ok I teach and this thread is both scaring me and cracking me up with ideas.
funny stuff.
my weird creepy moment from childhood was little league baseball. we had this coach who was more than a little crazy. after our last game he gave us all a bottle of BEER, I think I was 10 at the time.
Is there a name for this concept? It seems rather obvious to me that God would have wanted a large population no matter what.
The Bible also clearly teaches that sex is good and should be fantastic between husband and wife.
Why would God not wanted them to have sex if they didn’t sin?
The Bad:
9th grade English. A significant part of our grade was spelling, of all things. We had these alphebetized lists of words, and then for the quizzes, we would have to write sentences using three of them at a time. “Alleviate the adolescent armadillos”.
11th grade theology (Catholic school). The teacher was the most absolute control freak I’ve ever heard of. We had to take notes printed, in ink, with left and right margins of precisely 2 inches, top margins of 2 and a half inches, and bottom margins 4 inches. If we made a mistake, we were to draw a single horizontal line through the erroneous word to strike it out. Our notebooks were, of course, collected so he could grade us on this. My best friend had dysgraphia, and so couldn’t write neatly, so he typed his notes up at home. The teacher insisted that my friend’s father must have done it, since it wasn’t his handwriting.
The same teacher once gave a student a detention for walking too slowly in the hallway, and another student for holding a pen in class. One of the only two detentions I got at that school was from him, for disrespect, since I responded to something he said with “Yes, sir.”. It quickly got to the point that the Dean of Men (in charge of discipline) would immediately dismiss any student from detention, if it was from that teacher.
10th-11th grade history. The teacher (named Ms. Heil, appropriate, as I’ll explain in a moment) is what I believe is called in the vernacular a “butterface”. She routinely came to work wearing a miniskirt shorter than her underwear. She also had a habit of leaning over the front of a student’s desk to ask a question, and God help you if you were looking anywhere but at the ceiling when she did so. This was an all-male school, incidentally.
The same teacher was rather a bit of a Nazi sympathiser. At one point, when she was upset at one of the students (of Italian descent), she exclaimed at him that had Hitler won, his next step would have been to exterminate the Italians.
Eventually, the school managed to get rid of her by officially instituting a dress code for the female teachers (none of the others had needed one), and then firing her when she persisted in ignoring it.
The Good:
9th grade Latin: We were learning the numbers. Now, in Latin, every adjective has a masculine, feminine, and neuter form, and each of those comes in 5-7 different cases, depending on the role it plays in the sentence. So, he had us recite all 18 forms for each number: Nominative masculine, nominative feminine, nominative neuter, genitive masculine, genitive feminine, genitive neuter, and so on. He gets to 4, and says “And you’ll love four: Quattor, quattor, quattor, quattor…”, all 18 forms being the same. “And if you loved four, you’ll love five:”, again, all the same form. “And if you loved five, you’ll love six!” So we all chanted “Sex sex sex Sex sex sex Sex sex sex Sex sex sex Sex sex sex Sex sex sex”.
10th-12th grade Latin. We had a priest, who longed for the good old days when religious rituals involved massive drunken orgies. It’s thanks to him that I know the three-verse limerick about the three girls from Birmingham, and the bishop confirming them (yes, it’s every bit as dirty as you’d expect).
He also refused to give 100% for any assignment. If you handed in a perfect paper, he’d find a period which was a tenth of a millimeter out of place or something, and give you a 99.999%. With one exception: He once gave one of his students a 100% on the midterm project (which the student had blown off), for the sole reason that he knew that even with that 100, that student still wouldn’t pass the course.
But those were his Latin classes. He liked his Latin students. When he taught theology, though, he usually got the dumb jock sections, for which he had great contempt. I’m told that when he gave them tests, he passed the class time by drinking expensive scotch and smoking cigars.
12th grade physics. Another priest. Whenever anyone in class made a mistake, he would exclaim “Heresy!”. It happened enough with enough students that it wasn’t really intimidating, just a peculiar quirk. He’s now the abbot of the monastery which runs my high school.
