Ooo! ooo! I thought of another one. My first year of college. I was taking the college algebra because I hate math and didn’t care. So we’re listening to this teacher lecture us and everyone is being quiet and good and always has been. Then a girl in the back yawns. And the guy looses it. “If you’re going to fucking yawn and not pay attention you can all just fucking leave! It’s so fucking unprofessional! You’re adults now! Grow the fuck up!” (paraphrased from my memory) Then he storms out of the room, throwing his chalk on the floor.
Everyone sat there for a minute kind of stunned, then I started laughing and got my stuff and left. Hey, he said we could leave. Stand there and scream at us like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum about professionalism? Ha!
I heard later that he came back after ten minutes and apologized and continued the class–I can’t believe anyone was still there.
My physics teacher was a real nut. He would constantly tell us these weird stories from his friends including one that involved one of his friends on a hunting trip and their pissing match with an electric fence. A long involved story that took up half the class.
He’d come in Monday morning and tell us how ripped he got on Saturday night.
He also was forever pining after his fiance who had died a few years before. He wrote a song for her that he showed us (and I heard he performed the song for the AP class). There was also a rumor she was a former student of his who dropped out of high school and ran away from home to be with him, but we could never confirm it.
But this pining never stopped him from flirting with any other girl in the vacinity. He would often stop mid-lecture and ask the hottest girl in class (in a leering kind of voice) “So what do you think of that Tina?” Tina was always dumbfounded and a little creeped out.
He also had a thing for my English teacher, who was 24, fresh out of college and way out of his league. He convinced her to help chaperone the physics field trip to the amusement park and when she agreed he canceled the final project we had to do because he wanted to spend the day riding roller coasters with her instead of helping us with our lab reports.
We tried to warn her about his little crush before hand, but her response was almost more weird: “My very angry, very Puerto Rican, 6 foot 6 boyfriend likes to play with knives. I’ll be OK.”
I had a French teacher completely blow up in anger when one of my sister’s classmates came to the door asking to speak to me. Just went crazy, telling her she shouldn’t just knock on the door and ask to speak to a student, she should go to the office and have the office call him, and then HE got to decide if I could find out what the message was, etc. She was stunned, but managed to blurt out
“Mnem, your sister broke her arm at lunch, she wants you to come see her in the nurse’s office.”
I just got up and walked out, not even bothering to clear it with the prof. He did apologize to me later, but still, WTF? My sister was only 12 or 13 at the time, and naturally quite scared and wanted her big sister with her while we waited for our mom to come and bring us to the hospital.
Related to that story;
My sister had been participating in a noon-hour obstacle course for the Winter Carnival that was happening that week… not a particularly dangerous course, but she went over the pommel horse awkwardly and her bone must have snapped… she didn’t even notice it until she had to touch the wall to turn around for the next part of the course, and then it hurt her. The idiot music teacher who had been supervising the obstacle course allowed the event to continue for the other students, but took out the requirement of having to touch the wall. Yeah, 'cause that’s what broke her arm!
And related to that…
I think it was another year for Winter Carnival when the organizers thought that each team (there were 4, made up of kids from every grade) should choose the smallest person on their team, were given two rolls of Duct Tape and had to tape the kid to the wall. The kid that fell off last, won points for their team. Fun and funny, the first kid fell pretty quickly (they had put mats on the floor under them to catch them safely) until the next two kids started slipping down… the tape held, but they were sliding, and they became strangled by the tape! So they rescued the two strangled kids, and tore the last kid off the wall… he was on my team, and won the points for us, but they decided that there would be no repeat of that event next year!
I remember the “duck and cover” exercises, but I also remember us having to go single file into the hall, open our lockers and stand facing our locker, between the open doors. This was, somehow, supposed to protect us in case a nuclear warhead landed on the school. This didn’t make sense to even the dumbest kid in the class.
I’ve been able to find humor in almost everyone’s stories (I even laughed at the naked Frank story), but this is just sad. The closest thing that I’ve ever experienced was when I was in the 4th grade and the teacher pulled all the black kids out of the class and yelled at us for being bad and embarrassing her in front of all the white folks. But at least she was black herself, and I think she did it out of love rather than hatred.
