Not my teacher, but when I was teaching middle and high school English, the science teacher kept showing her classes film strips of the Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” because she thought the poem was so beautiful. This was a religious school with a strict dress code (women wore high necklines and long sleeves, for exampple); missing the point entirely, she wore backless dresses. Shortly after her contract wasn’t renewed, she and her husband were busted for growi ng marijuana in their front yard. Overheard secular staff room conversation: “Everybody knows you grow your pot in the *back *yard!”
There’s a phrase that sounds interesting out of context…
Just doing my job. 
Who knows, maybe Slim Goodbody was a teacher.
Reading these made me remember one of my creepy school experiences:
In my 5th grade social studies class, my teacher kept ONLY these Chick Tract-type “comic books” in the reading rack (maybe they WERE Chick Tracts!). So of course when we had down time, we would leaf through them out of boredom. And then I got it in my head that I was going to read the whole Bible. I couldn’t get through the “begats” in Exodus (?) so I gave up. I remember that he let me read the Bible in his class.
We also had Bible study class (this was not a catholic school, but it was in the 1970s, so I guess that kind of stuff wasn’t unheard of then) complete with verse memorization and songs and preaching & stuff.
To me, ALL of that was creepy!
This thread is hysterical. Goes to show that truth is indeed at least as strange as fiction.
Here’s one that I didn’t realize was weird until I thought about it while reading this thread: My eighth-grade science teacher, who by all accounts and memories was one of the better teachers of my middle school days, taught a whole unit in the spring on UFOs and alien abductions. We spent a particularly long time learning about Betty and Barney Hill, who he claimed to have met. It didn’t seem at all strange at the time, but retrospectively spending a substantial amount of a public school science curriculum on alien abductions is kind of odd.
For some reason this is my favorite story. It’s kind of strange and sweet too.
The thought process behind it is just so mysterious.
I don’t have any stories that even compare really but here goes.
In the 5th grade, the highly respected English teacher at my school threw a piece of chalk at my best friend James in the middle of class. James was a class clown but really wasn’t doing anything at the time when the teacher whipped around and threw the chalk. It hit James right below the eye. I alos remember for some reason another teacher was in the room and whisked James away while the rest of us were stunned silent.
In the 2nd grade, Mr. Hunter the music teacher would come once a week for the afternoon to do a music class. Our regular teacher would leave the classroom during this time so it was just him and us. One day he announced his sister had passed away. Every music class after that was about 5 minutes of music and then hours of stories about his life. Stories about the war, trips to Mexico (one story detailed finding a boy’s body in the street with rat bites taken out of his flesh), old lovers (nothing too explicit)… this was 2nd grade! I remember at the time thinking that this was sad but also kind of funny.
It took the better part of the year for any of the school staff to get wind of this. Eventually our teacher had to stay in the class room and would interrupt with questions to help redirect him if he strayed too far off music.
Well, I can’t quite compare to this stories but…
My AP American History teacher assigned us the task of visiting a local cemetery (on our own, after school hours). We we to look for the oldest headstone we could find, take a rubbing of it, and then write a story about what we thought that person’s life was like.
That reminds me of one of my 8th-grade teachers. He had a reputation for having deadly aim with a blackboard eraser, and he hated having students talk to each other in class. If you turned around to say something to a student behind or beside you, you’d get an eraser in the back of the head. Big poof of chalk dust. White blotch in the hair. Definitely a wake-up call. He probably did it a half-dozen times at the beginning of the semester (just to prove he was serious), and then maybe once every couple of weeks after that.
He also punished students by having you “sit” with knees at a 90-degree angle and your back against the wall, but no chair (it’s actually an old ski exercise). Very tough to do for long periods of time.
My strongest memory of him, though, was when the school bully went after me between classes one day. The bully had just punched me and knocked my head into a wall. The teacher came flying out of his classroom and body-slammed the bully all the way across the hall and into a bank of lockers–HARD. The teacher grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and frog-marched him to the office. A teacher would probably lose his job for that today–if he didn’t get sued and charged with assault. I found him after school and thanked him.
That’s actually a pretty cool assignment.
