Stupidest thing one of your teachers ever said or did?

In My Humble Opinion
121

I’m another one that’s been accused of plagerism. We had a relief teacher for a term when the other one left, and she hated me basically from the start - telling me off for things I never even did, marking down my work for insignificant details, etc. And then, after spending ages the previous weekend working on a research assignment, she drags me up to the front of the class, and - in front of EVERYONE - accused me of copying it straight off of a website. Apparently because I hadn’t used the exact same headings that she’d used as an example, it was obviously plagerised - plus being too good for me to ever have written. After she said this I was very, very pissed.

In the end my mother rung up and sorted it out with my year co-ordinator, and I showed my teacher all of my notes and prior assignments to show how not only had I studied for it, but it followed the same writing pattern as I normally use. So I got an A for that and almost every other assignment for the year. Basically, I figured the whole thing was over.

Until I got my report. She gave me a C for the semester.

I really hated that bitch.

122

I’ve encountered many lousy teachers during my matriculation.

My high school gym teacher ( I had the same bastard for 4 out of 5 years) liked to take me, and the only 2 other guys in the school shorter than me, and put us on the same basketball team trio. Even in grade 10 not one of us was more than 4’10", and we collectively weighed 320 pounds.
Then he’d make another team of the guys who were 6’5"+.
But he also used to have a window in his office that looked into the girls’ locker room.

My university gave out A+ as the top grade, defined as being 95%. One particular teacher absolutely refused to hand this out, saying “An a is a perfect grade, so how can any of you do better than perfect?”

But at least I had some good teachers once I got out of high school. The best was the physics teacher who gave it up to teach Communication Studies.

123

So cool to learn a new word usage. My brother is an actuary (US)–neat how those words are similar.

[/hijack]

124

You need a little background info for this one: I was in Brownies as a kid, and meetings were on Wednesdays, which was the same day my sister had violin lessons. My mom would take my sister to her lesson and my dad would pick me up from the meetings after work.
So one Wednesday in grade three I fell and hit my head against a steel door at recess, and blacked out. I came to a few seconds later, so that no one (not even the prick who pushed me) realised anything was wrong.

A few hours later I still have a terrible headache and can’t concentrate on anything, so I decide to go directly home after school instead of going to Brownies. I explained the situation to my teacher and asked if I could call my mom to tell her I wasn’t going to Brownies, and that she should pick me up and take me with her. Teacher said no. Being the obedient child I was I sat back down and continued to space out.

So after school I go home. Of course, since I never carried a key I couldn’t get into the house, but luckily the van was unlocked so I crawled in there and slept for the next two or so hours, not even noticing when my dad carried me indoors. I don’t remember the trip to the hospital or anything.

Yep, I had a concussion, and the stupid teacher let me go home alone and sleep.

I found out when I got to grade four that I’d lost a good half-year’s worth of school-related memories, too.

125

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to spot this thread. I’ve got a few gems to share, myself. Fortunately, I’m in elite company here, so hopefully none of this will sound too immodest (looks furtively around for Hamadryad, expecting another rap on the knuckles). I’ll keep it to one story from each school.

Elementary School, grade 1:

Like many of you, I was an early reader, and my parents gave me free access to their books and to the library. As I found my reading class overwhelmingly boring, I’d usually zip through my assignment, then pull out a book from home to read. On one memorable occasion, I was reading Shield of Three Lions (historical fiction involving the Lionheart). My teacher refused to believe that I was actually reading it, so she made me read a passage out loud. It happened to be a rape scene. She faltered for a moment, but she had more guts than sense, so she then insisted that I couldn’t possibly understand it–so I explained the scene (in considerable clinical detail) in the middle of a room full of first graders. I don’t think she ever spoke to me again.

Junior High, grade 7:

A general science teacher insisted that the moon does not rotate. I was quite vocal in my disagreement (I was never inclined to keep my mouth shut when someone was wrong), but explanations, drawings, and references from the text wouldn’t sway him. I finally had to snag a volunteer from the class to “orbit” him to demonstrate the rotation.

