Stupidest thing one of your teachers ever said or did?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I had a very poor biology professor in college. She was a nasty person, and somehow managed to be individually rude to many of the 500 people in the class.

One day after being especially asshole-ish, the class started grumbling. Teacher then asks what was possibly the stupidist question you could ask in this situation:

With a huff of breath, and in a sarcastic tone, she asks “Does anyone have anything they would like to DISCUSS before we continue?”

So who do you think raised his hand?

I proceeded to tell her EXACTLY what we thought of her teaching methodology, and how I would be taking it up with the department chair and dean later that day. The class applauded.

From what I understand, she doesn’t work there any more.

22

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by rackensack *
**
[li]One day at the beginning of class, she began by asking a student to define “model”. **[/li][/QUOTE]

You know, I had teachers do that kind of thing too. Specifically I think Mrs. Hooker did it- she taught 7th grade creation science (fortunately I transferred to that school in 8th grade, but I still had to take history from her. God only knows what would have happened if I had been in that class…) She also put one or two “discussion questions” on each exam. Remember, this is the school where tests commonly asked questions about what color tie someone was wearing, so her “discussion questions” would demand that you regurgitate every single fact on, say, churchgoing in Puritan New England that was mentioned in the book. I remember writing reams of cramped handwriting, squeezing in as many words as possible into the space provided, sentences crawling up the margins and creeping into the blanks for adjacent questions. Invariably I would get at the very most 75% of the points- not that I got anything incorrect, mind you, it’s just that she subtracted five points for each of the insignificant details that I hadn’t remembered.

-Ben

23

In graduate school, I took am elective course on the history of the War Between the States. The course was outside of my major, but it was my last semester, I had met all of my requirements, and I like history. I though it would be a nice change.

I sensed from the beginning that the prof didn’t like me, but I figured I was being too sensitive.

When it came time to write a final paper, we were told that she would be collecting our research notes as well. I really didn’t take any formal research notes for this particular paper… just a bunch of random scribblings on Post-Its. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.

The paper met all of the requirements, and it was carefully researched. About a week after I turned the paper in, the prof asked me into her office to discuss it.

She accused me of plagiarism because the paper was “so good”, and I couldn’t produce any formal research notes. She railed at me, I mean really let me have it, about lazy Mass Communications majors thinking that they could get an easy three credits by taking a history course for “fun”. She went on to say that she could and would keep me from graduating, that I should be ashamed, et cetera. I purely just wanted to go right through the floor.

I told her that I had written the paper, but that I probably should have taken better notes. She went to the head of my department and complained. I think that they told her where to get off, because later on that week she grudgingly explained her outburst by saying that cheating was a common problem at the school :eek: .

I ended up with an A on the paper, and an apology from my own department head. I never brought it up again to the history prof, who avoided all but necessary contact with me for what was left of the semester. I suspect that once the folks in my department gave her a bit of history on me, she was pretty embarrassed.
So yeah, I’d say she acted stupidly.

24

Back in 1969 when I was a high school freshman, my math teacher was pretty weird. She was almost to retirement age and was very slightly built. She didn’t lecture much, but instead made us read our texts in silence as she sat at her desk and flipped through what looked like a big honkin’ coffee-table book.

One day as the class was silently reading, she SLAMMED the book shut (just about gave us heart-attacks) and cried out, “I’VE GOT IT! I’VE GOT IT! NOW I KNOW WHY YOU PEOPLE ARE THE WAY YOU ARE!” She squinted one eye as she scanned across the room of stunned, disbelieving faces. “YOU’RE ALL ON… MARIJUANA!”

25

Oh man, where do I start?

High school health teacher, calling the roll in a study hall on the first day of school, couldn’t figure out why “Gee-off” (pronounced with a hard “G”) wouldn’t answer when his name was called.

7th grade social studies teacher always spelled it “Isreal”. I tried to correct him, but I think it just hardened his resolve to spell it his own way.

High school physics teacher stated that exerting a constant force on a body will cause the body to move with a constant…velocity. Isaac Newton? Whozzat? It took only some gentle prodding from me and a night’s review of the textbook to get her to correct herself.

Same teacher: I entered a physics contest (write a paper, it gets judged by the faculty of the local ‘institute of technology’, cash prizes are to be had) and needed a “faculty sponsor” in order to submit my entry. After reading my work, she declared that I had copied it from an encyclopedia and refused to endorse it. I made my case before the principal and he signed it in her place. I won $50 for honorable mention in the contest, and my physics “teacher” got chewed out by the principal and either quit or was fired. I’m surprised at how many times this basic story has been repeated in previous posts!

