Strange, surreal, and creepy things your teachers made you do

In My Humble Opinion
161

[QUOTE=Mayo Speaks!]

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!
[/QUOTE]

Seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to guess.

BTW, if you were in 9th grade on 9/11, you would have been 15 and you’re, what, 21 now? Gaaah, when did God decide to speed time up like this? I’m getting dizzy.

162

[QUOTE=rhythmonly]
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.”

[/QUOTE]

I think we’ve found “naked around the pool” Frank!

The Bad
I had an alcoholic Trig teacher–(I didn’t know it at the time), but he stank of menthol Salems (seen in his breastpocket always) and whiskey. His eyes were yellow. He always ran to the men’s room between classes. :dubious: He would slur out something about “imagine – unit circle” and then GRIND the chalk into the board. His board was pitted from this.
One kid in our class (sr year in HS) liked to get to class early and reposition this teacher’s big wooden compass which was kept on the ledge above the blackboard, so that when Mr L did the chalk grinding, the compass would clatter to the floor and Mr L would jump a foot. He did it every class. Mr L never caught on, but his shakes were always worse after our class…
I had a 7th grade math teacher who would throw chalk or erasers at us. She was very blonde and very fair skinned. You could tell she was about to lose her temper because her neck would get all red and then she’d blow-usually because we didn’t know the correct answers. Unlike Mr L, she was scary (he was just pathetic and taught us nothing). We were usually pinned to our seats, afraid of the next blow out. And they wonder why I suck at math…

My 3rd grade teacher was enormously fat (long before morgic obesity was common–this was 1970) She wore her hair in a bun–think the movie Matilda’s principal: that’s her. She made us sing “The Star Spangled Banner” every morning with her providing piano accompinment. If she caught you mouthing the words or not singing–you had to do it all over again, a capella, in front of the class. God, I hated her.
My(regular level) chem teacher in HS was a nervous old lady with hesitant speech and no fashion sense. This was not good, given that it was 1978 and she had some troublemakers in the class. She never did keep order, ever, and ran screaming and crying out of our class, never to be seen again. The next week, we had a new chem teacher–90 pounds soaking wet. She walked into class and took control the instantly.

My Speech teacher sophomore year used to have his debate and drama kids do their stuff for us–and then say to us non-debaters, non-dramatics: see? this is how it’s done. Learn something. :rolleyes: Mike F., whose father had just been found dead in the trunk of a car (Mob hit–I knew a few kids whose dads were supposedly killed this way), threw a chair across the room in his class–he was suspended, but scared the shit out of us.
My Western Civ teacher (in summer school-4 straight hours of class M-F) told us all that he was “hypoglycemic” and so had to eat constantly. We couldn’t so much as chew gum.

My daughter had a 3rd grade teacher who told the class that she had studied for her principal certificate, this would be her last year teaching so she didn’t care. This teacher also duct-taped a kid to his desk for fidgeting. This was 1997. The parent of the kid didn’t mind her doing so. (wtf?)

Cool Weirdness:

Our US History teacher had worked for whatever the WW2 equivalent of psy-ops was. He used to tell us stories about the war–very cool.
My AP English teacher let us eat in class, let us veer off into discussions that were perhaps only tangentially related to the matter at hand. He treated us with respect (it was much more like a college course)–and we loved him.

My 5th grade teacher was from England and told us stories about UK-growing up in postwar Britain.

My 6th grade teacher let us put on plays in class, based on books we had read–wonderful experience. (I was narrator a lot).

My college Physiology TA had dissect rats. We had partners. We isolated the vagus nerve and stimulated it or some such thing. Afterwards, we were to “sacrifice” our animal. Sue and my rat would NOT die. The TA came over, kind of rolling his eyes at us and he tried more sodium pentathol. Bupkus–Mr Rat was alive and kicking-he seemed to like the drug. TA tried again-nothing. Finally, he took Mr Rat into the backroom and we were waiting to hear a shot…I’ve always wondered what he did to Mr Rat in that backroom.

163

[QUOTE=Koxinga]
Seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to guess.

BTW, if you were in 9th grade on 9/11, you would have been 15 and you’re, what, 21 now? Gaaah, when did God decide to speed time up like this? I’m getting dizzy.
[/QUOTE]

I realized recently that my ninth grade tutoring student was in third grade on 9/11/01.

