Stupidest thing one of your teachers ever said or did?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I’ve got a good one reported to me by my sister: her ninth-grade history teacher (incidentally, the same one who couldn’t remember Harry Truman; cf. my previous post) once said that the Stuart claim to the English throne came from the illegitimate offspring of William Wallace and Queen Isabel, wife of Edward II, as seen in Braveheart – regardless of the fact that THAT NEVER HAPPENED.

My high school has a seriously deficient social studies department. (The English department is wonderful, albeit with a few exceptions…)

42

I actually had to get into college before I had any teachers say something that was mindbogglingly stupid, but, boy, did they ever make up for lost time!

Freshman general science course, the professor stands in front of the class and says, “When rounding numbers, you round down on the even ones and up on the odds.” Even the mental defects in the class were stunned by this one.

Freshman history course, the professor says the US Constitution is not an economic document for reasons I forget, but I was like, “Hello? It set the government up, the government regulates trade, and trade is related to economics, so the Constitution is an economic document.” She never admitted I was right, but she never contradicted me, either.

By far, though, my worst professors were all in the English dept., which was the reverse of my middle school and high school years. Had one English prof for 3 classes and he started the year off the same way in each of one by saying that he didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up so he decided to become an English professor and wasn’t that funny? (Actually, no.)

Then I had one who forced us to watch some short film with the old fart from “Silver Spoons” in it about a displaced person after WWII. Anyway, I hated the author on whose short story the film was based and was practically slamming my head on the table at how hamfisted the writing was (and it was faithful to the original, so this wasn’t a case of the script being written by some hack), and after we finished watching it she related how she got part of the film, but part of what was going on was a mystery to her (naturally, this was the part that made me want to slam my forehead onto the table until I lost consciousness). I went up to her after class and explained it to her. Her response was, “Oh! I never thought of that before!”

In one class, we were reading modern novels based on Greek myths, and I guess I must have really impressed the professor because she told me I should take her advanced English course the following semester where they “read the myths in the original.” I pointed out to her that there was really no point since I didn’t speak ancient Greek. Her response was, “I don’t speak Greek either, we read them in English.” 'Scuse me? But I thought that to read something in the original meant that you read them in the language they were written in!

Don’t even get me started about how almost all my English professors handed out such detailed instructions on how they wanted to you write a paper that all you practically had to do was type your name on the top of the instruction sheet, insert the name of the characters here and there, add a few location descriptions and you were done!

And my parents wonder why I quit.

43

I did that in high school too! For an entire week in English class when we had a sub. He said “uh” hundreds of time during each period.

44

I remember once in 3rd grade we were reading some story, I’m thinking it was part of the Ramona Quimby series. Anyway, Ramona had a doll named “Chevrolet” like the car. Well, I’m reading it aloud and I come to the word and pronounce it Chevrolet, like the car. My teacher says, “No. It’s Chev-Ro-Let.” Not being one to argue w/the teacher, I shrugged and figured I’d just do what she said, even though I knew she was wrong. I knew this because the part I was reading said, paraphrased: “Ramona named the doll Chevrolet because that was the car her cousin had.”
So, the next day we are reading again, and again I come to that word. Only, we have a sub that day. I pronounce it “Chev-Ro-Let” and the Sub said, “Really! It’s pronoucned Chevrolet, like the car.” and gave me this really disgusted look.
I hate them both.

45

From my current English teacher:

WWI was the result of an arms race

Hitler’s first position of power in Germany was 1935

Three kings came to visit Jesus

Crane published “Red Badge of Courage” at age 3.

It is currently possible for humans to live forever by altering their telemerase.

From my Social Psych prof:

If the parents of the two kids at Columbine had known about the guns, they would have been able to stop their kids.

You are as likely to flip a coin six times and get six heads as you are to get three heads and three tails (not in succession, just total).

