So, who are the wacky/interesting teachers you ever have?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There are some lecturers who put us to sleep, some who put us to the test, and some who just, well, are downright strange or interesting. Here are the wacky ones on my list:

1. The Shampoo Advertisement Poster Girl
That would be my Software Engineering lecturer, a middle-aged lady with almost waist-length hair. From time to time, she will toss her hair about, like those girls in those shampoo ad showing off their shimmering long flock. We once tried to count how many times she tossed her hair, but we gave up.

2. The AI Lecturer which is suspected of being an AI himself
This said lecturer, who teaches AI, is suspected by many of us to be an AI himself. He just lectures on and on – if someone’s mobile phone goes off, he just go on. If someone cracked a joke in middle of his speech and caused a fuss, he just go on. He never stopped for any interruptions, never gauged the reaction the class have to him or never ever stopped lecturing once.

We suspect that he is an AI whose goal is just to finish lecturing ASAP and get back to office where he can recharge his battery.

2

I had a middle school social sudies teacher who never lost his temper, which was surprising given that myself and several others certainly did get yelled at by other teachers for one reason or another. I always had a lot of respect for him because he could keep it together (who knows, mabye it was just vodka in his water bottle that kept him mellow :stuck_out_tongue: )

3

I had a Physics lecturer at Uni who had a stroke but refused to give up teaching. He also refused to prepare slides and wrote everything on the board as he went along. This was painful to watch as he had to control his right arm with his left. Being cruel students we nicknamed him Hawking-lite.
We also had a Professor Pert who was given the unoriginal name of Nipples.

4

Until ninth grade, I hated history. It had always been presented as nothing but a boring regurgitation of dates and names.

That year, I had history with “Mrs. Bird.” On the first day of class, she came into the room and told us to put our books away-- we wouldn’t be using them this year. She proceeded to teach us the fun and interesting stuff about history. One day, we had a lecture on chamberpots and hygeine; the next day she talked about sex scandals involving the Founding Fathers (and made me feel very, very sorry for poor Rachel Jackson).

The amazing thing was that she managed to capture our interest with the “gross and shocking” parts of history but tucked in lessons on economic and how the political system works. She made historical politicians seem real to us because we saw the same motivations you see today.

Of course, she was very controversial. I knew nothing of it at the time, but I’ve learned since then that she faced enormous resistance to her methods and outraged a lot of people who thought she sould just be reading from the text like a “normal” teacher.

I credit her with giving me my love of history, and I use her methods when I take kids on tour of the museum in which I work, grossing-out the kids with tales of chamberpots while sneaking in a bit of info about the founding of our state. (One of our famous politicians I’m supposed to make sure they learn about was also a doctor, so I show them his bleeding and leeching equipment. By gum, it works-- they remember that guy!)

I feel sorry for kids today who might not get to have fun with people like “Mrs. Bird.” I learned so much from her-- most importantly, I learned to peel back the layers and look at all of the issues. Teachers are often so pressed to make sure the kids know all of the info on the standardized tests that I doubt if they have the time or inclination to talk about things like the rampant drug abuse during the Victorian era or sing the popular songs of the day which mocked this public figure or that.

Wherever you are, “Mrs. Bird”, thank you. You opened my eyes and made me love learning. You changed my life.

5

Well…

There was the music teacher in elementary school who was obviously losing it or had lost it. It was probably due to age, but could have been any number of things.

First of all, the man couldn’t hear. Which is bad for a music teacher. By the end of the school year, he still only knew a few names. and this was a fairly small school. It wasn’t just the foreign names or the three-in-one-class names he had trouble with either. He did, after a while, rename a few people and remember the names he had made up. He had Ally answering to Abigail by the end of the year, for example.

He liked formality. Johns were Jonathans to him even if they weren’t actually named Jonathan. He always called me my full first and middle name even though I go by a diminuitive of my middle.

He would do things like… we never warmed up before singing in choir (which was separate from classes. We actualy wanted to be good.) and we’d sing the wrong songs. And when we tried to point out to him that we don’t know the song he’s playing, he’d say, “oh, that’s alright (an oddly lengthy and formal version or just wrong version of your name)” and smile like he had absorbed it and go on playing.