Great thread.
I got sent to the principal once for looking at a substitute teacher “funny.” That’s as close as I can get, and considering I was such a goody two-shoes, it was shocking at the time.
I had an English teacher in Junior High who was known for being grouchy and reclusive and unpredictably violent. Our classes would mostly consist of him telling us stories about crazy students he’d had in classes previous. I admit he was a good storyteller–never forget the yarn about his student who could solve a rubik’s cube in seconds that busted out a plate glass window one day.
And every once in a while he would smash his ruler into the side of the garbage can and scream ‘‘WAKE UP!’’ for no obvious reason. He had to have the garbage cans regularly replaced, because he would destroy them. Nobody on staff ever seemed to care that he regularly damaged school property. He would freak out if he couldn’t find his ruler, because it meant he couldn’t smash things.
Despite his weirdness and gruff exterior, he was basically a well-meaning guy. People whispered all the time that he’d never been the same since his teenage son committed suicide, but I really had no idea whether it was true or not.
When I had him as a Driver’s Ed instructor in high school, I was scared shitless. There was one day we watched the obligatory film on drunk driving and he spent the whole time talking about how horrible it is to have to identify your own kid’s body. He gave us all his personal phone number and said we were welcome to call him at 3am any time if we were too drunk to drive and scared to tell our parents. He said we could not possibly comprehend the misery of losing a child. He started crying.
It was pretty awful.
I also had a history teacher in Junior High who dedicated her life to making things as difficult as possible. She was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and would often espouse really strange ideas as if they were completely true. For example, the reason that Abraham Lincoln had a dream fortelling his death is because his wife was involved in the occult. This stuff would actually show up on our tests.
But the thing I’ll never forget is her talking about the rise and fall of national powers throughout history. She made us memorize the phrase ‘‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’’ We had to write a whole essay on why it was true. We had to memorize this notion, this idea, as if it were some kind of concrete verifiable fact, as if it were something like ‘‘The U.S. has 50 States and 13 original colonies.’’
And when we had to write that essay, I explained why it was a subjective statement, and she marked me down. No, she said, it’s not subjective, it’s absolutely true.
I still get pissed off when I hear that phrase.
When I was about 12 or 13 we had a CDT (Craft, Design & Technology, i.e. woodwork and metalwork) teacher called Mr Goodwin. His “safety lesson” at the start of the year was legendary. Among the highlights I remember:
At the start of the lesson, he got the biggest and burliest kid kind in our year to stand and hold a big heavy wood plane out in front of him at arm’s length, and keep it there. Each time his arms would start to wobble under the strain he would yell “Get those arms up!”, and whack the desk beside him with a big wooden ruler for effect. Eventually this big strapping lad was reduced to tears, at which point Mr Goodwin shouted: “Why didn’t you put it down, you stupid boy?” :dubious:
Mr Goodwin led another boy by his school tie over to the big bench drill, and wrapped his tie, which was still round his neck, around the chuck of the drill. He then asked one of the girls to push the big green START button. Obviously she refused, so he yelled at her again and again: “PUSH IT!!!” So at length she reaches for the button and at the last second he shouts “STOP! What on earth are you doing?” :dubious:
The “moral” was supposedly that you should “think for yourself” and “use common sense”. Right, so teaching people to disregard authority figures in a dangerous environment is wise. I think he just got a kick out of abusing kids.
One of my college professors had quite a few quirks.
In 1914, the new priest at the Jesuit’s Tortosa parish started some personal project analyzing the waters of the nearby river delta. Hearing of his skill with test tubes, local chemists and pharmacists contacted him about help with laboratory procedures. Word of mouth moved fast… seeing the enormous need for lab training, in a country where at the time a degree in Chemistry or Pharmacy required and involved zero lab time, the priest talked to his order. 1915-1916 was the first year that the school where I later studied offered its “laboratory courses for those with theoretical knowledge of chemistry and other sciences.”
I explain this to indicate that this was and is a school very focused on industry and on practical teaching.
