Only one? Is Zoggie really Ashley Olsen?
A few things come to mind. When I started the 6th grade, I decided to be a slacker, not doing homework and generally being lazy when it came to studying. The school counselor took notice and told me that I would have one month to bring my grades up, or they would put me back in the 5th grade rather than let me go all year long as a slacker. Well, this put the fear in me, so I buckled down and really worked hard at bringing up my grades. (by the way, several students were given this ultimatum, not just me). Well, I was doing well and assumed that I wouldn’t be put back in the 5th grade. On the last day of the 30 day period, I was waiting for the first period bell to ring when the counselor came up to me and said, “Well, Eric, are you ready to go back to the 5th grade today?”. I immediately started crying, inconsolably. The counselor said, “I’m sorry, I was just joking”. Maybe I was too sensitive, but I thought she was very cruel to me.
Another time, we had a student teacher in gym class. One day he got mad because some kids were behaving badly, so he decided to make us all get on our hands and knees and act like dogs. He made us bark and everything. There we were, acting like dogs for the last 10 minutes of gym class. We though it was over until it was time to go shower, we all got up and started to head downstairs to the locker room. Student teacher insisted that everyone walk down the stairs on their hands and knees…
And then there was the time our Journalism teacher was on maternity leave. Our replacement was an asshole. During class one day, he asked my best friend to do something and my friend said, “That’s not how Mrs. Lembke wants it done”. Well, this was the wrong thing to say. Replacement teacher went OFF, screaming and yelling. I mean, he was screaming and yelling at the top of his lungs. My ears actually hurt. This went on for about 2 or 3 minutes, when finally the teacher in the next room came over to see what the ruckus was about. A few minutes later, the school principal came and and asked the teacher to step outside. They had a discussion and the principal came in to the classroom and sat with the class until the end of the class. Teacher didn’t come back until two days later. No explanation was ever given.
I had a really crazy music teacher in 7th grade-who basically dictated stuff to us (about famous composers) that we had to write down-the idea was to put together a big book of music. Other than some singing around the piano, that was it! Other weirdos: 8th grade math-we were read to by a sleepy old guy. 11th grade english: psychopath teacher made us write weekly compositions-we had to write up and deliver to the class the next week.
My 10th grade geometry teacher was kind of eccentric. He looked pretty dour and talked like he was mad all the time, but he actually had a quirky sense of humor. He’d wait about half a minute after the bell rang then make his grand entrance. He’d put his fingers between the back part of the door and the door frame, grip the edge with his fingertips, then have the door close by momentum as he stepped into class.
As he was drawing angles and shapes on the chalkboard, he’d draw a stick man wearing a sombrero alongside the diagram and say “Pedro wants to find the measurement of angle B…” His tone of voice was like bullets shooting out of a gun.
Speaking of guns, he was a huge hunting nut. He’d talk about his hunting trips every once in a while, and one time used up the entire class debating with a guy about what kind of rifle scope to use. The guy baited him on purpose, because he didn’t feel like doing any work that day. Interesting use of words because his name was Mr. Hooks. 
I had a science teacher in 10th grade just like that. Unfortunately I can’t think of any good illustrative stories. I just remember that at the time I was just discovering Kurt Vonnegut and I thought this teacher might be Vonnegut slumming as a teacher.
Not really illustrative, but related and kind of funny, there was the time he sent me to the office for not having my textbook. The vice principle, on hearing why I was in the office, scowled, and told me “Just tell him I gave you saturday school.” I went back to class and that was it. 
I discovered shortly afterwards that the two were really good friends. Strangely given their outward demeanors, one thing they did together regularly was tend a garden in the science teacher’s lawn.
-FrL-
Ninth Grade Gym. We had a gym teacher who once told us:
“Happinesss…is when you hit yourself on the head with a Hammer Fifty Times. And then Stop.”
We all thought he looked just a little too happy.
I’m sitting here in awe of the strangeness you guys grew up with. I thought I had some bizarre stories, but I guess not…the bar has been moved.
In third grade in gym class we were in the gym because it was raining outside and the teacher was trying to teach us basketball. Well the girls didn’t seem to care and a couple of the guys were goofing off too so the coach was getting frustrated.
Then towards the end of the class he blew the whistle and yelled at a buddy of mine to come over to him. My buddy had been goofing off. So the coach yells at the kid and then tells the rest of the class to go sit on the bleachers.
Then he made my buddy “clean” the basketball court by laying down and rolling around on the floor to sweep it up for the last 5-10 minutes of class. It was funny then and the memories of it are still funny. That was the only time the coach weirded out.
My 12th grade physics teacher was an extremely cool guy, but his favorite position for lecturing was putting one foot up on a stool in front of him, putting an elbow on his knee, and leaning on that hand. This put many of the students strongly in mind of Captain Morgan, and we continually made jokes about it.