It was so frustrating that it was never amusing. The average conversation went like this:
Teacher: Okay, we’re going to sing Carol of the Bells (starts playing something that is not Carol of the Bells)
Student: Mr. Jones! That’s not Carol of the Bells!
Teacher: what?
Student: that’s not Carol of the Bells! Carol of the bells is the one that goes (hums)
teacher: oh… oh that’s all right Georgianna.
student: my name is Hanna!
teacher: what’s that Georgianna?
student: never mind.
Another student: Mr. Jones, why are we singing Carol of the Bells in February? Christmas is over!
My sisters and I confused him a lot because we all go by our middle names and share first names. He would either call them all by my name or call them by other common middle names. He never got mine wrong, though. I didn’t know if it was because it’s a mouthful and he like it or because I was in his choir. Annie had the worst of it- She hates being called Mary Anne (where’s ginger? har har.) and he’d call her Mary Lou, Mary Beth, Mary Jane, Mary Sue, etc.

He had a strange way of picking on people, too. He’d somehow decide that someone was very smart or knew a lot about music and then would ask questions is class and say, “I know Dierdre knows this one” (“my name is Dani!” “oh, that’s okay Dierdre”) and poor Dani would be like “wha-?” He never made those people answer the questions, though. Just mentioned that he knew they knew. Which made the person look like a teacher’s pet. Sometimes he’d mention why the person should know it and it was always like “well, so what?” like- “What key is this in? Oh, I know Dierdre (“Dani!”) knows this. She plays the drums.”

The weirdest thing was that he’d tell us all these mundane stories about his life- not like how he went skydiving and wrestled a bear, but like how he and his wife went to see a performance of the song we were singing and it was just beautiful- and then totally contradict himself later. We were told that he was never married and had no children, that he had a wife and a son, that he was never married and had only an adopted daughter, that he had lived in our city all his life, that he had been in the army and lived all over the place, that he was born in Texas or Ohio or New Hampshire… It was all very strange and shady.

6

I was taught by an army of Penguins.

Catholic school.

7

I had an English teacher who was a playwright. A really, really bad playwright. And all he taught was his plays. Did I mention how bad they were? And when he ran out of his plays, he would hand us each a copy of the Boston Herald (written on I believe a fourth grade reading level) and tell us to look for words we didn’t know. This was an AP English class, by the way.

8

My AP English teacher. She had Lou Gehrig’s disease and got around on a walker. She must have been close to retirement.

She had a statue of the Hear No Evil See No Evil Speak No Evil monkeys on her desk, and if you were having a bad day (not unheard of with driven high school seniors taking AP courses) you could take the statue and put it on your desk and she wouldn’t call on you during class.

She used to send the seniors out to McDonald’s for her breakfast during class (right around the corner, so at most they’d miss maybe 10 minutes of class) until one of the deans got on her case about it. She smiled impishly at us after her dressing out and asked us if we’d like to know what she thought of the dean. We said yes, and she flipped the bird.

We had to write every day. Every. Day. We’d come in, there’d be a topic on the board, and we’d have to write a few paragraphs on it.

My Senior Civics Class was great too…every Friday we’d have a trivia game, and we held mock Nuremburg trials. I was one of the judges, my teacher and some other students were the defense, and another team of students were the prosecutors. The prosecutors were left off from doing a term paper because building the case was such a big deal.

Well, the prosecutors made their case against one of the Nazis and then rested their case. Mind you, there are about six other Nazis we’re supposed to try and the trial is supposed to take all week. The room was stunned, and the teacher/defense attorney got up and argued that all the other charges against the other Nazis should be dropped. We had no choice but to let them go.

In college, I had one teacher I had to take for a required elective and I liked him so much I took him for two other courses that weren’t part of my major. He taught anthropology and spent time with the Comanches. If you ever saw a documentary on Discovery about dragons then you saw him as one of the experts.

9

My algebra teacher had read that students who listened to classical music learned better, so she played Debussy and Mozart on a tape deck during class, while she lectured with the lights off (for the overhead projector) and spoke in a monotone. This was first period. No one ever stayed awake through her class.

She also routinely got students’ papers confused. I found this out when I got my midterm report and was failing, though I hadn’t made below a 90 on anything. When I went to complain, it turned out she’d been confusing my tests with another girl’s (whose name was nothing like mine). In her gradebook, I had gotten an 8 on a test I should have had a 93 on.