My english prof last term was seconds away from explaining to a soph-level english class exactly what a simile and a metaphor are. I tried to contain my laughter and she asked me what was wrong. “Um, I can see doing this in a high school class, or a 100-level [freshman] class, but this is a soph-level class. People should know what one is by now.” She was rather taken aback.

And then there’s my frosh year english teacher, who taught a book all about depression despite not knowing anything about it. I spent the better part of a class period trying to explain to people why the book was not close to realistic.

46

On a fourth-grade science test, there was a question along the lines of “how does a seed know which way to grow the roots, and which way to grow the stem?” I got it wrong when I said “gravity”. The teacher, Mr. Rooney (his actual name), said it was light that made the seed grow in the correct directions. When I corrected him by explaining that it would be dark underground, where most seeds grow, he told me the book says light, and that was what he was going with.

Dork.

47

In college, I took a class called “Linguistics”. Only the person who taught it was as clueless as I would be about physics.

She insisted everyone bring the three books she’d made us purchase to every class, whether we used them or not. She always forgot her own, of course, and never remembered where we were in the class.

But the dumb thing was when she was diagramming a sentence on the board, and was doing so incorrectly (I mean blazingly incorrect, too). There were mutters in the class, because she was wrong on a daily basis. So she turns around and kicks out this one kid, an iconoclastic psuedo-hippie who was a very smart, cool guy.

So I stood up and said that was wrong, she was wrong, and dadblast it the whole course was wrong! Ok, maybe not in so many words, but I stuck up for him, because she was wrong in her behavior. Needless to say, though, I was kicked out too. I spoke to the department head about her, though, and even though I finished the course without further incident, I don’t think she was there much longer.

48

Mr. Hansel, 12 grade physics. He was a big, clunky, clumsy dude. Think Frankenstein without the makeup. He was the laughingstock of all the science students, and I felt kind of bad for his son, who was in my grade.

Anyway, he was forever stepping into the wastebasket, screwing up experiments, and stuff like that. All with that doofusy smile on his face. I remember him trying to illustrate the axes of 3-dimensional space by trying to manipulate 3 metersticks into correct position in midair, with the origin in the palm of his hand. But the best was his “demonstration” of angular momentum – best illustrated by noting that when a spinning figure skater lowers her arms, she spins faster. Well, poor Mr. Hansel tried to duplicate the effect by sitting on a lab stool with a physics book in each hand, held out at arm’s length. He started spinning around on the stool (all six-and-a-half feet of him), then lowered his arms to “show” the increase in speed. Of course he wasn’t going fast or freely enough for it to make a difference. Just plain stupid.

49

I’m still really, really pissed off about this one. I’m out of college and what this moron said to me in sixth grade still makes me clench my teeth, man.

The class: Geography. The question: “How many countries are in North America?” My answer: “Three, Canada, the US, and Mexico.” Him, “No. Wrong. Four.” “Four?” I figured, maybe you might counting Central America and come up with more, but I couldn’t imagine where four would come from. Well, he was counting Central America.

He thought Central America was a country.

No, really.

Yes, the whole thing.

So I asked him what he thought Guatemala and Panama and Nicaragua and all were, and he said “states”. I brought in encyclopedia articles and everything and he would not be moved. I was in tears because the guy was a freaking moron.

Grr, I’m still mad just thinking about it.

50

My high school American history teacher was a really nice guy, but boy did he have some wierd ideas.

One day as part of the lesson he said that the United States Military got the idea of the cloaking device for the stelth bomber from the aliens and their UFO’s. No, it he wasn’t just joking, unfortunately…

51

One of the reasons I was so excited about starting college was that for the first time, I would be able to choose my classes with complete freedom. I was terrifically excited about being able to take classes I was interested in. Well, except for the first quarter of my freshman year. I was required to take my college’s core course. The core course at Oakes College at UC Santa Cruz is entitled “Values and Change in a Diverse Society.” Whatever. I can deal.