9th grade history. The room was like a museum, with all sorts of artifacts from all sorts of time periods strewn about, all of them genuine. And whenever he got to a relevant subject, he would pass around the appropriate artifacts. At one point in that class, there were two swords, six daggers, a heavy flail, an elephant-hide shield, and a Mongol helmet circulating through a room full of 14-year-old boys.
The same teacher had a grading scale based on the A = 4, B = 3, etc. scale. Except he extended it: An A+ was 4.5, an H was 5, an H+ was 6, and a Hum-Dinger was 7 or more. I once managed to earn an 11-point Hum-Dinger on a homework assignment.
So when they talk about God telling Eve that she would bring forth children in sorrow, what changed? She would have had kids even if they hadn’t eaten of the tree, but it’s only painful/sorrowful now that they “sinned”?
Critical1 wrote:
I’m a teaching student (They let me teach for real next year! CHILDREN BEWARE!) And I’m the same. So much of this is soooo sad. Some of it is giving me ideas 
A lot of it makes me worried that I might suddenly crack once I’m out there. If I do, I hope I do so as entertainingly as some of these…
Lillith Fair wrote:
Was this an early-ish grade? I’m doing K-6 training/teaching atm, and this is actually a pretty popular task for younger kids. A few reasons (and almost every lesson these days will have aboput twenty different reasons. This is just a sample):
- Fine motor control. Young kids need practise in this stuff. We tend to assume they’ll just pick it up as they go. Which is true. We picked it up as we went because our teachers gave us this kind of stuff to do when we were young - we just didn’t notice at the time. Fine motor control underpins so much - art, handwriting, some sport, anything that involves tools from cooking to eating to putting an engine together, all the way up to just not being a clumsy kid covered in bruises, etc.
So yes, practise cutting out tiny letters. Because it’s practise in moving in small, controlled ways and it’s a skill that doesn’t come naturally to many, many kids.
- Spelling / Letter recognition / Practice reading different fonts etc.
And this is important:
3. Little kids frickin’ love it! Ransom notes, wanted posters, anything they’ve seen in the movies. It’s fun to make and gives kids practice in whatever english skill the teacher is after (describing things, sentence structure - whatever) that isn’t just “bring out your books and write X …”. You’ve never seen kids have so much fun in an english lesson.
I wish I had a story to relate but my teachers were generally great. Or at least incompetant in boring ways.
The best I can think of is an eighth grade science lesson where our teacher encouraged us to use a pair of wires conveted to DC to see what objects around the classrooms we could make glow/set on fire/explode. She was pretty good about keeping too much out of our hands though. A chunk of sodium was quickly vetoed, for example. (Her reasoning was we were in a selective school, so she knew we already knew what would happen. Very true. That was why we’d suggested it 
).
And it wasn’t switched on until we were a fair distance. We lost a few graphite pencils that day.
I had an advanced English HSC class where our experienced, other wise quite competant, English teacher (who specialised in Chaucer at uni). While reading “The Miller’s Tale” he needed one of his students to explain what a censer was to him and the rest of the class (me), and didn’t know what the Pater Noster was and had a student trouble it out from the latin (me again). Obviously, we were not a religious school and none of us had been taught latin, but still :dubious: …
I do remember having a pre-email flame war with one of my little sister’s primary-school teachers where my poor little sister was the mail-carrier. The teacher insisted that dinosaurs and humans had existed together. My sister had argued with her and lost but had come home sure she was right and asked me. Over a week I sent notes. I sent timelines. I sent references to archaeological evidence (I was a know-it-all prat in high-school at the time). The teacher reffered me to that unimpeachable source, “The Flintstones”.
This was in Australia, where the whole evolution debate isn’t such a hot topic - evolution is assumed. And this was not a religious school where it might be, if not excused, at least it would be understandable.
I think that was one of the moments when I realised I needed to be a teacher… This shit needed to be fought at every turn.
This is a dangerous topic; could easily get me into “drone on forever” mode.
I wasn’t actually involved that day, though I certainly would have been, had I not been elsewhere.