10

My high school physics teacher, Mr. Hovey. First of all, he had an unfashionable crew cut, black horn-rimmed glasses and suspenders. Also, we noticed one day that his shoes seemed to be held together with electrical tape. And he played jazz and classical tuba. To all appearances, he was completely uncool.

And his teaching style was weird. First of all, he seemed to use the Socratic method, so you’d never get a straight answer to any question. (At the time, we thought he was being an asshole for not giving us straight answers. It was only years later that I realized that he was teaching us. God, were we stupid.) And he’d mark points off if your write-up of the experiment had misspellings or poor grammar. (And he definitely hated our habit of referring to the experiments as “labs.” If we did so, he would remind us that the lab[oratory] was the place where we conducted experiments.) We were taking physics in junior year, and hadn’t yet formally studied calculus but he subtly taught it. And we were required to obtain a slide rule and learn how to use it. His reasoning was that using one was a good way to learn to read a scale. This was the early 1980s, so they were already obsolete and not available in stores. Some of my classmates were laughed at when they asked retail clerks if the store stocked them. Fortunately, I was able to get mine from my older brother.

And sometime during the last few weeks of AP Physics class senior year, Sarah G, one of the six students in this class, talked him into hosting a party at his house. (I can’t remember how she did this but she was interesting. She seemed to be this total Jewish-American-Princess airhead, but was actually quite smart and went to Yale. I don’t know what happened to her after that.) So a bunch of us went to his house on a Saturday for a barbeque and pool party. (We met his wife and three children, one of whom was an adopted Vietnamese orphan missing one leg.) I respected him a lot more after that party.

Another interesting person was my senior year civics teacher, whose name I can’t remember. This was an elective during the final semester and most of the students already had their college plans, so everyone seemed to consider the class a lark. The teacher did as well, for the most part. We’d play games, he’d tell stories about teaching on an Indian reservation and we’d goof off. And he’d yell and scream like Sam Kinison. But there were moments when he got serious, like when he discovered that none of us – not even the college-bound among us or the junior who had spent the previous semester as a Congressional page (and this was around the time of a notorious sex scandal involving members of Congress and Congressional pages so that guy got teased mercilessly) – knew who Learned Hand was. So one of the very few homework assignments that semester was to write a short biography of the famous jurist.

11

One of my favorite teachers was my Algebra II teacher. Everyone was afraid of him, because he yelled all the time and was very sarcastic. It was obvious, though, that he was doing it to amuse himself, and he cracked me up. He was always telling people to leave if they didn’t want to do algebra–which of course no one ever did–and he would clench his teeth and say, "Every day, I tell you to go. away. And every day, you come back! And if you weren’t paying enough attention, he would slam his ruler across your desk and yell your last name.

Eh, I can’t think of anyone very amusing, though.

12

My husband and I, though 13 years apart in age, had the same 7th-grade math teacher, Mrs. McCarty. My husband thought she was ninety years older than God when he had her.

I had been, through grade school, a straight-A, sail-through-with-no-effort student. But for whatever reason, it all fell apart for me with 6th-grade math. I struggled and made Cs.

Then I encountered Mrs. McCarty, a short, wirey gray-haired dynamo in polyester. Mean, too. You gave a wrong answer and her response was an exasperated, “You don’t have any more sense than a rabbit!”

I can’t tell you how she taught it, but suddenly it all made sense. By the time I got to 10th grade, I was in advanced math. I had to take geometry in summer school to catch up with everyone else, but I never would have gotten there without Mrs. McCarty.

13

Let’s see.

The film teacher in highschool who was the school eccentric and pretty much alway drunk. If you look up old, bitter and darkly sarcastic in the dictionary you’d see his picture. I loved him.

My history teacher who was a rabid Reaganite, but nonetheless taught us all about the labor movement (how often that even get teached in highschool?) and I became his favorite student by showing up in class with the Communist Manifesto. A complex man.

Shelly Rice, my favorite college professor, brilliant photograph historian, my second semester with her she started going on about “Seth Speaks”, a book about some guy who was channelling Seth, some ancient guy who has all the wisdom of the ages…oooookay. Still love her too though.

Then there was the teacher I only had for study hall, who one day couldn’t take it anymore and hid under her desk. Not a good thing.

14

I had a college Psychcology teacher who was a little nutty. Everyday he would ask someone in the class what Pyschology was and the student would reply “Pyschology is a science.” One morning he pointed his finger at me and in his most authoritarian voice asked. “What is Pyschology?” I thought for a second, then inspiration hit. “They systemetic torture of white rats?” He exploded so fast the class never had a chance to laugh. A spoiled two year old would have been proud of the fit he threw. He turned red, knocked the books off his desk and started raving. “Pyschology is a science! Pyschology is a science!” Finally he stormed out of the room slamming the door behind him. We sat there silently for about a half minute, then we burst out laughing. He didn’t come back to class that day. So after about 15 minutes we all just left. I did pass the class but I was never called on agian.

15

Oh, I just remembered a very good one! My High School Drama teacher.

If people ran a vote on ‘worst drama teacher of the universe’, this guy would win by a landslide. I didn’t actually hate him that much- I rather pitied him. I was going through a lot of shit in high school at the time, so a neurotic drama teacher that assigned very little actual work wasn’t that bad. Also, I wasn’t a very confrontational student.

But boy were my classmates! They would do anything and everything to drive this guy to insanity. It wasn’t that they were particularly cruel, it was more that he wasn’t a very good drama teacher, and made himself a huge target to snarky high school students. He was mocked by the drama geeks for being a bad drama teacher, and mocked by just about everyone else for being so thin-skinned. He once mentioned how it’s bad luck to say ‘Macbeth’ in a theater, and how a few people who said it had horrible accidents or some such nonsense, so from that point onward students would scream ‘MACBETH!’ at random intervals to pretty much hijack the conversation into how you weren’t supposed to say that word.

He had a few meltdowns in class. He was an alcoholic to some extent and the set of a school play was done at the last minute because he had spent the previous weekend drinking or some such business instead of painting (according to the grapevine, anyway). Often a student would upset him so much he’d storm off to the teacher’s lounge to cry or drink or (more likely) cool off. He would be gone for 20+minutes, and often the aide would be responsible for roll. Many days, the aide marked everyone ‘present’ and the entire class simply left. I had heard a rumor from a former student of the high school that he was fired for losing his temper and strangling a student in the middle of class :eek: .

It gets even more surreal- just last week I was substitute teaching at a high school (not the one I graduated from). While eating lunch, a teacher who looked oddly familiar asked my name, then said he recognized me. It took a bit longer to recognize him- it was the same teacher, seven years later. He had lost a considerable amount of hair and talked very slowly (like he had a stroke or something). It was neat to see a teacher from high school, since we are vaguely co-workers now. While subbing my class, I asked the students there if they knew the guy, since I had him for drama myself.

Sure enough, some of them did, and it was definitely the same guy. He drove a rather distinctive vehicle, and after casually mentioning to his students that he hates mayonnaise, he later found his car coated in mayo :eek: . If anything, that teacher taught me to never show fear, or stress, or any kind of victimization toward high school students. And definitely do not let them know what kind of car you drive. :o

16

My Creative Writing instructor my first semester of college. She was spunky and loved to try out new creativity-boosting teaching techniques on us. (Apparently we were a lot more fun than the other class she taught, which was in a women’s prison.)

One day she walked into class, pulled a bottle of champagne out of her tote bag, uncorked it (nearly shooting out my friend’s eye in the process, before the cork ricocheted off the wall), chugged a good half the bottle without stopping, then slammed it down on her desk and told us to write what we were thinking at that very moment. Then she passed the rest of the bottle around the room.
(And then there was the time we all shared autobiographical short stories with each other; hers involved having a one-night stand with an Icelandic reindeer farmer in a room full of other - sleeping - Icelandic reindeer farmers, after they had finished the reindeer butchering for the year. Everyone was drunk on Icelandic homebrewed hootch and covered in reindeer blood. She pretty much blew my relatively innocent, 18-year-old mind, she did. Great teacher, though - I probably still have the printed copy of her story around somewhere.)

17

my favourite teacher ever is Drunken Irish Stereotype metabolism lecturer. From way down south, i didn’t understand a word he said for most of the first year. the very first class he asked a question. i didn’t even realise he had asked one, so i failed to avoid eye contact. after i understood what he was saying i answered and got it right, after which he anounced i would be his “Question Bitch” from then on. He was drunk most lectures, and would turn up to any students party he was invited to, including our Dublin Pub Crawl Week.

Then there is Enjoys-Her-Work-A-Bit-Too-Much german anatomy lecturer. she stalks the disection room with a giant pair of bolt cutters in hand, sitting on the gurneys to talk to us and complaining that “we treat the cadavers like they can still feel it”.