:smack:

-FrL-

164

I remember one year- I’m not entirely sure if it was 6th or 7th Form, but it was one of the two- where our Economics teacher (who was a top bloke and everyone got on really well with) was sitting at his desk one class right at the end of the year, after all the teaching classes have wound up but Study Leave hasn’t kicked in yet, working on reports.

“Hey, you two are creative guys, right?” he says to me and my best mate, who were sitting at the desks next to his.

“Sure” we say, wondering if he’s trying to enlist our help to think of a nice gift for his girlfriend or something.

“I need your help to write these 4th Form English reports” he says. Apparently the English teacher had left 3/4ths of the way through the year to look after a very ill family member, and he’d been assigned the task of Caretaker Relief Teacher to get them through to the end of the year.

“Problem is” he says “I don’t know any of them”. “William Smith? Fred Bloggs? Johnathon Randomkid? I’ve only been teaching them for 8 weeks, none of them really stand out. But none of the kids really suck at English, so I want to give them nice, average, respectable reports. You’re both good at making shit up, so help me out here…”

We spent the next hour crafting these end-of year reports for nearly an entire 4th Form English class. The reports all read in such a way that seemed complimentary- ie, your parents wouldn’t be upset to read it- but didn’t actually say anything;
“William makes the most of every lesson”, “Johnathon has progressed very well this term”, “Fred has approached his studies with diligence”, etc.

Fertiliser-grade bullshit, of course, but hey, it meant a bunch of kids we didn’t know weren’t getting bad end of year reports.

165

Great thread! :slight_smile:

I grew up in Norway, and lived about four kilometers (2.5 miles) of from school.

We used to have these special maths note books in fifth grade (about 11 years old) for longer homework assignments that we had to hand in on a bi-weekly basis. Once, in January the teacher came up to me and said I hadn’t handed in my note book in the pile on his desk. I insisted I had handed it in and he immediately became furious and yelled out that I was a liar in front my classmates. He was so furious I broke down and started sobbing in front of my classmates.

Then he threw me out of class and ordered me to walk home and fetch the note book - he actually sort of shoved me out through the corridors of the school, past the racks of outer garments too (so no time to take my jacket, cap, mittens and scarf).

So I had to walk home in the snow wearing this really thin sweatshirt. It was actually snowing that day too. January in Norway can be quite cold.

When I had walked home through the forest for (if I were to walk the roads it would take another twenty minutes or so), I didn’t really know what the hell to do. I knew I’d handed in the book. So I started looking, just in case I found it - but no luck. Thankfully, my mom was home - said I could stay home for the rest of the day. Needless to say, I got a cold around that time and had to stay at home for a few days.

The sickest thing is that the teacher knew exactly how far I would have to walk, since he lived a few houses down the street from me - and still he didn’t allow me to take my jacket or anything with me.

166

[QUOTE=eleanorigby]

I had an alcoholic Trig teacher–(I didn’t know it at the time), but he stank of menthol Salems (seen in his breastpocket always) and whiskey. His eyes were yellow. He always ran to the men’s room between classes. :dubious: He would slur out something about “imagine – unit circle” and then GRIND the chalk into the board. His board was pitted from this.
[/QUOTE]

I swear, I had that same guy for my high school trig class! It was on the first floor of the old building, and a classmate would open the windows even in midwinter because he reeked so badly. There were cat corpses and skeletons in the guy’s house…

But my (very slightly) strange thing was in P.E.. We were supposed to be playing soccer, but there were about 60 guys in the class, thus 30 to each side - ALL on the field at once. Only a few of us had ever played soccer and frustrated guys kept using their hands to knock the ball to the ground so they could kick it. Our teacher, Mr. W., got so mad about this that he finally burst out "All right! You don’t wanna play by the rules?! Then, it’s ‘No-Rules Soccer’! Great joy, chaos and bloody mayhem ensued. Wanna carry the ball, kick an opponent, punch somebody in the face? Anything, I mean, ANYTHING was ok. By the time we headed for the showers, people were limping, bleeding. battered and bruised.

For the rest of the year, whenever Mr. W. asked us (as he occasionally did) what activity we’d choose for today’s class, he got 60 guys yelling ‘No-Rules Soccer’. I can’t imagine anyone allowing that kind of thing today, but I remember it fondly.

167

Quoth elanorigby:

C’mon, don’t leave us hanging. Forget about the rat; was the TA able to kill Sue?