8th grade algebra teacher kept pronouncing “apogee” with the accent on the second syllable. I know it’s a nit-pick, but it reflects a larger trend of teachers trying to explain things they themselves have only read about in the textbook. In the same vein, a health teacher kept pronouncing “intestines” with a long “i”: “In-test-eye-ns”. That may be correct in some parts of the world, but in the American Midwest it is distinctly nonstandard.

6th grade math teacher, when asked what comes after trillions, said with an air of learned authority, “Zillions.”

I’ve got more; these are just the ones that I think about often. With teachers like that, it’s a wonder I didn’t end up picking goobers for minimum wage. Not that there’s anything wrong with goober-pickers.

What I did end up doing was getting a Ph.D. in engineering and embarking on a career as a rocket scientist. Many of the kids in my class went on to similar achievements - which makes me wonder if society’s perpetual concern about the quality of teaching is perhaps too Chicken Little. Hell, we had presidents come out of log cabins and one-room schoolhouses. All it takes is to read a book now and then.

26

Well, this is tame because it’s just about my personal dislike for my ninth-grade English teacher. She was the kind of lady that could suck the life out of any work of literature. The kind of lady who would actually pause during her speeches in order to come up with the biggest words she could think of.

Not to be modest, but I was the best English student in that class. I’ve been a huge reader since I could read, and know my way around creative writing. I could drop a poem that sounds good like that. (I know, you’ve all been there. You’re frequenters of message boards.)

Anyway, first instance, we’re reading the Odyssey or its sequel or somesuch. (Didn’t catch up on Greek. Sorry.) I’m assigned to read in front of the class. Lucky me, the main character in what I was reading was Telemachus. I didn’t know how to pronounce it, so I said “Tel-eh-MACH-us”. Well, after I finished the first thing she said was, “Well, first off, the guy’s name is Tel-lem-i-kuss.” like I was a freaking moron. Well why the hell didn’t you correct me the first time I said it? This is one of the many instances where I wish I was as big a pain in the ass as I am now.

Second, we were assigned to read a poem in front of the class. I’ve never taken anything seriously. So, many people read their many poems. Some of the good, some of them not. I decided to read “Too Many Daves” by Dr. Seuss. A perfect example of rhythm and meter in my book, and also slightly stupid, which was my ouvre. So I read it aloud, and my teacher, master of the backhanded compliment that she was, responded with this: “Well, it was very brave of you to read that poem.”

Why, yes, it did take a sheer act of will to stand up and read a poem unsuspecting that I would be ridiculed by my teacher for not prescribing to her standards of poetry. Thank you very much. You’ve taught me a valuable lesson. Never trust a word junky.

Wow. I’ve tapped a bitterness vein I didn’t know I had. Thank you Straight Dope!

27

I took an elective psych class in a community college one summer to get units inexpensively. The professor was a Christian who counseled teens at his church. He told us early on that he would not tolerate swearing or foul language either from us or from his clients. So a kid’s suicidal and says the f-word? I’d certainly kick him out of his counseling session.

But I digress…He showed us a bunch of artwork supposedly done by patients in mental institutions. Several of the paintings looked as if they were painted by whackos, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. Then he showed “The Scream” and went on to give his interpretation of the patient’s mental illness. I thought it was a joke and that he would talk about a fine line between insanity and genius, but there was no such explanation. Raised my hand and told him it was a famous painting by Edvard Munch, an expressionist painter, that the painting displayed inner torture and drama and may (or may not) be a reaction to the horrors of war. He disagreed with me but said he’d look into it. Several weeks later he kept me after class and said that I was right but that I had undermined his authority and that I should have quietly brought this to his attention. I went to the head of the Psych Dept and complained. He didn’t teach after that in that particular community college.

Back in Sister Annunciata’s fifth grade class, we were told that the proper pronunciation of ‘helicopter’ was heal-a-copter, that such a fine piece of engineering could not have come from hell. The nuns all had trouble with the planet Uranus - they pronounced it something like Your-on-us. My Dad owned a bar in San Francisco and I was told by our Sister Superior never to mention that to my classmates.

After reading these posts I’m surprised that more of us aren’t submitting our artwork from mental institutions.

28

I had a 7th-grade English teacher tell her class, with a straight face, “I don’t make mistakes.” :eek:

And I think she believed it, too! :eek:

Can you believe the arrogance? Even the smartest people in the history of the world made mistakes, and admitted it.

And she was the meanest S.O.B., too. I’ll dance on her grave when she dies.