From school my favourite teacher was my chemistry teacher, one of the few who actually liked me since i sailed through school doing no work and being a cocky little git about it as well. he loved doing crazy experiments, and always got me to help him out, on one occasion managing to set my arm on fire. i don’t even remember what we were doing, so so much for that method of teaching being more effective.

the worst was my school maths teacher, who couldn’t control the class, least of all me. bog knows why they let her teach the top set since the very first day she admitted that she got a C in her Alevel maths. after that she completely lost control. i asked questions i knew she couldnt answer, we locked her out every time she left the room, we gave her underwear and sex toys for her birthday. eventually she snapped and threw a piece of chalk at a boys head. after that we got a different teacher.

18

I could go on and on about all the weird teachers I’ve had so I’ll just try to hit the highlights.

Note: Names changed via spell check, just in case.

First of all there was Mr. Woolliness, who taught life science (watered down biology) in 7th grade. He liked (after assigning class work, so that students tended to be focused on their papers) to go around the room and find a girl who was particularly focused on her work. He would then drop a plastic spider or rubber snake on her paper and laugh as she shrieked.
Mr. Woolliness also liked to make fun of his students. I seem to recall, “Humans and chimps are genetically 99% the same. Of course, some humans are closer to monkeys than others. Rick here can tell us all about that.” I know it got worse than this, but none are coming to mind so I’ll move on to:

Mrs. Frankfurter was a Spanish teacher who frequently forgot English words. This wasn’t so bad except that she always forgot really simple words like “is,” “will” and “go.”
Then there were her grading problems. During one quarter, I had received no test grade below 85, and yet somehow she calculated my test average as 37, and argued that her math was right. My parents scheduled a conference with her and the assistant principal to get things straitened out. Mrs. F was asked to have all my papers together for this conference. When my parents showed up, she had exactly one paper. A homework assignment from the previous grading period. She had none of the papers they were actually there to discuss.

I’m exhausted at the moment, so I’ll sign off. I have plenty more to post and will do so later.

19

I had the pleasure of having the same geography and science teacher in both 7th and 8th grade. He was not so crazy, just plain fun.

He told tons of jokes. He was obsessed with radio. He had tapes upon tapes of radio shows he’d taped right off the radio - like Dr. Demento - and played funny songs during class. He talked about his wife like Henny Youngman did and everyone was shocked when word got around that she wasn’t ACTUALLY a fat old hag. One time he played us a tape of him messing around with sound effects that was a story about him pushing his car home and jumping into the pool.

He was somehow obsessed with beavers, and had a lot of beaver parifinalia in his classroom. If you did something good for him you’d get a “beaver buck” which I think could be traded in for extra credit.

He was the sort of science teacher that would show you about the digestive system by eating a cracker while standing on his head, or having the class hold hands in a circle while he shocked us. One time some kid didn’t believe that HCl was dangerous, so he let the kid put some on his hand.

He was a super cool guy. He moved to Florida. As far as my Googling tells me, he’s still alive.

20

I had a nutty 4th grade teacher at this Christian school I used to go to. She was a very interesting person… The very first thing she told us that year was that she was pregnant, so we shouldn’t all go home and tell our parents she was fat. She was obsessed with Tigger (from Winnie the Pooh) and bats. Some of us girls found out on a trip to a place with a swimming pool that she had a tattoo of Tigger on her lower back. She was an oddling, but very cool. She once made our entire class wear our school bags back to front, so she wouldn’t be the only “pregnant” one. And a lot of the stuff she taught us was through song.

The other person who immediately comes to mind is the science teacher who used to teach at the high school I currently attend. She was always telling stories. Some of her stories had some relevance to what we were learning and others had none whatsoever. Several people found that annoying, since they never knew when they had to listen, but I was happy just listening to everything she told us. At the very beginning of the year I had her, she was explaining the structure of an atom or something to us. She somehow managed to link this to how everyone has a “psychological bubble” which is the reason they do that unnecessary little shuffle to the side when someone sits next to them on a bus. She demonstrated this by suddenly thrusting her face right up in front of mine and saying something to me. While I was silently thanking Dog I hadn’t fallen off my chair, she explained to the rest of the class that they had just witnessed her invading my psychological bubble. That was one of those things that had no relevance to anything.