168

[QUOTE=dangermom]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Huh, exactly the opposite! My teacher was infamous for her “teaching method”: She wrote things on the board. We would literally spend a couple hours a day copying whatever the lesson was, word-for-word, into those little beige notebooks. We never did anything remote ‘fun’.

Now that I think about it, there were a few more teachers who were rather off their rockers. Like the second grade teacher who told us about how she left her dog outside one night and it died of fright, how she stepped on(!) her parrot and killed it, drowned a pet mouse, etc.

Then there was the seventh-grade gym teacher who called all the female students “rainbow”. He replaced our previous teacher in the middle of the year, because the previous teacher literally retired the very day he was eligible to do so.

Plus for bonus creepiness, the elementary school gym teacher who may or may not have molested me, and numerous other students. Ah, public school…

169

[QUOTE=Chronos]
Quoth elanorigby:C’mon, don’t leave us hanging. Forget about the rat; was the TA able to kill Sue?
[/QUOTE]

really need to reread prior to posting! :smack: :smiley:

Sue lived, but she ripped her knee up the next semester and spent several weeks on crutches.

And I forgot to tell y’all about Mr Schutie–I never had hime, thank god, but my older sibs did. He was so old, he was ossified, and didn’t teach 5th grade at all–he merely bored the kids shitless with tales of his stamp and coin collecting. He would hold periodic sales of his coins, in class time. I’m sure they learned nothing all year from him. But I still have the steel penny I bought from him.

170

You mean besides the wrestling unit in P.E. class when we’re asked put our hand on another guy’s thigh?

Not much that I can remember now. We were asked, in eight grade history, to write a Declaration of Independence from our parents. Years later, my folks found mine, and thought I must have done it sometime when I was mad at them! I couldn’t convince them otherwise, though they thankfully didn’t ask me to discuss what I had been mad about. I honestly couldn’t have come up with anything.

171

Jeez, how did any of us survive childhood back then? I was thinking I had it pretty easy, but upthread the lining up by height sucked: I was always just shy of a year younger than most classmates, and small anyway, so always at the head of the line. It did alot to highlight one’s small frail position in the system; Gee, Thanks for that!

But, then this BAD memory happens, not creepy in the sense of an enforced sense for everyone, but: My 6th grade teacher, Mr. Bishop, was a really fine teacher. I, unfortunately, was in his 6th grade class when he was going through a divorce. At that time, I was a good straight A student, but my eyes were changing myopically. I had a seat at the back of the class, and couldn’t see the board. I didn’t know enough at that age to tell anyone, and made A’s anyway, so, I’d listen in class, and doodle notes in the margin. I was paying attention: doodles actually help me focus, as found out in subsequent experience.

Mr. Bishop flipped out one day in that 6th grade class, walked back to my desk, and yelled about how I was not paying attention. He upended my desk, spilling all the books and papers out, and then made me stand at the back of the room for the entire lesson period. It just shocked the shit out of me at that age. I was a reather shy, bookish kid, and a year behind, having skipped a grade. It was horribly embarrassing, shit…that upturned desk with all my loved textbooks willy nilly on the floor: I cringe still. Never told my parents about it, it was such a shock, so I figgered I’d done something really bad to get that response, and I didn’t want a replay.

That brings up the point: I didn’t tell my parents that episode at school, even though at 45 years old, I still cringe at the memory. The overarching meme was that, YOU were wrong. I’m seeing a lot of awful crap perpetrated on schoolkids in this thread. Is it getting better?

And, I do have compassion on anyone going into the teaching profession. It’s a hard row to hoe, and not enough support.

172

[QUOTE=monstro]
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).
[/QUOTE]
My student teaching was in a seventh grade class. I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason it’s the seventh grade teachers losing it :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway… I hated the school I went to in third grade. Being a city kid, I managed to go to three different schools by fourth grade, and this one was my least favorite. One of the biggest reasons was recess.

I don’t know who decided this or why, but without informing parents they decided to segregate all the kids with fair skin. Only about 1/2 of my classmates were white anyway, and of the other half not too many of us were fair and freckled, so I guess they decided this was a manageable policy: on nice sunny days we weren’t allowed to go outside. Instead, we were sat in the nurse’s office and did nothing. We couldn’t even color like we would on rainy days when everyone had indoor recess.

Some of us begged to be allowed to bring in sunscreen if that’s what they were worried about, but that wasn’t “good enough.” So this went on every nice day from the beginning of spring until school let out for the summer.