The teacher in charge of political science type classes (9th grade social studies and 12th Honors Government) was an interesting guy. He REALLY enjoyed staring at the more well endowed female students both during class and out in the hallway. We heard rumors that he was married, but he never wore a ring. He also enjoyed playing with the change in his pockets… all the time. There were persistant stories that in the days when they used blackboards he would constantly have white smudges on the crotch of his pants. In 9th grade, the girls were creeped out by him, but by 12th grade we mostly just thought it was funny, and it was a given that if you had breasts, bring a sweater or wear a high necked shirt to his class.
One of our spanish teachers was from Panama, and didn’t really care about what you did in her class (she taught spanish 1, 3, 4). For spanish 1 students, she gave you a good grasp of the basics, but once you got in spanish 3 or 4, she didn’t give a crap what you did. We did a months long knitting project (mostly just time to talk), watched several movies several times, most with a very limited relationship to spanish (a concession was made by having spanish subtitles on), and we had frequent “fiestas” where students had to bring in a spanish related food that they cooked themselves, and the recipe translated into spanish. This is actually a cool idea if done sparingly, but parents start to get pissed off after three in one month. She also complained that Michigan was way too cold, and subverted the school mandated temperature settings by placing a cold wet paper towel over her thermostat.
My AP Lit teacher was all sorts of cool, and we did various awesome things in his class including making our own video of King Lear, learn to swordfight with real prop swords (made of metal), and, because our auditorium director had connections to the movie industry, got taught how to stage fight by some really cool people (one class got taught by Tony Wolfe, who worked on Lord of the Rings). We also had a Shakespearian food day, where we got to eat lots of interesting foods, and a full on premiere party for our film, including an awards ceremony.
In fourth grade we had a brand new sub. Unfortunately, our class had a couple mentally disabled boys in it that could get quite violent for no real reason. The day she happened to be there, another boy tripped on the desk of one of these violent boys (D, for sake of the story), and D started screaming that the other guy had messed up his froot loops (he had a bowl of cereal on his desk). This ended with D flipping a desk over. The sub handled this part, but later in class when we were still a little stirred up, and not precisely paying attention to our reading assignment about tornados, the sub suddenly burst into tears and ran clear out of the building, not to be coaxed back at all.
My high school drew from a basic pool of subs, so we’d get one guy all the time, mostly because he was the vice-principal’s husband. He was notorious. One class he taught to sing the words he made up to the “Winny the Pooh” song. In another class, he was so busy reading his book that he failed to notice the entire class had escaped out the window into a courtyard until the bell rang. In one of my classes he subbed in, he went to the wrong lunch period, leaving us locked out of the room at first. After we were let into the room, he still didn’t show up for another 20 minutes. Suprisingly, only one student had left.
We had a math teacher who did this, too. Except that he had a very small classroom, so somebody would end up getting two eyefuls of Teacher Cock. I don’t remember what we called that stance, but it was something penis-related.
Damn. I have to say, that was awesome.
And no, I’m not. I may be skinny, but I lack a bobble head.
My surreal moment: It was early in the period of 10th grade Spanish and Mrs. X, a very no-nonsense middle aged teacher, caught me doodling. As punishment, she made me come to the front of the class told me that “if you’re going to draw, you’re going to have to do it on the blackboard”. The class giggled at the expected humiliation, and she cotinued the lesson.
So, I scratched my head and started drawing what I thought Smog from The Hobbit might look like. After a few minutes I started getting into it. I added mountains, trees, minatours, knights, goblins, etc. With about twenty minutes left in the class, I noticed that I wasn’t hearing the lesson any more. I turned around to see all thirty-some odd class mates staring at my growing mural (which had taken up more than half the blackboard at this point), totally silent. Even more unnerving was my teacher, who was sitting Indian style on top of her desk, just staring at the picture. The last 20 minutes were pretty surreal as I didn’t know what else to do but continue drawing a fantasy battle on the blackboard of a raptly attentive Spanish class with the only sounds being softly playing salsa music and the quiet scratches of my chalk.
I did have one of the knights being unhorsed by a windmill, because, well, it was Spanish class.
In my high school years I was taught mainly by Salesian Catholic priests. It would be hard to find a weirder bunch of inept social misfits and outcasts, and I could probably fill this thread. The following were all Catholic priests.
We had an ‘art’ teacher who was probably about 900 years old. Next to him, Yoda would look youthful and wrinkle-free. It wasn’t at all clear that he even knew what century it was. There were some ‘lessons’ that didn’t actually involve any drawing or artistic activity at all. Instead, he made us sit and listen to him while he droned on and on about the ridiculously low provision for art in the school budget. That was his central theme, but he wandered off it at wild tangents. He often had his eyes closed and was addressing nobody in particular, in a sort of ‘sleeping standing up’ pose.
