agent who was sent to spy on her.
She lost her job at that school, but I just Googled her (easy since she had a very unusual last name), and it seems she’s still a teacher in a different state. I recognize her from her staff photo at her current school. She’s older now obviously, probably close to retirement, but looks a lot healthier than she did.