This course was a nightmare. I now jokingly call it my White Guilt class, but at the time, it wasn’t funny. I am politically very liberal,but that wasn’t enough; you really couldn’t hold your head up in this class if you were white. This sounds horrible, but it was true. The idea was to promote diversity, I guess, but what it promoted was paranoia and anger. My own section sort of fumbled along, writing essays on how bad we feel when we are racist, how bad we feel when we are homophobic, etc. So one day, we were assigned to write a paper on how we have been classist. And I told the teacher, no, I don’t want to do this. I’m not a classist, and I’m tired of this course. I was in a bad mood to start with that day, and just sick sick sick of this class trying to make me look like such a terrible person. The teacher looks disappointed in me, but whatever.

So the next class, she walks over to me and says, “I thought about what you said to me last class, and I wonder, would you have said that to me if I wasn’t Latina?” The class period was almost over, and people were getting up to leave, but I was rooted to my seat. I felt like she had punched me in the stomach. I sat there in my seat for almost an hour, crying. Having all the material in the course assume I was a racist was bad enough, but when my teacher actually said it to me aloud, that was too much. Fortunately, she apologized profusely when she saw how upset I was, and she wrote me an excellent evaluation at the end of the course.

(BTW, I heard the college provost got so many complaints about the core material that they drastically altered the course the next year.)

52

3rd grade:
I had been reading a juvenile biography of Alexander Graham Bell — when he was a kid, he confronted a bully who threatened to throw his schoolbooks in the “muck.” I figured out on my own that it meant ‘mud’. All right, probably they said it more often in Scotland than America, but it was a genuine word in the English language nonetheless.

So in phonics class, the teacher, a dried out mean old bag, asked for examples of words that fit a certain phonetic pattern. I came up with one that fit: “muck”! She said to me witheringly, “There is no such word.”

33 years later, I’m still disgusted by the arrogant ignorance she displayed on that occasion.

9th grade:
I was fascinated with the different alphabets in the American Heritage Dictionary (1st ed.). After teaching myself to read Greek and Russian, I really got into the Semitic alphabets: Hebrew, Arabic, and Phoenician. Since Phoenician was the origin from which all the others developed, I made up my own alphabet out of it. I tried writing each Phoenician letter over and over real fast until it turned into another shape. Once I had mastered this, I began writing everything in it. Right to left.

I took my notes in class in my invented Semitic alphabet. (In transliterated English—I also used it for the language I was inventing, but it takes a lot longer to work up a whole language than an alphabet, so I used English in the interim.) One day the teacher saw me taking notes in class, filling whole pages with this alien script. He growled, “What the hell is all this crap!”, grabbed my notebook, and scribbled all over it. My face glowering bloody murder, I silently plotted my revenge.

My chance came when I snooped on his desk before class — this being a Catholic school, he was a monk in a certain teaching order — and there it was amongst his papers: I busted him with a big glossy full-spread-beaver porno shot!

53

I have a couple of stories from my college chemistry department, which is staffed with the biggest group of weirdos I’ve ever seen outside a circus.

First there was the old guy teaching Organic Chem. He had styrofoam balls connected with rods that he used to model molecules. One day, he was trying to demonstrate a reaction. His exact words were, “I’d like to show you this reaction, but I don’t have enough balls for it.” He had no idea why the class started snickering.

In the same class, we had a sub come in one day to teach us about IR spectroscopy. Now, keep in mind, we had never so much as heard the theory behind it before. This guy, who’s even older than the regular teacher, comes in, slaps transparencies of spectra on the projector, and starts going off. “Look at this curve here, what a beautiful -OH group!” “This is a great carbonyl group!” On and on and on like that. Not a person in the class had the slightest idea what he was talking about. We were all looking at each other, puzzled. Finally someone let out a little snort of amusement. The teacher looked up, PISSED. “This is NOT funny! We do NOT laugh in this class! This is a very serious topic that YOU need to know!!!” No one else laughed. We were all too busy picking our lower jaws up off the floor.

