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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Nutty:

My Human Sexuality prof first semester sophomore year of college. He was older (60?) and had been a sex therapist FOREVER. He didn’t really lecture, he just told us stories about his wackiest clients and even himself (getting pulled over in CA as an undergrad for driving erratically because he was getting road head) and watching the self-help videos that accompanied his book about female orgasm problems. He was in them, as the therapist, then you’d see a chick who had sexual difficulties working through her problem (EXTREMELY graphic - it was watching an hour of an 80s chick masturbating and other TMI stuff). Also the video for male erectile dysfunction - prof mentioned before the vid that they had a hard time finding a guy to be in the video and the guy that did it had a huge wang, and that if we looked in one scene, his johnson was against his partner’s arm and they were close to the same size. Not a class for the prude!

I got an A+ though. :slight_smile: (I thorougly read the book)

Interesting:

Senior year of high school, AP European History teacher. I only took this class because of the teacher (and GPA boosting). Let’s call her Mrs. Blue. Mrs. Blue was the most fun teacher I’ve ever had. AP was a lot of work; we had hours and hours of homework a week. She’d give us a bunch of topics and we’d have to do a variety of projects about them. She was known at the school as the “project queen.” Our homework could consist of: drawing pictures, making cartoons, scrapbooks, writing fake letters, etc. No boring “answer questions 1-30 at the end of the chapter.” She let us be creative. One of our big projects was a Renaissance scrapbook, acting like we had lived through it. We also had some crazy debates. She was a philosophy major or minor or something, and she’d often introduce interesting ways to think about things. We loved her so much, our class pitched in and bought her a really nice leather desk chair and signed it with silver Sharpies. She was also one of the 2 teachers that I went to Greece with the summer between junior and senior year. She found the perfect balance of being the “cool” teacher everyone loves while still maintaing authority and order in the classroom. I want to go home and visit her.

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Oh, I forgot. Mrs. Blue let us watch Black Adder in class too. :slight_smile:

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I got nuthin’, but I hope RickJay doesn’t mind my linking this post of his. I saved it a long time ago, because the second anecdote, about the geography prof, made me laugh to tears. And did again, just now.

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My 3rd-year Russian prof was like that; he was a professional actor in Russian-language theater in NYC, and a fabulously funny guy who gave great creative homework assignments, but his English was awful. Often if we ran into unknown vocabulary in readings, he wouldn’t know the English translation, and if it wasn’t a word likely to be found in the pocket dictionaries most of us brought to class, we’d be out of luck.

But I still remember when he was trying to remember the English word “bull” when the Russian word came up in class; he held his hands up to his head like horns, and explained, “you know, MOOOOO! Husband of cow!”

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I don’t really have any thing cool to contribute, but this did remind me of my high school Spanish teacher who was German. I’m pretty sure we spoke Spanish with a German accent by the end of that year.

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I had problems in high school. Not because of the classes, but because I was one of the kids who (sadly) was smarter than everyone else. As a result, I got bored in class and goofed off, didn’t do homework, etc., and my grades suffered as a result.

Except in German and Latin. Mr. Salls and Mr. Fairweather were the teachers. Both were (I assume) in their late 40s to early 50s, which automatically made them older than dirt to snot-nosed kids like me. This was in 1964-65, so WW2 had only been over for just less than 20 years. Except that one day, Mr. Salls was telling us about the difference in accents in German and how one could identify someone’s birthplace by accents and how important that had been during the war because they had to make up his cover papers and story to match his accent from the Hamburg area and… WHOA! He’d been a spy! An actual, honest-to-Og spy during the war. We got him talking about it, and he told us about being in place for about 4 months, then getting found out and having to hide and escape with the SS chasing his ass, knowing that he would be shot if he was discovered, etc. And he told us the story entirely in German, and it was so fascinating that I understood almost all of it. And that was the day I discovered that he had beaten German into my head so well that I was fluent in it, to the point where I could switch gears and think in it.

Mr. Fairweather was the same way. He had been in the British Army in Singapore, and had escaped by convincing the Japanese that he was actually Italian and therefore an ally. He did so by speaking nothing but Latin, which confused the Japanese. They brought in a translator who didn’t speak good Italian to begin with, but because Latin and Italian are very close (Mr. Fairweather always argued that Italian was what Latin had evolved into), he was able to confuse the translator and convince him that he was not from Rome, but from the hills up near Torino. They put him on a plane back to Italy; he managed to get off in Damascus and find his way to the British consulate there.

Fascinating men, and they instilled in me a love of language that exists today.

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2 good teachers and one odd substitute…

Dr. D was an AP History teacher for Senior World History. You had to be pre-approved for his class in your junior year, and he handed the 2500+ page textbook to you before summer break. You were required to read the entire book over the summer.

The first week back, he gave you a test on the entire book. If you didn’t pass, you were relegated back to the normal History class. He didn’t want to teach students who weren’t ready to learn.

Once you survived 5 hours of testing, he threw out the textbook. You never had to look at it the rest of the year.

Dr D taught 4 days per week. Fridays were reserved for open discussion of any topic that came to mind. Often we’d spend the hour doing current events, Legos®, his kids, his Porsche or the best practical jokes to play on the secretaries. He’d sit in his doorway with a squirt gun and shoot other classrooms, just to annoy the other History teachers.

He taught us “cause and effect” and how it applied to History better than any teacher I’ve ever met. We’d follow threads of history to see how the 100 Years War impacted the Napoleonic Wars, and how those wars directly helped cause WWI and WWII. An incredible teacher, to keep everything juggling and interesting to a bunch of bright (and often bored) students

My favorite tale was in the spring, when the class was nearly over. We had covered from the Dawn of Time to the beginning of WWI. It was May, warm and the windows were open. We were bored stupid, and many of us were falling asleep. Dr D was talking a monotone (which should have been a cue) about Arch-Duke Ferdinand and Princess Sophie driving through Sarajevo…getting lost…Gavro Princip…etc.