This professor was the only one who had never worked in an industrial company, never had a collaboration contract with an industrial company. He prided himself in the complete uselesness of his research and of any research that he directed; he barked at us that we were total idiots because nobody wanted to research under him (gee, can’t figure why).
The one thing that still has me stumped to this day is his hearing aid, though. He’d switch it off when he entered the class, so if you asked him a question he would not answer the question you’d asked, but the question that had been most commonly asked at that point in his curriculum during the years before he’d started losing his hearing. Since other courses had changed a lot in those years, we learned quite fast that asking “should I switch the lights on, sir?” was likely to receive a lengthy explanation on the sexual mores of Avogadro’s cook and how it affects the third principle of thermodynamics as proven by Einstein’s hairdresser, which is how Mme Curie got her Oscar. Yes, not only was the answer irrelevant, but often it was wrong.
We’re quite sure that there was champagne and cake in the teachers’ lounge when he turned 65 - not because he was well-loved of his colleagues (most of them also his ex-students) but because they were SOOOO glad that they could force him to retire.
Of course, he got angry at the forceful retirement and took it out on the students’ grades, but that is a rant for another forum.
That poor man. I wonder if anyone ever took him up on his offer.
Just thought of another one.
I was always stronger in math than physics, so when I started college I was taking beginning physics at the same time as I was taking 2nd-year calculus.
The physics prof had a number of quirks. One of them was that each test had two or three sheets of blank paper stapled to the back. That was your only scratch paper, and you had to turn it in with the test.
On one test, he asked for the volume of a sphere. I didn’t remember the formula, so I derived it (that’s what calculus is for, after all). I was quite proud of myself for figuring it out in the allotted time. When I got the test back, that question was marked wrong. I checked my answer, and it was right. I approached the prof after class and asked him. He flipped back to my scratch paper and found where I had derived the formula. “You didn’t memorize the formula for the volume of a sphere,” he told me.
I argued that it’s far more important to understand how to derive these formulas than it is to memorize them all, but he insisted that you had to memorize them and the grade stood as marked.
Twit.
In a perverse way, I sort of hope so. Obviously he holds a lot of self-inflicted guilt over his son’s death. Maybe saving other kids’ lives (even theoretically) would help him to “pay his penance” and heal.
[/hijack]
Oh! This reminds me of my Algebra II teacher! Mr. S. was very grumpy. He would always tell us that if we didn’t want to be there, we could just get out already, he didn’t care. I particularly remember him growling through gritted teeth one day, “Every day I tell you to go away. And every day, you…come…BACK!” I thought he was hilarious, he was so entertaining. I sat in the front row, next to a guy who was something of a buddy of mine. And if I talked with him (or sometimes just at random), Mr. S. would slam his ruler onto my desk and yell my last name (he always called me by my last name). And then I would laugh.
Ah, those were the days.
I also had an English teacher who cultivated a vague resemblance to Lincoln and had a poster detailing the “strange similarities” between Lincoln and JFK’s assassinations. And there was the chemistry teacher who was creepily friendly to the girls. Every so often he would come up and start giving me a shoulder rub. His girl TAs warned each other not to accept rides in his red convertible. And I realized a few years afterwards that I might not actually have earned the A I got in that class.
In some ways, yes, but being assigned a trip to a cemetery definitely falls under the “creepy” category.
Quite right too. Independent thought is not on the syllabus and will be penalised.
To me, it seems a bit basic for an AP US History class. Make an etching and then write a story about how you think the person lived? Just seems very elementary school.
I had a crotchety math teacher in highschool who yelled at me for smiling. I had just heard something funny in the hall. When I walked in the class room and sat down in my assigned seat right in front of his desk, I was still smiling. He said, “You there! It’s NOT FUNNY! Go to the back of the room and sleep or whatever it is you do!”
I don’t know what he was in such a dither about, but it was par for the course.
The next year I had the same math teacher. On the first day of class he puts us in alphabetical order and sees me in the same seat, front and center. Says he, “Oh no - not gain. You’re not sitting there! Go to the back of the next row!” And to the back I went.
Honest - I was a good student, never gave him any grief. I don’t know what his problem was with me. (but I didn’t like sitting in front anyway so I was glad)