29

Seventh grade science teacher didn’t know the difference between taxonomy and taxidermy. Went so far as to write it up on the board and to say thatr the two words were interchangeable. I politely raised my hand and defined both words for him. he ignored me. I started getting mad and got chewed out by the other teacher in the classroom. It took an encyclopedia to prove the man wrong… he didn’t really like me too much after that.

Kitty

30

I moved to a different state for my last year of high school. On my first day, the first class up was English. I walk in feeling a little nervous (as you do) and just want to slip in quietly and not draw attention to myself. So the first thing the teacher says is “Why don’t you come stand up the front of the class and tell us all about yourself?”.

That part I handled ok… But this is the part that pissed me off. The homework for that day was to write a couple of pages on a question she’d set on “Great Expectations”. When I got my paper back it had a big fat F and “See me after class” written on it. Apparently I’d been failed because it must have been plaigarised because “It wasn’t written in my own personal style.” Excuse me? She’d taught me for all of an hour, never seen anything I’d written and she thinks she knows my style! Lucky the very nice Subject Co-ordinator took her to task with me and had the grade changed!

31

Glad I haven’t done any of these things in front of my class. I do have my pet peeves when it comes to pronouncing certain words correctly, (our rhymes with hour, not are; nuclear=nuke-lee-yer not nuke-you-ler) but at least I know what I’m talking about. A lot of the stories above have to do with things other than stupidity. Accusing a student of cheating when the student is innocent is poor judgement, and in some cases prejudice, but is not neccesarily stupidity. IMHO, it’s worse than stupidity, because the teacher should know better.

My story: High school Algebra II, with students from 9th-12th grades, I was in 9th. We have a new teacher whose last job was teaching at a community college in a small town in, IIRC Argentina. He was remarkably easy to get off track, telling stories about his travels, and the stories themselves were wonderfully intricate and full of colorful characters and exotic places. But once the class realized that he could be so easily distracted off onto a tangent, they did it every day.

A group of senior boys would take off just after roll call each day announcing to the teacher (whose name I cannot recall) that they were bored and were going to go play tennis. Which they did. Those of us who wanted to actually learn the Algebra (mostly the advanced freshmen) would likewise leave for the library, and learn the material together out of the book, once in a while popping into the regular class to ask the teacher (can’t remember his name, so I call him Mr. Doofus) a question when we needed clarification, and turning in the chapter test at the end of each chapter for grading when we finished it.

So it comes near the end of the second quarter, about 16 weeks into the school year, and the principal pays our “study group” a visit. He wants to know how much progress we were making on our own. We were on chapter 6 at the time (out of 12, putting us slightly ahead of the yearly plan); the regular class was on chapter 2.

A week later, Mr. Doofus was fired. The regular class had a substitute for the remaining three weeks of the second quarter, and a new teacher hired at semester. She was actually quite good, but had to start over at the very beginning, as no one in the regular class had learned anything. The four students in my study group were allowed to finish the class as an independant study, and the four boys who skipped class every day had to retake the class as a summer school class or repeat their senior year.

The school had to create a special class the next year for those students who had missed the entire first semester of instruction (officially it was Algebra II, section B, but everyone called it Algebra 2 1/2). Those in my study group were the only ones who went on to trig the next year, but because we were the only ones taking it (due to the “irregularities” in the previous year’s Algebra II class) we were permitted to do it also as an independant study. For the four of us, it was a very positive experience. For the rest, well, they certainly enjoyed the 16 weeks of doing nothing, but not having to take a year and a half to make up for the semester they goofed off.

I suppose this is more incopetence than stupidity, but it was incopetence on such a grand scale that it supercedes any single incidence of stupidity that I’ve ever witnessed in a classroom.

32

Cruel but teenage.

We notice that our English teacher inserts “um”, “erhh” and “ahhh” into his lectures far too often.

We chose a sucker (yes, it’s me) to count them during a lesson.

He sees me scrawling in my pad and says, “What are you doing XXXXXXXX.” [anonymity]

“I am recording how often you say …(refer above)”

“Are you inferring that I’m an idiot XXXXXXX??”

“No sir, I can only imply that you are an idiot, only you can infer it.”

“Get out of this room XXXXXXX”

33

I did that too, in 7th grade. It was the “Brewer Tally,” and I did it every day for a few weeks. It made me seem so much cooler to the class. Even the popular kids would talk to me. :eek:

Unfortunately, I moved soon after the project started, so it had to be completed by another student.

34

Had the same teacher for Economics (10th grade) and US History (11th). A born-and-bred Carolina belle, only about 50 years past her prime. And, I’m suspecting, never a genius when in it.