Then there was the teacher of my O-Chem lab, the self-described bitch. She taught two sections that met on the same days. She gave the same quiz to both sections, returning them, corrected, before the end of the class. A few weeks into it, she revealed that she was worried about cheating. Apparently, people from the morning section were giving the corrected quizzes to the afternoon section. Her solution? No, not any of the dozens of solutions you’re thinking of. She made an “extra-hard” quiz, so that the only people to do well would be the cheaters. And she told us about it beforehand. So, anyway (there’s a point eventually, I promise), she was returning the quizzes that day and comes to me. She asked me my name, I told her, and she said, in this really suspicious tone, “Oh, yes, I know you. I have you all figured out.” I looked at my score, which was quite good, seeing as how I’d actually studied and all. “That’s quite a good score you’ve got there,” she said. “Yep,” I said, and she moved on. Bitch.

54

If we’re going to move on to college teachers, I guess I have a few more stories in that department. I had an anthro prof who was an absolute banshee- I remember that once she chewed out her TA in front of the class (all 200 or so of us) because the TA hadn’t brought something she wanted to use for class. As the TA walked out to get it, the prof made some comment to the class about “incompetent grad students.” Another time some grips were setting up a TV for a video she wanted to show during class, and as they worked she kept telling the class that “This is obviously a Larry, Moe, and Curly situation,” things of that sort. She wouldn’t last a minute on the SDMB- she was constantly and blatantly abusive, and often the abuse was very sexist in nature. You know, if the grips can’t get the video working immediately, it’s because all men are incompetent, things of that sort.

In the end, I ended up nearly missing the three-hour final exam because she had rescheduled it. Admittedly, I would have known about this had I not missed the first 10 minutes of class every day… but she didn’t teach well enough to make it worthwhile for me to be punctual. Moreover, she didn’t run the schedule change through the department; she just up and decided that she would have the exam when and where she pleased. I got to the exam about ten minutes before the end, and she was there outside the door of the classroom, glaring at me. “Do you want to take the exam? You have ten minutes left.” (Well, since in ten minutes I would be able to score about 1% of the points on the three-hour final, why even bother? It’s not like it could possibly affect my grade.) I told her that I had been unaware of the schedule change and would like to take a makeup exam, and she started screaming at me right there, right outside the classroom. I told her that she had no right to scream at me, and she replied, “Ssssh!! Are you crazy? People are trying to take an exam in there- how can you be so inconsiderate as to raise your voice?” Needless to say, she quickly found that such logic did not set well with me. I shouted her down with the Doc Holliday-like abandon of one who has nothing to lose.

Afterwards I found out from another student that she had been in a particularly bad mood because, having not told any administrators about her schedule change by divine fiat, she ended up with the entire class in the classroom ready to take the exam… at the exact same time that another professor had scheduled his exam, and he had done it through the appropriate channels. She demanded to know why he was in her classroom during her exam time, and it quickly devolved into a screaming match between the two profs in front of their combined classes (roughly what- 400 students?) She ultimately turned to the student onlookers, declared, “This is obviously an example of male stupidity,” and stormed out.
I talked to the dean about this, and he said that he was powerless to do anything. He suggested that I call her and work out a time to retake the exam, and I tried to call, several times, but couldn’t contact her. The dean then advised me that she had probably left for Christmas vacation, and that I should just wait until the next semester to work it out. When I finally got into contact with her, she said that she wasn’t going to give me a fourth opportunity to take the exam when I had so carelessly disregarded the three she had already given me. Three? Yes, she had been, in her mind, scheduling makeup exams just for me, and since I didn’t know about them, I couldn’t take them- which, in her mind, was exactly the same as blowing them off. When I told her I had tried to contact her several times over the course of a week or more, and only stopped when I had to leave for vacation, she said that she had been in town during my vacation, and if she were me, she would for damn sure have cancelled her non-refundable airline tickets for the family vacation just in case there were a slim chance that the hellbitch would let me retake the exam. Fortunately, in the end I found that I didn’t need her course to graduate after all.