High School, grade 10:

A little background here–I was not a normal child (doesn’t sound like there are many Dopers who were). I was a geek with a talent for finding things out, and for taking things over. I could do whatever I wanted with the school computer system (including looking at certain private–and rather incriminating–files), I controlled the climate control system (I was the only one who could program it, or who even knew where the access panel was), and I could and did pick the locks on lots of “Confidential” filing cabinets. In short, even the faculty members that didn’t like me generally considered it unwise to antagonize me.

Not the Bitch with the Bleached Blonde Hair, though–she didn’t have the mother-wit to come in out of a thunderstorm. She was bound and determined to change me. She didn’t approve of pessimism or irreverance, and heaven forbid someone should make use of sarcasm. The friction would probably have been limited, though, if she had been teaching one of the regular classes with 20 or so students. Unfortunately, they had yanked the accelerated math classes away from those of us in the GT (Gifted/Talented) program and replaced them with her “Enrichment” class (mostly a very poor survey of arts class). There were only two other students. We spent several months clogging all over each other’s nerves before the dam broke: She finally ordered me to say at least three optimistic/positive/pollyannaish things in each class. I stalked over to her desk, loomed over her, and said in the iciest voice I could manage, “No.” She sent me to the principal’s office. I handed him the little “misconduct” form and arched an eyebrow. He shredded it and told me to go back to class and send her to him. On my way out, I patched his intercom circuit through to our classroom so that we could listen to him chew her out. It was quite a treat–he wasn’t very bright, but he had a booming voice and an impressive command of invective. BBBH never spoke directly to me again, either–another treat.

College, Junior year, EE:

I was taking one of the required cross-disciplinary classes (an ME Materials class) with one of the dippiest professors I’ve ever run across. She was pleasant enough, and actually did know the material, but she lived in a perpetual state of confusion. The class was easy, and she put bonus problems on every test (although they were hardly necessary–at least half the class scored over 90% on the tests anyway). I generally worked the bonus for the hell of it, as it was often the only challenging thing on the exam–every little piece of it had to be right to get any credit. I got one test back with the bonus marked wrong. It puzzled me, because it had been an unusually easy problem–simple algebraic substitution to turn a nonlinear equation into a linear one, plug in the right values, and go. I compared my answer with that of a friend who had gotten credit–he had the same result, but he had taken a much more roundabout way of getting it. I didn’t need the points, but I was annoyed on principle, so I confronted her about it–she insisted that I hadn’t done it correctly.

“So how did I use the supplied values to get the right answer to 4 decimal places?”
“Um…I don’t know.”
“Look, I’ll explain how it works…”
[five minutes of explanation, then I see the light bulb come on]
“Oh, I’m teaching that to another class right now! I just wasn’t expecting to see it here.”

Airhead. At least she admitted it, though.

126

I will never understand why PE teachers are so fond of this running-backwards business. I don’t know how many stories I’ve heard about students being badly injured while running backwards in gym class. A girl in my 8th grade PE class fell and broke her foot. A lot of things kids do in gym class are difficult or boring, but it seems to me that this one is really danerous and should not be allowed.

127

In 5th grade, on the last real day of school, Ms. Miller gave us a math problem: “A bottle and a cork together cost $2.10. The bottle costs $2.00 more than the cork. How much does the cork cost?” All the class (except me) came up with ten cents. Of course, the right answer is five cents. And Ms. Miller? She was squarely in the ten cents camp. I tried and tried, but I didn’t know algebra yet, so I couldn’t prove it. The whole class decided that I just couldn’t admit being wrong. I went home and my dad helped me with an algebraic proof, and the next day (field day, no classes) I found Ms. Miller and showed her the proof. Did she admit that she was wrong? No! She said “Well, you’ve really got me thinking.” I guess making her actually think was progress, but it wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been.