A number of boys were sent to the principal’s office en masse, which was not unusual, as we tended to act up in groups. Of course, authority still wants a ringleader, so as to keep up the fiction that not all kids are that bad. Mr. Austin had an “older black guy” speech pattern, which resulted in:
STERN look at everyone.
“Now, you is all fine young gentlemans…'ception a Chris.”
I had a pretty zany AP American History teacher my senior year of high school. He was a great story teller, and he leaned a bit to the right politically (not that that’s weird, but it’s kinda important to the story). He called my by a diminutive of my last name, as if my name was Fitzgerald and he called me Fitzy. I was the only one he did this to. Early on in the year, we took a where-are-you-on-the-political-spectrum-type quiz. I scored as far to the left as possible (which was kind of an eye-opener for me; I didn’t realize I was that far off the norm), way farther left than any of my classmates. From that point on, whenever I made a comment in class, he would put a Hammer and Sickle flag (that a former student had gotten for him before the fall of the USSR, that he kept in his desk with his “stupid stick”) on his head and dance around. Even if I was answering a factual question. We also didn’t talk about any American history before WWII, but somehow I got a 5 on the AP test, even though I quoted *Trainspotting *on one of the essays: “I don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We’re colonised by wankers.” Ah, memories.
We were given one of those quizzes in American History too. I was the only one to score exactly in the center. Mr. D (who was a great teacher) jokingly suggested I did that on purpose just to mess with him and he was sure my real political stance wasn’t in the center.
I’ve taken a few online spectrum tests since then and I always land almost exactly dead center.
An elementary school art teacher was always - several times per class - tell us that “people in a hurry flub the dub”. She loved this phrase. One day someone in my class asked her what, exactly, “flubbing the dub” meant. What’s the dub? She freaked out, kicked him out of class, and spent the next twenty minutes shouting at us not to question her, until the teacher next door came to see what was going on.
There was the math teacher who, finally cracking under the stress of my horrid geometry class, just sat down and sobbed one day in class.
My fourth-grade teacher once settled a bullying dispute by telling me that the bully was “just trying out new ideas”, those ideas being anti-semetic, white supremacist crap. Somehow admin never got involved, but damn did my parents chew her up over that.
There was also the middle school teacher (I wasn’t in her class) whose class was once interrupted by the police, who then led her away in handcuffs, and she was not seen by any of her students ever again.
Not about a teacher who taught me but one who worked at the school I worked for a while before I arrived.
The techers was encouraged to seek an alternative career after he made his 7th grade class pair off into twos and instructed the children to each try to catch their partner’s farts in a bottle.
7-8 years later, I’m working at that school and one of our students gets himselkf into some trouble wih the law. So I have to arrange a confernce as part of the restorative justice process. And who should walk into the room , to act as the State’s appointed child advocate - the old fart catcher himself.
My fourth-grade teacher was just the opposite! One morning a kid showed up with an old white t-shirt on, which he had inked up with little swastikas. I don’t think he really realized what he’d done; he probably thought it was like wearing a Darth Vader t-shirt. (Aaron, if you’re out there, you could explain…) The teacher made him turn it inside-out and spent most of the rest of the day lecturing us on the Holocaust, which none of us knew anything about. I particularly remember being told about lampshades. That was by far the most educational day I had in 4th grade, since that teacher was usually more interested in art projects than in math or anything.
That kid was one of those who is always doing something to injure himself or otherwise get into trouble. One day he stapled his own palm.
This was in 1970:
The principal of the grade school I attended, was married to a coworker of my dad. Dad, and coworker were up for the same promotion. But, dad had about 10 years seniority and was the most likely cadidate.
My homeroom teacher (who I loved), was on maternity leave. Her replacement was our first black teacher, who hated me, and made sure everyone knew it. I don’t know if she was told to do the things she did, by the principal, or if she did them on her own to get ‘brownie points.’ But, she got the other kids involved. These were 8 year olds who were happy to do what the fun, new teacher said.