At any rate, during the US History class, we got around to discussing farm subsidies, especially vis-a-vis FDR’s Alphabet Soup programs, IIRC. (This has been a while, and history classes have always been my weak suit.) She was trying to explain how it was financially advantageous for farmers to actually not grow the given crops, and just take the money. From this she expanded to the mental imagery of “plowing the crops under,” and then took another branch that left me stunned and wondering. Apparently she concluded that these subsidies and plowing-under practices applied to livestock as well as crops, and fumbled the phrase “plowing the pigs under” into her schpiele.

Naturally, this got a huge reaction from the class, most notably from the ones who were too dim to realize she’d obviously conflated separate notions. But she felt the rise from them, and decided to stick with her story. I remember her coming back to this phrase several more times in the course of the year. It was all I could do to just shake my head in disbelief. I knew trying to argue the point would have been useless by then.
… unless, of course, the problem is actually with me. Has there actually been any recorded incidents of forcible porcine subterraneanation? Anyone?

  • Dave
35

I’ve mentioned several times that one of my chem teachers at the tony private school I was sent to tried to coerce me into drinking dilute hydrochloric acid.

sigh

36

As much fun as it is, at a certain age, to make jokes about the rings around Uranus, planetary astronomers are with the nuns on this one. YER-ann-us or something similar.

Our high school’s Latin teacher (my homeroom teacher one year, I didn’t take Latin) insisted that all modern European languages were in some way descended from Latin.

Another year my homeroom teacher was the football coach, who also taught American history. Once during homeroom period he was setting up a display on the bulletin board showing the generals in the Civil War. Fortunately it didn’t take much to convince him that Grant fought for the Union. But then everybody knew he was clueless. It seemed worse with the Latin teacher who seemed relatively intelligent.

37

This isn’t so much stupid as funny.

In my brother’s trigonometry class, his math teacher, Mr. Sternovsky, once spent a lot of time trying to solve one particularly tricky geometric proof.

Now, “Sterno” (by the way, he HATED that name) was a great teacher. Make no mistake about that. He taught the most advanced classes as well as the slowest ones, and our school had a policy of singling out those classes for the best teachers.

Anyway, we liked Sterno because he had a sense of humor and was eccentric. Often when he was confused by a particularly tricky problem (as in the present example) he would seat himself in an empty student’s chair and stare at the problem along with us. In a way, that allowed him to bond with us.

Which is exactly what he did. For a few minutes. Then, you could almost see the light bulb going off in his head…doing everything but shrieking “Eureka”, he got up, dashed off a few steps to his proof, and turned to the class, no doubt expecting wonderment and awe.

What he got was a period of silence, followed by one student raising his hand and asking “But Mr. Sternovsky, wasn’t ‘A=B’ your hypothesis?”

Silence then gave way to laughter. And my brother, of course, couldn’t wait to tell me that story.

Since I also had Sternovsky for my math class, I wasted no time in asking him the next day, “Hey, is it true that you spent 45 minutes in yesterday’s fourth period ‘proving your own hypothesis’?” :eek: :stuck_out_tongue:

If looks could kill, I’d be seventeen years dead now.

38

**

That reminds me of the small town in the South (not the one I grew up in) which decided that all the phone operators for the municipal government would answer the phone with “heaveno.” (This is not a UL- I saw it on CNN.com, complete with interviews with the mastermind- if I might use the word so loosely- of the scheme.) What’s next? Is the word “ask” going to be replaced with “buttk”?

A friend of mine once said that there’s no good way to pronounce the name of that planet. “Your-Anus,” “Urine-Us,” or “YewRAAAAHnus,” which makes you sound like a British twit.

Speaking of religious kookery, I forgot to mention the English teacher who told us, completely seriously, that if we went to an Ivy League school, many of our professors would teach class in drag. It’s weird- my high school seemed to make determined attempts to make sure that no one would go to college, because they fed us so many bizarre scare stories.

-Ben

39

I took a class my first year in college called Statistics/Social Context. I dropped it after two weeks or so because it contained an insane amount of work that would not have fit with the rest of my schedule.

Anyway, the topic of the class was Gay and Lesbian Statistics. Early on, in the discussion of the difference between sex and gender, etc, he touched on “do chromosomes define sex?” His example was, “Well, do you think Jamie Lee Curtis is male?” :rolleyes:

My health teacher in high school did a fantastic job of teaching urban legends on a regular basis.

40

My pre-algebra teacher insisted that pi had exactly 52 digits, and one day proceeded to write them all out on the blackboard. (I remember that after 3.14… she just wrote down a bunch of random numbers.) I found it more amusing than frustrating, though.

Yep, that was pretty stupid.