Teachers who think that their class is so important and that interrupting it are a pet peeve of mine. That brings me to another story:
When I was in middle school, I had orchestra class. I got there a little earlier than everyone else for some reason, and I opened the door to go inside. It turns out that my teacher was still in there with the high school class. She came out and asked me if I’d warn everyone else who got there that she wanated a little extra time with the class, and not to come in till she was done.
So other kids started showing up. I said that we weren’t supposed to go in, and then one of the students who either didn’t hear me or didn’t realize what was going on, pushed open the door, curious. Our teacher came out and she was livid. Then before class started, she lectured me in front of everyone because God forbid her special high school class miss out on valuable minutes of wisdom. Then she told me that if it ever happened again, that I was to stand in front of the door no matter what and not let anyone in.
It upset me at the time, but now it just makes me sad for her. She was really invested in teaching, and it’s good to have a passion, but it seems pathetic now that she cared this much about a middle school orchestra class, where most of the students aren’t even going to go on to be even remotely good or professional.
In jr. high the lockers and the showers were separated by a five-foot wall. Coach Larson would sit on the wall, reclining against the perpendicular structural wall, one knee pulled up and with his hands on his knee, watching the boys take their showers after PE. ‘Just making sure they were really taking showers.’ :dubious:
I’ve related this story, but it shudder somehow never gets old:
A chemistry teacher attempted to force me to taste dilute hydrochloric acid. I, caught up in some silly notion of being able to control what goes into my body, refused. He got the entire class to pound on desks and chant DRINK IT! DRINK IT! I still refused, and later told the headmaster. By and by the chem teacher took me aside and told me loudly that if I have a problem with him, I should tell him rather than go over his head. I restrained myself from speculating on how sympathetic someone who had just performed the above-mentioned actions would have been to a complaint about them.
My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Hopkins, decided to be a “clean-your-plate” Nazi and started patrolling the lunch room to see if we’d finished our food. This was not a problem for me, as my mother was the same way, so I was used to choking down my entire meal, whether or not the quantities were appropriate or I liked the taste.
My friend Karen, however, was not as experienced (or meek). One day we were served a paper cup full of tomato juice. Karen hated tomato juice and refused to drink it. After lunch period, the teacher brought it back to class and put it on Karen’s desk, where it sat all afternoon. When Karen hadn’t drunk the juice by the end of the day, the teacher made her stay after school until she drank it, without informing anyone as to why Karen wasn’t coming home at the normal time.
Karen continued to refuse … by this time the juice was warm, had chalk dust in it, and was thoroughly unappetizing. Finally, at about 5 pm, her frantic parents, who wondered where the hell their daughter was and why she had not come home at the normal time, located her in the classroom with the teacher standing over her. I guess they had some harsh words for the teacher.
What I find amazing about that story is that there was no aftermath. The teacher was not disciplined (that I know of; certainly she continued to teach at the school for at least another year),and Karen did not switch classes to another teacher. Hmm. Well, that was 1968 or so. Things were different then.
I have more stories but I want to spend my time reading the rest of the thread … maybe later.
I worked on the school paper in high school and one day we came back from lunch and the teacher had turned out the lights except for one desk lamp on the floor in front of him, shining up on his face. He was dressed in an army uniform and announced we were going to war. He was trying to drum up some enthusiasm for the paper staff to get fired up about journalism, but it came off as really sad.
Later, I found out he was writing some creepy stalkerish letters to one of his former students when she was in college.
We had a science teacher in 7th grade who was a total loser, and the kids were old enough to know it, so we had zero respect for him.
Instead of teaching, he would show movie after movie, and then tell us tall tales and insist they were true. The one I especially remember is how his toes were bitten off by a shark while he was scuba diving. Uh-huh. And no, he would not take his shoes and socks off to show us.
At the end of the year, we had to do a report that counted a lot for our grade. I did a pretty good job on mine, and stashed it in my locker before the period where I had to take it to class.
To my utter horror, it was missing when the time came to hand it in! Pretty clearly, someone stole it.
I had no faith that anyone would believe me if I said “no, I really DID do the report” so I kept my mouth shut and expected to get a poor grade.