Years later I mentioned it to my mom and she seemed aghast. Apparently not only did the school not tell her about it, I didn’t either.


Then there's the other side of the discriminatory coin - by the time I started middle school, we'd moved to a small town that was 99.8% white. None of the few minority students was picked on for not being white (one was ragged on for being a bitch, but that's another issue entirely) which is what made the actions of one of our English teachers in 9th grade so hard to figure out...

As was tradition, all the 9th grade classes studied Romeo and Juliet. We were going to go see a stage production, which most people were enthusiastic about. At least until we found out what the permission slip they'd sent home said. Apparently one of the teachers felt it was necessary to inform our parents that all the actors in the play would be black.  Wow, did that ever cause an uproar from angry parents who called and demanded to know why the teacher thought they were all racists. I didn't know anyone whose parents *didn't* call the principal over that one. As far as I know nothing ever came of it - she didn't even end up issuing an apology or offering an explanation for this massive misunderstanding. Weird. The play was excellent, however.
173

[QUOTE=irishgirl]
There was the history teacher who as a GCSE (age 16, national exams) coursework piece got us to watch the X-files episode “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” and Oliver Stone’s “JFK”. Then we had to compare and contrast the two with primary and secondary source materials and say what we really thought happened in Dallas. You got extra marks if you came up with a weird conspiracy theory.
[/QUOTE]
In…Ireland. Oh, the Kennedys are of Irish descent! For the first time, I see the heavy “persecution of the ethnic Irish” component in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory.

I was more drawn to the fact that the chief suspect was killed two days later.

As to the thread, I got nothin’.

174

[QUOTE=elelle]

It was horribly embarrassing, shit…that upturned desk with all my loved textbooks willy nilly on the floor: I cringe still. Never told my parents about it, it was such a shock, so I figgered I’d done something really bad to get that response, and I didn’t want a replay.

That brings up the point: I didn’t tell my parents that episode at school, even though at 45 years old, I still cringe at the memory. The overarching meme was that, YOU were wrong. I’m seeing a lot of awful crap perpetrated on schoolkids in this thread. Is it getting better?

And, I do have compassion on anyone going into the teaching profession. It’s a hard row to hoe, and not enough support.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, elelle- yuck. No excusing that behavior- calling attention to the quiet kid, and in such a violent and loud attack and tarnishing your books too. Geez. I’m with you- I remember the scrapes and bruise my 4th grade teacher left after she shoved my shoulder hard into a brick wall and pinned me there while correcting me nose to nose and through gritted teeth for passing notes. Same teacher had pulled a few girls’ hair over the years, and specialized in bringing smartmouth kids to the front of the class and inviting the class to join her in humiliating the kid. I ran into that woman in an antique store when I was 25, and told her in hushed tones that I was relieved when I’d heard that she had retired, because she was an abusive and frightening monster when I was 9. She gave me exactly the same tight-lipped glare that would have frozen hot lava in 1979, and I walked away from that hateful stare both literally and metaphorically washing my hands of her.

I’m back in school now, and I’ll be teaching within the next 18 months. But I will bear in mind how stubbornly unpleasant childhood memories can cling, and I solemnly * promise * that I will not shame or embarrass a single child so long as they are in my care, no matter their attitude or behavior.

175

My fifth-grade geography teacher Mrs. Dummert was married to a taxidermist. She displayed his handiwork all over the classroom. There were a few owls, a hawk, various other birds, and an ancient dried armadillo, suspended from the ceiling, lurking in corners, and stashed atop her bookcases, but worst of all was a mouse in a jar.
“That was my pet mouse,” she explained, “and when she died, Mr. Dummert stuffed her for me as a gift. Wasn’t that sweet?”

176

[QUOTE=elelle]
Mr. Bishop flipped out one day in that 6th grade class, walked back to my desk, and yelled about how I was not paying attention.
[/QUOTE]

Mr. Waples did the exact thing to me in grade 7, because he said my desk was too messy.

177

[QUOTE=me]
I got nothin’.
[/QUOTE]
OK, that’s not entirely true. I had a really hard time in second grade. I was on the young end of the age range for my class, & small; maybe slightly (a year?) ahead on some math skills due to my mom & my natural curiosity; & reading at…maybe a jr. high level. Apparently, I really had no business being in a standard public school program.