My books would be snatched from my desk and thrown out the opened window. When I complained, the teacher accused me of doing it myself. I was poked with pencils, had glue poured on my head, my hair was cut, I had rocks thrown at me during recess…
My parents made several trips to the school to get it stopped, and got accused of being racists.
Finally, we moved across town. A couple of years later I was in Girl Scouts with one of my former classmates, who said that after we moved away, they were told that I left because my parents didn’t want me going to school with black kids. Nevermind the fact that I had attended the previous 2 grades with them, and the school I moved to had a higher black percentage.
I met up with more of my former classmates in Middle School, who said they were sorry for their actions towards me. They thought they had to do it because the teacher said to.
Well when I was in 7th grade my 40something teacher held me back after class, leaned me up against the chalkboard and asked me to go to bed with him. Creepy enough?
On a lighter note (for me if not for the fish) we had gone through worms and frogs. We were on to fetal sharks. We were half way through cutting them up (and I had named mine Salvador Dali) when we came back the next day to find they had not been refigerated the night before. Project over. Talk about dying in vain.
I have a story about a flipping-out teacher too.
And, like most of the stories I’ve shared, this one happened in the seventh grade. (I’m starting to wonder if there’s a reason for this).
He was my science teacher. Very nice, attractive man with long flowing hair and a beautiful French last name. But very emotional.
It was Earth Day, the first one that I can remember celebrating. As our “assignment”, we were to spend the class period decorating T-shirts with environmental themes. I don’t know why he thought this was instructional, but it was fun. (This alone could be the surreal memory, but it’s not)
As it was the late 80s, we were using fluorescent paint markers. The hour began to wane, so he told us to wrap things up and gather all the markers together. Then he began to count them. Well, one came up missing. For some reason, he immediately suspected thievery and he flipped out. He literally flipped over one of the tables in rage. One moment everyone’s happy and the next we’re shaking in our boots. But the thief and the marker never showed up. He was such a good guy who did a lot of fun things with us, but he will forever be Scary Crazy Teacher to me. Which is sad.
We had a teacher who I will call Mr. Jones for the protection of the innocent. Mr. Jones taught English. When I was in grade 8 we used to hear him take students out of his classroom to yell at them extensively and colourfully in the hallway. Our teacher would shush us and open the door a crack so we could listen.
So in grade 9, I was in Mr. Jones’s class and slightly intimidated because I hate being yelled at. I had a friend who was in that class. Her name had a common nickname, but she was trying to be more grown-up and use her full name. Reading through roll-call on the first day, Mr. Jones got to her and said “Ah, I’ll call you ‘nickname’.” She said that she would prefer if he’d use her full name, and he said just said that he’d call her whatever he wanted. So she said “Fine, Jonesy.” and proceeded to call him Jonesy instead of Mr. Jones for the rest of the term.
Now, my brother had Mr. Jones the year before I did, so when he heard I was in Mr. Jones’s class he told me a few things. Like that Mr. Jones would always look at his watch if we were misbehaving and when we noticed, tell us to the second how long we were going to be in detention after class, matching it to the time we had been acting up. My brother pointed out that Mr. Jones’s watch did not in fact have a second hand. He just liked to mess with us.
He also used to like to tell us he was going to the teacher’s lounge for a smoke (uh huh…) and that we were to sit quietly while he was gone. Then he’d go out of the building and watch us through the windows and wait until we got good and rowdy before coming back in to have a good yell.
Almost everyone was petrified of Mr. Jones, but because my brother told me about his little tricks, and because my friend stood up to him and got away with it, I just found his behaviour amusing. He was really bitter about having to work with kids, and somewhat sadistic, but not in a truly traumatizing way if you twigged to the part where he was just doing it for his own entertainment. I feel sorry for him.
The redeeming part is that he wasn’t actually a bad teacher if you were interested in the subject matter, which I was, and prepared to put in the work, which I more or less was.
Staggeringly unprofessional conduct. How do psychos like this ever get hired? I make it a point to never play favorites (or unfavorites) with my students.