We had a music teacher, Scottish, who was actually famous for his violent temper. He actually assaulted several of the guys in my class, and wasn’t particularly bothered about hiding the fact or trying to cover it up. He just felt that sometimes a fast, deep punch into the shoulder or a resounding slap across the face was his preferred ‘teaching’ method. Over the weekends, as homework, he would provide a very long photocopied biography of a famous composer and we had to re-write it, by hand, across two pages of an exercise book. There was so much wordage that it was only possible to do this using very small writing. It was a bizarre exercise in compressed writing, and had little to do with actually learning anything about classical music (except how to develop a loathing for it).
We had a Latin teacher whose passion in life was cricket. He often didn’t get round to referring to Latin at all. Instead, he drew diagrams on the board to do with cricket and made us learn things about field positions or whatever (I wasn’t into sport in general or cricket in particular, so I am hazy on the details).
At the age of 17 we had a ‘General Studies’ teacher who exhibited a hearty contempt for evolution (despite the fact that we were taught evolution in biology class) and devoted all of his classes to expounding on creationism, and expected us to learn about it. When we raised some obvious questions, such as the slight conflict with what we were learning in biology, he dismissed these objections with an airy wave of his hand and insisted that we should learn ‘the truth’.
I could go on forever.
I had a few bizarre experiences in high school.
During my freshman year, I had an elderly gentleman as a teacher in World History for about a week. He then disappeared, and we discovered through the local papers that it was due to having been arrested for soliciting prostitutes. We then got a ditzy but well-meaning teacher who knew approximately negative three about World History. I remember that she showed us the movie version of Clan of the Cave Bear during our unit on prehistory, but that she didn’t realize there was sex in it, and became too panicked to operate the VCR, so she just ended up frantically waving in front of the screen.
My sophomore year was even better. I had one teacher who basically looked like the Unabomber when he was cleaned up for his court case. He had salt and pepper hair in a pony tail, a beard, and big bulby eyes that he could jut outward weirdly when he stared. He was something of an aging hipster and would drink coffee out of his thermos and lecture the kids about how terrible our generation was and how the world was going to hell. The class was American literature, and I do remember reading a few things, but a lot of classes were taken up by his ranting. He’d also mention, on a frequent (near daily) basis, exactly how many years he had until retirement.
I found him completely awesome and became a teacher’s pet. I’d hang around with him before school with a friend of mine. He made up a song about my name based on something from the cartoon Ren and Stimpy, and would sing it every time he saw me. I tend to think a lot of the ranting was put on because he was irritated by dealing with petulant, entitled little rich kids all day. Ranting is kind of a harsh word, as it was basically a freeform lecture having little to nothing to do with the topic at hand and moving frequently into backhanded criticisms of other teachers, the school administration (very frequently), other teachers, politicians, public figures, or pretty much anyone, really. He was never outwardly cruel, as most of the rants about specific classroom members went over the heads of most of the class. He hated most of the literature we studied, but he loved Walden and deeply admired, and discussed at length, about Thoreau and Emerson and their ideas. I know he fantasized about going and living in the woods someday. He also would show The Last of the Mohicans every year – I think so we could avoid reading the stupid thing but technically meeting the curriculum requirements - and ever after, even after we moved onto other topics, he’d make daily references to “Daniel Day-Lewis, the man no woman can resist” somewhere in his lecture. Every day, for months and months.
He also had something of a rivalry with another teacher I also had, who taught sophomore history. His name had a “chess” sound in it, so my English teacher started calling him “The Big Cheese” and adding him to his frequent rants. After awhile, it became, “The Big Cheese. [dramatic pause] Le Grand Fromage. [dramatic pause]” then he would continue his rant/story/stream of consciousness “lecture”. The other teacher was actually pretty cool, but had a lot of energy and was generally cheery and used to jump up and down and on his desk during class, and absolutely loved to spend time with students, and I’m sure his youthful enthusiasm bugged out my literature teacher something awful.
I moved away after that but he used to write letters back and forth with me (I started them). He was cool but so very weird. He also recommended some interesting 60s hippie music to my friend that she shared with me, and I’ve enjoyed ever since.
He sounds schizophrenic, little bit 
.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
That sounds a lot like one of the French teachers at my high school. I never had him because I was in French Immersion and he taught the non-immersion French classes, but every girl in the school was well aware of his reputation. He got placed on “indefinite sick leave” when I was in grade 12 after he chaperoned a school dance. He showed up drunk and proceeded to hit on one of my classmates. That was the last any of us saw of him.