The grade school was a polling place, & I remember being puzzled to see these little booths for voters set up in the halls one day. But the weird thing came later: One day I walked into class & saw one of the booths setting off a chair to the side. I was supposed to be in the classroom but separated in that way. I remember learning very simple algebra there. I don’t remember much else about it. I grew to hate that teacher. Long, long after, I mentioned this to my mom, & she said I’d never told her when it was happening. Which is possible; I tended to compartmentalize school from home.

Anyway, I hated school. I think it was not long after that point that I decided I would drop out when it was legal, & there was no way I would ever go to college. Neither of which I did exactly, but those prejudices affected me for a long time.

I’m not sure how long I was in that booth. Fortunately, I totally missed much of spring semester by living in a foreign country.

(Where my linguist/translator mother discovered that she could not teach me French. I’m still a monoglot.)

178

[QUOTE=Beaucarnea]
Oh, elelle- yuck. No excusing that behavior- calling attention to the quiet kid, and in such a violent and loud attack and tarnishing your books too. Geez. I’m with you- I remember the scrapes and bruise my 4th grade teacher left after she shoved my shoulder hard into a brick wall and pinned me there while correcting me nose to nose and through gritted teeth for passing notes. Same teacher had pulled a few girls’ hair over the years, and specialized in bringing smartmouth kids to the front of the class and inviting the class to join her in humiliating the kid. I ran into that woman in an antique store when I was 25, and told her in hushed tones that I was relieved when I’d heard that she had retired, because she was an abusive and frightening monster when I was 9. She gave me exactly the same tight-lipped glare that would have frozen hot lava in 1979, and I walked away from that hateful stare both literally and metaphorically washing my hands of her.
[/QUOTE]

When I started school, my brother was one year ahead of me. Being the smartass that I am, I read his school books to annoy him. In second grade, the teacher made us read a story from our textbook.

Well I had already read that story from my brother’s book so I finished very quickly. The teacher was convinced that I hadn’t read the story and slapped me across the face for “talking back”. Now what bitch thinks that she needs to slap a seven-year old? Of course I cried in front of the class.

I saw her years later when I was working at a restaurant during high school. She I asked if I remembered her. I said, “Yes, you were the only teacher who ever slapped me”. She quickly took her food and left. I kind of wish I had been a little shittier to her.

In high school, I had a French teacher that threw pointed scissors at a student. The student was really fucking stupid, but still. She quit that year.

My History teacher, nicknamed The Walrus because of his mustache, one day opened the windows because he said he could smell pot smoke. And then went on a tirade about how his head hurt and he felt dizzy because of the smell. Another time he took a student’s head and smashed it into and through the glass on the door. We never saw him after that!

In college, there was asshole Professor Bell, that on the first day of the semester came in ranting, “Freshmen just suck, freshmen are just shit!” Good way to start Pascal class.

179

Then there was the guy who taught (if you could call it that) Film Studies which I took as an elective in high school. He stayed in his cave of film generally when he wasn’t in his his inner cave, which I pretty much assume contained several bottles of Scotch. When he shuffled out to actually run class, he’d frequently do it in Mouseteers ears. If you look up “teacher burnout” in the dictionary you’d see his picture. The louts (if you look up louts in the dictionary you’d see their picture) made fun of him. I loved the guy. Not often you get the right combimation of whimsy, acerbic wit, worldwearness, acidic cynicsism and alchohol just perfectly.

(On the other hand my AP English teacher, the shriveled bitch, I hear, got canned for drinking in the teacher’s lounge. Would have thought that would have loosend the stick up her ass. Big time schadenfreude there.)

And then there was my study hall teacher…not that you get taught anything in study hall…I don’t know what if anything she actually taught. Who when we wouldn’t be absolutly silent for no good reason, on day burst into tears and crawled under her desk.

We didn’t see her after that.

180

[QUOTE=matt_mcl]
Mr. Waples did the exact thing to me in grade 7, because he said my desk was too messy.
[/QUOTE]

One of our grade school teachers did that to a friend of mine, whose name was also Matt, for the same reason. And honestly - it was seriously messy. It was one of those flip-up-top desks where you lift the desk surface to get at stuff in the bin under it, but still! He flipped the desk with my friend still sitting in it, in front of the whole class, and had him clean it up by himself. IIRC he kept teaching and made the other kids pay attention, rather than be extra-cruel by making us stare at him or something, but I still remember Matt crying. :frowning: