On exams week, the teachers aren’t allowed to assign you homework. We had one teacher though, that would assign us homework and tell us to label it as classwork at the top of the page.
Had another teacher that would come to “freak ally” (An ally behind the school where all the misfits would go to smoke) and smoke cigarettes with us before school.
My Drivers Ed teacher would sleep in the car while you drove around town. He claimed it was a way to teach us proper driving habits. If he woke up, you were driving too rough.
One day I left town while he slept (we were restricted to town streets). My classmate in the backseat was bug eyed. I drove three or four miles, then turned around, but he woke up before we reached town. He was livid, but couldn’t really do anything.
6th grade: Our teacher polled us at election time on our candidate, Nixon or Humphrey. The kids who voted Humphrey were immediately ridiculed as “wrong”.
She often babbled about how Jesus was hung on a pole, not a cross. (Public school BTW)
She got mad at one kid who didn’t know how to fix her busted shoe.
Then she got pregnant, and our writing homework was to write a congratulations letter to her husband, which we all did.
My mom got wind of this from me. Next thing I knew, there were 20 mothers in my living room yelling in a meeting. Teacher was gone by Monday afternoon.
There was a PE teacher in high school who openly encouraged the bigger kids to bully the smaller kids “to keep them in their place”.
High school sociology teacher regularly gave her Christian testimony, told us that girls shouldnt wear pants, that Planting a Tree in Israel was a scam and that students who sat in the front, middle of the class were more intelligent than everyone else.
High school physiology teacher told us stories, completely serious, about the poltergeist/demon that lived in his house and how his child slept in the hallway because it lived in her room. He regularly took naps in the storage room during class.
High school English teacher wore leather pants and stiletto heals to class. Her nickname was The Whip Lady.
Sixth grade teacher made us pay her money if we wrote on or left anything in our desks when school was over.
I had a lot of old-school nuns as teachers and quit telling stories about them because no one believes me.
My middle school band teacher used to play us a recording of whatever song we were learning so we would know what it should sound like, often times repeating the lyrics so we’d understand what notes got stressed, where the rests were, etc. One year we were performing songs from A Chorus Line, in particular Dance Ten; Looks Three. There was frumpy Mrs Barnes telling the class
" ***TITS ***and ASS as she pointed to the brass section, punching up each “tits” and “ass”. They’d play it again and mess up (possibly intentionally) and she’d go through it again, getting more frustrated.
*TITS* and *ASS*! *TITS *and *ASS*!
We also had a chorus teacher who wore a nippleless bra (she did have a great rack) and was rumored to have been in Playboy.
And, continuing along the peculiar music teacher theme, my brother’s band teacher (the one before Ms. T & A) was fired and possibly prosecuted for some sex related offense involving a student(s). His name was Lee Adams and everyone said he was responsible for co-writing the theme song from All in the Family. I believed that for the longest time but it isn’t true.
I had an elderly nun in 4th grade who told us all that every time we did something bad or misbehaved in class, we were driving nails deeper into Jesus’ hands and pushing the crown of thorns harder onto his head.
Considering we were just 9 or 10, that was kinda freaky. I won’t say we were innocent little darlings, but we were just little kids. We never did anything THAT bad!!!
That said, a year later, a girl in my class told a different elderly nun what the other sister had told us, and she just shook her head in exasperation. “No, that’s just fairy tales,” she told us. “Jesus suffered and died once. YOU can’t do that to him again.”
We felt a lot better at that point.
I had one in eighth grade shop class. Mr. S was a 6’5" misogynist who was morally offended that girls were now being allowed into his class. He was also about 75 years old, and opened class the first day by assuring us that he was not too old to beat the crap out of us, and if any of us acted up he’d lock himself into the supply closet with them and then we’d just see who came out.
The tables were fairly high, and surrounded by tall, thick metal stools so heavy I had difficulty dragging mine closer to the table. About half way through the year I was sitting on one of them carving a piece of wood when the kid next to me said something smartish to Mr. S. Mr. S. responded by throwing a stool at the kid, causing me to dive for the floor and do substantial damage to my left thumb with the carving knife in the process.