My grade 9 French Literature teacher (actually, I think I had her for classes in grades 8 and 10 as well, but I’m not 100% certain) could provide for a whole thread on her own. Off the top of my head, there’s the time a video she was showing the class suddenly turned into hardcore porn, while she just stood there watching; the time she completely lost it and started ranting about how ungrateful we all were after we asked her to please turn down the volume on the supposedly soothing music she had on during a test; and the time she again, nearly lost it, because she couldn’t get the tape to go into the VCR (she was trying to insert it upside-down and backwards). I know there’s more, but that’s all I can think of just now. Actually, pretty well all of the teachers at my high school were freaks, so I’m sure I’ll be back with more stories once I think of them.
This thread has kind of turned into a “favorite teachers” thread, in addition to the original intention, which is fine by me. Anyway, mine would have to be Mr. Carroll. He was this guy who looked like Hunter S. Thompson and always taught class wearing a white T-shirt and jeans (teachers were supposed to wear at least a collared polo shirt.) He also openly chewed tobacco, a brash gesture in a tobacco-free school. He blasted The Ramones, The Clash and Elvis Costello on a boom box every day before class. He was a U.S. Army tank commander during the first Gulf War, and then had gone on to become an independent defense contractor in Saudi Arabia, helping the Saudis repair tanks. He made a lot of money doing this and was independently wealthy, which was not immediately apparent but which you could discern after having a lot of classes with him (he sometimes mentioned his Porsche 911s and drove a giant, fully-loaded red Chevy 3500 dually.) He was a basically a libertarian, though politically conservative, and offered his outspoken views on anti-smoking laws and what he viewed as government intervention in peoples’ lives. His political conservatism was very obvious in everything he said, but he was very respectful and classy to those students who chose to debate him. The funny thing was, he had this sort of lisp, where he’d be like, “the indianth encountered the thettlerth,” and he also had the habit of tacking on “he did” or “they were” or whatnot after a sentence.
As in: “The English thettlerth faced very thevere difficulty in the early dayth of thettlement, they did.”
He is an incredibly awesome guy. I ran into him at the park last year walking his dog, and chatted with him. Very personable, friendly, a real character.
I don’t know what his deal was. He was pretty bitter about teaching, but that didn’t really explain all of it.
I had forgotten one other thing. When we were doing the Crucible, he had us read everything aloud in class because it’s a play. However, he would usually take the role of Tituba. He would nearly yell everything she said in this sort of terrible Miss Cleo accent (though this was pre-Miss Cleo). It was really odd. This wasn’t that long ago either - about 1994.
Fascinating thread!!
From ages 8-10 I attended an English speaking school in Stockholm. It was downtown and during recess we played in the park/churchyard across the street. There was no playground equipment, just the church steps, pea gravel on the pathways, park benches, and a whole bunch of 100-200 year old gravestones to entertain the kids.
By ages 14-18 we had moved to England. In 4th and 5th form (9th & 10th grades) I had a home room teacher who was in her early 20s, not much older than the students in the class. In May of each year she arranged a class trip to a Youth Hostel in a wooded area not too far away. My home room class had about 10 boys and 20 girls and almost everyone went on the 3-day (Bank holiday) weekend trip. The first night she arranged with the girls that for any who were willing, the boys would give them good-night kisses. As a good teacher, she checked with the boys and found out that two of us had never French kissed. I was one of the two. She took both of us off, in turn, into a darkened corner and taught us the finer points of the process before we were all escorted into the girls sleeping area to provide the 10 willing ones with the goodnight kisses. The kisses were repeated (without the initial lesson) the next night and the next year as well. Very surreal and even 30+ years later it brings a smile to my face.
For Lower and Upper 6th Form (17-18 years old; 11th & 12th grades) I was in a different school. I was in A-Level biology and remember how bizarre it was when it came time for the teacher to teach us about human reproduction. His daughter, a mousy shy girl, was in the class and it lead to much embarrassment on his part. The subject matter was presented in a very stumbling and almost incomprehensible fashion.
The physics teacher in the school was recognized by all the students as being a pervert. He was often noticed ogling the girls breasts and trying to look up their skirts. The surprising thing is that a few years after I left he was fired for “fiddling” with one of the boys. (It was a boarding school with about 1/3 of the students living in the area and not boarding.)
Then there was the boy’s gym teacher who was having the affair with one of the girls. All the boys knew she was off-limits as she was “Mr. C’s girl.” The girl’s gym teacher paid a bit too much attention to the girls when they showered, a story related by my sister who is 3 years younger than me. What is it with gym teachers?
My 7th grade science teacher told us the first day of the year that if every single one of us turned in every single homework assignment on time for the entire year, he would lie down on a bed of nails and have the shop teacher smash a concrete block on his chest with a sledgehammer. He meant it, too - the bed of nails was lying in the corner of the classroom.
We didn’t make the cut.