I had heard that she kept getting bounced from university to university because no one in their right mind would give her tenure, but I checked her webpage and found that they haven’t fired her yet. In fact, I think she finally got tenture at my old school!

-Ben

55

My HS Chemistry teacher pronounced accurate “ACC-re-ite”. That always seemed a little ironic to me.

Last fall I took a speech class at the local CC, and the instructor was generally about as engaging to listen to as a clump of dirt. The thing that tore me up about his class, though, was his confusion over standard vs nonstandard usage: He said “Standard” is anything geographically or dialectically different, including slang, colloquialisms, jargon, and other constructions not used in Proper English; “Non-Standard” is essentially Standard Written English, accepted and understood by everyone.
I never did call him on it, and he said it three times. And the kicker was, yup, you guessed it, it was on the final.

56

Grade 6 or 7 Science class. Talking about “Black Holes.”

The culprit: Mr. Hiltz

Student: “Can you see black holes?”

Mr. Hiltz: (in his serious voice) “Yes. They’re slightly “darker” patches that the rest of the sky. You have to really know where you are looking though…”

The scary part… he was dead serious.
Other than that, I really liked him.

57

My 10th grade biology teacher told our class, in a long, drawn-out explanation, that the Challenger had been blown up by a Soviet missile. Does that count?

58

Third grade. On the wall is a number line, with positive and negative numbers extending on either side of a big, red 0. For the millionth time that morning, the teacher declares, “It’s impossible to subtract a larger number from a smaller one.”

“But Mrs. X!” I say, not one to know when to keep my mouth shut. “Sure you can! You just use negative numbers!”

“There’s no such thing as negative numbers!” she declares. Huh.

Eighth grade. The teacher is going on about the evils of drug use, and all those horrible druggies who go around shooting marijuana.

High School. I had many fine teachers in HS…but then there was Sr. Jean. Freshman were required to take a class on the Bible. Don’t ask me what it was supposed to teach us. Girls who visibly slept through class got A’s. Others got B’s, unless you asked any questions at all, in which case you got a C. Sr. Jean would engage in a surreal, hour long monologue, covering any number of totally unrelated topics. In her class, I learned that the leaning tower of Pisa was leaning because the builders were holding the blueprint crooked while they worked. I learned that people invariably sit up right before they die because they see Jesus coming for them. We were told that she’d stopped going to movies, largely because the last one she’d gone to was intolerable–people kept getting up and going back and forth to buy hot dogs. (“Sister,” asked the class smartass, “was this movie called The Cards vs the Cubs?”)

Senior year, a substitute history teacher insisted that Northern Ireland had a Protestant population because the folks there hadn’t been converted to Christianity on St. Patrick’s watch, but were converted by the English when they arrived.

Oh, and registering as an entering (high school) freshman, the chemistry teacher, who was a complete dolt (though, to be fair, generally a good person) informed my mother, the research biochemist, that she wouldn’t understand about real science and how important it was, but he was a real scientist, and she could take his word for it, it was a good thing to have in one’s education. My mother, who does know when to keep her mouth shut, smiled pleasantly and said, “I don’t doubt that it is.”

College was mercifully free of such things.

59

At one time, Centra America WAS one nation, but that was in the early 19th century.

60

Oh shit! That just reminded me of the principal we had in 8th grade, Sister Leona. We would go out on the parking lot after lunch for recess, and for some reason, we always had to say the Pledge before we went back in. We also had basketballs and kickballs to play with during recess, and some of the guys would dribble them during the Pledge. Sister Leona one day said over the announcements on the intercom, “You will not play with your balls during the Pledge of Allegiance.” The entire class, including our teacher, was howling. And according to some of the other classes, most of their teachers as well.