During the lecture, he walked through out the classroom. Stopping by Chris G, one of the brightest students in the class (Who was completely asleep), he pulled a pistol, put it near Chris’s ear and pulled the trigger.

BANG!

After the screaming stopped (And Chris G managed to peel himself from the ceiling), he calmly stated “Now, you will remember. Ferdinand did not drown; he was not poisoned. HOW DID HE DIE???”

I loved that class.

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I have some great ones:

  1. High school English teacher. Totally whacky, off-the-wall, but so much fun!
  2. College biochemistry. Used to throw chalk at people who came in late. I mean, it pissed her right off. And she had sooooo much energy.
  3. College Chemistry. Knew every single name in every class, and we had like 200 kids. Amazing.
  4. High school history teacher. Used to bring in his guitar and sing us songs and stuff.
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Junior High English: looked and talked like Smithers. Had a fused neck. Very sarcastic but adored me.

High School Latin: hands down one of the best teachers I ever had.

Undergrad Poli Sci: I think he has become relatively well-known post-9/11 because he focuses on the Middle East…I’ve heard him interviewed on NPR before (his name is Rex Brynen). He was one of the few profs I encountered at McGill who was a teacher as much as a scholar.

Law School: some of my best experiences.

My tax & elder law prof-Prof. Kaplan, hands down the best teacher ever, narrowly edging out the latin teacher. He’s won the instructor award at UIUC law multiple times.

My environmental prof-Prof. Freyfogle, somewhat gentle but so into the subject area, also made impolitic statements about UIUC administration, for which I loved him.

My property prof (an excellent prof who made future interests EASY of all things, who the school lost through a bad decision not to tenure his partner)-Prof. Ball. Now at Penn State, I think.

30

Second good teacher…

Dr. N taught Intro to Psychology. He was the greatest teacher, because he was certifiably insane. He was also a City Councilman, which may explain much

He started the class the first day standing on the top of his file cabinet breathing on the windows (the only windows in the class were 8 feet of the ground). He then measured the amount of condensation on the glass. This told him which side of his brain was receiving more oxygen, so he could tell what method of teaching would be best that day.

He’d run positive/negative reinforcement exercises on the class, without their knowledge. We caught him at it 3 times during the semester, but looking back, I can see several other occasions where we missed it.

Dr N. taught the basic elements of a myriad of psychological theories, including Freud, Jung, Adler, Skinner, and then branched out into more and more outlandish theories. One of them was Primal scream therapy, which he demonstrated in the middle of class. In front of 35 students in his class, plus 7 classrooms who abutted his classroom, or had doors facing his class.

Then he had all 35 of us practice it. I’m certain that no one in any of the 8 classes accomplished anything that day.

My favorite was when he taught the week-long History of Psychology, all done from the perspective of Freud. He spent a week dressed as Freud, including three-piece suit, bowler hat, huge cigar, and bad German accent. He dressed and spoke that way all week.

I mentioned he was a City Councilman? Well, for my Boy Scouts Citizenship Merit Badge, I had to go to the City Council meeting that coincided with Freud visiting the classroom.

Dr N. arrived at the Council Meeting, still doing the fake accent, huge cigar, and bowler hat. The Mayor looked at him, commented “Dr. N could not join us this evening. He’s appointed Dr Freud to be his proxy.” AND CONTINUED THE MEETING!!! They voted on action items, the minutes listed Dr Freud as a member of the council (as proxy) and the cable TV network labeled him as Dr Freud.

The man was insane. Or the City Council was. I’m not sure which.

Eli

31

Finally, the worst teacher…

Dr R. taught Aviation and Physics. He was also on the promotion track to Assistant Principal, so he’d often be gone for a week or so to cover for this or that AP who was gone in other schools in the district.

In about January, one of the AP’s at the middle school got arrested for habitual shoplifting. Dr. R transferred to that school to cover for the AP, and returned to our class 1 day a week. The rest of the time we had Mr. M teaching.

Mr. M knew nothing about airplanes. He knew less about Physics. He was a glorified babysitter, nothing more.

But he was a small, very tough man. He was 5’5” tall and about 5’ across the shoulders. All muscle; he’s done semi-pro weightlifting before getting into martial arts. He’d been thrown out of the Army because he weighed too much, even though he had no body fat. It was all muscle.

He spent his evenings and weekends working out, and haunting various bars, looking for fights. On Monday, he’d come to class and tell us about the fights he’d gotten in over the weekend. If he’d not managed to get in one, he’d be depressed. 3 or more, he’d be bruised and black-eyed, but cheerful as hell.

Never finished my Aviation classes, but I did find out where to get in the best fights around town.

Eli

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My fifth grade teacher: She let my friend and I stay behind in the classroom and peel apples (with knives!) for the applesauce we were making that day while the rest of the class went to music. Guess what we did? We peeled apples.

My sixth grade teacher: Had long hair, sort of a hippie, let us do all kinds of stuff we thought up on our own (newspapers, silly news broadcasts). He was really tough on us if we picked on somebody. He shacked up with the art teacher and the two of them got busted for growing pot a few years later.

One teacher I had that became sort of famous is Charles Haas. When I was his English student in the late 70’s he would go on about all this Titanic stuff which we would have to endure. Years later he was on the telly going on about it. Good for him!

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Two psychology teachers. Both of them crazy. Is a trend forming?

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seems likely. my school psychology teacher was a total nut job.