I was frankly shocked to learn that they’d decided to let him finish out the year.
G. Zuss.
What year was this? CE, I hope?
One of my university teachers apparently kept a bottle of liquor in his office and would drink in his office. I heard that one day one of his classes was too much for him to bear without the alcohol, so he brought it into class. (Though this wasn’t something I personally saw, just heard secondhand.)
Another university staff member, who was from Russia, apparently used to keep a flask of vodka with him, but again, this was a secondhand rumour.
Just before a class reunion, a teacher at our old high school got arrested for sleeping with a student. Naturally, it was the subject of much discussion. None of the women at the reunion had slept with him, but all had gotten a creepy vibe from him.
Also, I learned that, during our senior year, a female gym teacher (who was the daughter of one of my mother’s best friends) allegedly had an affair with the quarterback of the football team.
When I was in Grade 7 all us girls were being loud and boisterous in the changeroom after gym class. The male gym teacher flung open the door and proceeded to yell at us for a good few minutes while were all in various states of undress - my friend had to quickly grab a shirt to hold against her chest because she was just wearing her bra and pants. Of course the boys were walking past the open doorway behind him ogling us. To my knowledge nothing happened to him for that, but could you imagine him doing that nowadays?
Whoa. Mind blown; my mother tells the very same story (well, minus the sensible nun who apparently didn’t see the need to traumatize her students).
I had a 12th grade math teacher who used an overhead projector to write out problems. When he found a student sleeping in class, he’d make a great show of sneaking up to him with the spray bottle of water that he used to clean the projector and nailing the napper in the ear. Not sure that would fly today, but everyone else in class appreciated the schadenfreude.
Another teacher, a civics and history teacher and like the above a football coach, would throw erasers at students who exasperated him. But never hard enough to hurt, and he was universally beloved because he engaged with and quite obviously respected the students in his classes.
Yet another coach, though, who saw Rosh Hashanah as an opportunity to make an anti-Semitic joke about the Holocaust, not so much.
My mother finished her Masters in the early 1970s. She had two (male) professors who openly toked in the classroom and invited students to light up as well.
One of them was fired soon after… for making a slight pass at a male student.
During my junior year of high school, I was thrown up against the wall by two different teachers. One was the wrestling coach and taught American history and one was the football coach and taught shop. I was kind of a mouthy kid.
Karma kind of hit when the shop teacher got pissed about something and threw a C-clamp on the floor and it bounced up and hit him in the face.
Had a substitute teacher in HS tell us the urban legend about having a friend who worked for the sanitation dept. Part of the job description of said friend was to clean the grates from the little aborted bodies that immoral women had flushed down the toilet. I knew that didn’t sound right at the time, was amused and vindicated to find the legend later in one of Jan Grunveld’s urban legend books.
What a tool that sub was.
Had a 9th grade math teacher who wouldn’t shut up about how everyone should vote for Clinton and people that didn’t were idiots and morons and if we didn’t want our parents to be idiots and morons we’d convince them to vote for Clinton.
I seem to have been very fortunate as far as teachers were concerned, but my wife has a horrible teacher in her past. One of her high school math teachers, if someone gave a wrong answer or did badly on a quiz, he would draw a small circle on the chalkboard and make the kid stand with their nose touching that circle while the teacher went on “teaching.” That’s bad but maybe not horrible. The horrible part was when he one day marched my wife out of the classroom after she failed a quiz and began yelling at her. “Everyone else does fine on these quizzes” he said at one point, to which she replied, “Everyone else cheats!”
His reply was just something like “well then you’ve got something to think about.” He was in context clearly telling her she should be cheating too.
Yes, he was a PE teacher. Sorry, but it’s true!
Not being as advanced in age as most users here, some of my experience will come off as pedestrian.
Had a high school civics teacher who taught civics through episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show”, as well as having students grade one-another’s quizzes. It was the most “phone it in” class I had.