Imagine my surprise when grades were distributed and I got an “A”!! Immediately I figured out what happened: the slacker was too lazy to even glance at our reports, and had simply graded us on his impression of how smart we were.
I’ve always wondered what the kid who stole my report got as a grade.
When I was in second grade, my teacher had us dissect animals. We dissected octopus, squid, and live snails. (I somehow got out of doing that; I was completely horrified.) Is that crazy, or what? Did anyone else do dissection at age seven? I didn’t dissect anything else until eleventh grade, when I took marine biology. (My regular biology teacher, in tenth grade, was more interested in ecosystems than specific animals, and his idea of dissection was cutting open logs he’d brought from the forest and reporting on what we found.)
My Spanish teacher in high school had been an FBI field officer, and we used to beg him to tell us FBI stories. They were often fairly gruesome. We loved it, but it retrospect, it was kind of weird. In Spanish 5, though, he’d try and make it educational by telling them in Spanish.
I went to a private religious school, so things were kind of weird all the time.
Once, in fourth grade, we were at lunch and the class’ “weird kid” was seated next to the teacher. She insisted that he clean his plate, although he kept telling her he was allergic to green beans. He was forced to eat them anyway, and promptly threw up in his plate. The teacher got all pissed off, and forced him to eat them again as he cried. I wonder if his mother ever got wind of that.
I’ve told this one before, but during our Drama class in a public high school, two guys wearing camouflage and carrying guns suddenly busted in and told us all to get down on the floor. After they had scared us for a couple of minutes, our teacher introduced them as former students of hers and explained that they had given us an example of improv. Even back in 1984, I don’t know how she got away with that one.
In elementary school, there was a substitute teacher whose name I can’t remember who used to call us dumb bunnies. It was said in a rather matter-of-fact way whenever any of us did anything less than perfect.
And one day she tied the class misfit girl to her desk with a jump rope. Can’t remember why she did that, either. It was a bizarre situation.
The music teacher tried to make each kid sing a solo greeting line at the start of each class. The idea of singing alone in front of our classmates was horrifying, and everyone flipped. Someone intervened on our behalf, and the plan was scrapped.
In primary school, each classroom had its own bathroom with one toilet. I used it, then another kid, then another went in to use it, found it clogged with paper towels and told the teacher. The teacher made me, and the other boy unclog it with our hands. My parents didn’t like that at all, but I don’t know if anything became of it.
6th grade. Male teacher. The song “Feelings” by Albert Morris had just come out. (1975). Something in that song must have touched him. He brought his phonograph and his 45 and played that song over 20-30 times per day for at least a month.
He also had us do an experiment with bic and flicker lighters. We were partnered to see which lighter had the most lights. Flick after Flick while a partner counted. I remember that Bic did better and when the teacher sent the results to the company, they sent all the kids…(no not lighters)…one of those four color pens that had blue, red, black and green.
Having 11 year olds playing with lighters didn’t seem so strange at the time.
I distinctly remember dissecting a cow’s eye when I was in the third grade. They divided us into groups and had adults helping out, but I just remember the eye was humongous and round and rolled around in the little tin.
I didn’t have the guy, but there was a chemistry professor at college who insisted that he always had the right answer to a mathematical calculation because he had a calculator that went out to 10 decimal places, and the students were restricted to slide rules.
What was particularly galling was the SOB did not understand the rules of significant digits, so his calculator was spewing bullshit along with what he was teaching.
I was in elementary school when Kennedy was shot. The teachers made all of us go outside, and line up by height. It was kinda weird, listening to the principle telling eneryone that the POTUS was dead, while the teachers stood of by themselves, sobbing.
When I was in junior high, we played Killer Ball inside the gym on rainy days. There were two teams, the Seniors against everybody else. We used half-inflated volley balls for ammo. Broken/bloody noses were a common occurance.
We also had an Earth/Space Science teacher then, named Frank. His teaching methods consisted solely of showing first grade movies to us daily:
“How Tommy found his way home.”
“Billy gets a new bike.”
“Eat your Vegetables.”
The highlight of the class was when one of the stoners managed to light his leg on fire.