Nothing compared to some of the stories here but here goes.
My ninth grade science teacher was really into ESP, and spent a lot of the class talking about Joesph rhine and telling spooky stories about psychic phenomena. Getting him going on this was a good way to distract him and derail the class if you weren’t prepared. He also believed in UFO’s, the bermuda triangle and other such stuff. I took him at his word–after all he was a science teacher, an expert in the field of science, as Dr. Paul Armstrong might say–and devoured books by von Danekin, Berlitz and others with almost fanatical devotion. It wasn’t till I was in my early twenties that I realized what BS the whole thing was.
I loved my freshman French teacher, 'cause she was nice to everybody. Trouble was, the kids in my class were kind of rowdy, and acted up in spite of her admonitions not to do so. One day, I believe it was in November, she’d had enough and proceeded to cuss us out. I was shocked - I’d never heard a teacher swear before. Her tirade finally won her the respect of the troublemakers. I don’t recall anyone reporting her for it, nor for the time she translated the French part in “Lady Marmalade” for us.
I just remembered my 7th grade wood shop teacher, who had nine fingers. I heard he lost another finger in class a year later.
I had a high school English/literature teacher who also taught a logic/debate/public speaking class. He assigned the topic of marijuana legalization; half the class had to argue pro and the other half con, and we had to go look up arguments and information on it, and present in class. He proceeded to argue with the con-assigned students when they gave their talks, but practically cheered on the students who gave pro-legalization info. A male friend told me that the teacher would invite male students to his house to smoke (marijuana was implied) and… probably something else - he had been invited but turned it down as politely as he could, as he always got skeeved out by this teacher.
Another English teacher taught a junior/senior lit class on British literature. This was an advanced group, but for some reason the teacher decided to include a weird spelling test as part of the grade. Our books included the opening part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, and he decided to test us on the first 40 lines, punctuation included. One of the students was third-ranked in our grade, even though he had dyslexia. Of course, he studied for hours on this lame assignment, and bombed it miserably.
One of our history teachers gave an abstinence-only “sex ed” mini-class called “Sex Respect”, which was filled with all sorts of misinformation, hysteria, and bias. This was the school’s idea, not his personal crusade, so we didn’t see any point in complaining. He made us answer embarrassing personal questions as a class, like voting with raised hands on what you’d do if your future spouse confessed to being bisexual. I think it was only me and two of my friends who said that the automatic response would not be to leave the person. I tried to explain that it’d depend, being bi doesn’t mean you’re going to be unfaithful, and the teacher’s response was to say something like, “You’re not worried he’s going to gasp out, ‘Oh, Jim!’?” Jim was my then-boyfriend’s name, which he didn’t know, but my classmates did and most found that funny.
I’ll always remember two things from 9th grade Civics. One, that’s where I was on 9/11. We had just finished talking about the Magna Carta when the phone rang, and Mr. Smith* wouldn’t let me use my cell phone to call home and check on my Dad who was supposed to be flying to India or Japan or somewhere that day. (Dad was perfectly safe at home as his trip had been cancelled.) But the other series of incidents was even more disturbing.
Mr. Smith was a decent enough teacher, and I enjoyed the class, and then one day early around September he disappeared and was never seen again. We had the same sub for about two weeks, and then one day that sub told us that he wouldn’t be our sub any more because, and I remember the exact words perfectly, “After learning all the facts, I don’t want to be associated with him [Mr. Smith] in any way. It wouldn’t be right before God.” Naturally, the students’ curiosity was piqued. We got another long term sub and eventually a new teacher and never saw Mr. Smith again. No explanation was ever given for his disappearance.
And the weird thing is, this was a fairly small town with only one high school where gossip was the only thing that traveled faster than light speed and everyone knew everyone else’s business. And I never heard, despite repeated inquires, what the hell had happened to Mr. Smith. I still don’t know, and it haunts me. I don’t care about where Jimmy Hoffa is, whether there’s life on other planets, or who shot J.R. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT MY 9TH GRADE CIVICS TEACHER DID!
- Fake name.