In 6th grade, Ms. Wong the math teacher let us take pre-tests to see if we already knew the material and could move on to more challenging chapters. One such test asked if a quantity was greater, less than or equal to another. It was something like .025 and .0250. Now, in pure math, these quantities are obviously equal. But apparently the answer key said that .0250 was greater than .025. And Ms. Wong agreed with it! So I had to do a whole chapter on decimals because I understood them better than the teacher.

Later, on a different pre-test, there was a section that was addressed on the pre-test by only one question, and the answer to the question was a write-in. I got the answer right, to four decimal places. Ms. Wong decided I had to do the section anyway, because “even a monkey could get it right, because it’s either right or wrong, and that’s a 50/50 chance.” Apparently the odds of me writing in the exactly correct digits, out of 100,000 different possible numbers, was 50%. What was this woman doing teaching math? I think her real motive for not letting me skip over stuff I already knew is that she would have had to come up with something for me to do.

In high school I had one english teacher who, in “advanced composition”, had her students bring in vocabulary words, which she would write on the board and later mimeograph for everyone. When students read her the words, she’d write them up but misspell them! If I didn’t correct her spelling right then, everyone would get a mimeographed copy of the mistakes and ignorance would propagate unchecked. So of course I corrected her, which put me on her bad list forever more. One day I was using my pocketknife, which was dull as a rock and had passed unnoticed in the previous three years of high school, and she saw it and gave me a referral to the dean. He informed me of the “no weapons” policy, in force even if you use it for peeling fruit, and that was fine. The next week, I walked in to class and she said “I’m giving you a referral.” I asked what for and she said “I don’t like your attitude.” A referral for nothing, just that she didn’t like me. Wow. It was especially fun because a third referral would mean automatically failing the class and likely not graduating. I argued with the dean and he said it didn’t matter if the referral was unwarranted, it still counted, and he suggested since she was handing out referrals for nothing I should transfer to another class. Of course, I was taking that english class entirely because it was the only one available that period. It ended up working out okay, though, I got an independent study with an english teacher who loved my attitude.

In a college creative writing course we were reading our works. One student I believe spoke japanese as his native language, but was working hard at writing in english, and his piece was an interesting bit about walking in the snow, and mentioned seeing a rabbit’s spoor. The teacher said “His what?” The student explained and spelled it, s-p-o-o-r. The teacher said “No, no, it’s s-p-o-r-e, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means. You’ll need to correct that.” AAAGH! The teacher is supposed to know english better than the students who don’t speak it! I dropped that class, I just couldn’t take it.

128

God, one drill we often had to do at the beginning of the year was running to the end of the gym, spinning around, and trying to run back. Eventually we learned to follow the lines on the floor, but there was always someone who’d end up following the basketball court and smash his head into the pole holding up the net. The rest of us were usually to nauseous to laugh.

129

God, one drill we often had to do at the beginning of the year was running to the end of the gym, spinning around, and trying to run back. Eventually we learned to follow the lines on the floor, but there was always someone who’d end up following the basketball court and smash his head into the pole holding up the net. The rest of us were usually too nauseous to laugh.

130

My history teacher in 11th grade had us watching “The Wizard of Oz” for some reason one day. (I don’t remembr why, it had something to do with US History, I guess). Everyone (well, most people) have heard about the urban legend of the midget wo hangs himself in the background. Well, when we got to that scene he paused the movie and replayed it several tims to point it out to us. What annoyed me is that he was passing it off as fact. He was pointing it out like it was a proven fact that this actually happened, when we can find out from Snopes that it’s really just a tale. I wouldn’t have cared if he said “No one knows if it happened or not.”

This same teacher is a really nice guy, but he has the habit of getting off track. Prior to class we always made a list of random subjects. During class we played a game where we all tried to get him to talk about all the things on the list. It wasn’t a competition, but a group effort. We all won if he talked about all of the things!

131

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot will always remind me of my junior high English teacher, Mr. O-------.

The year was 1980 or thereabouts. For reasons unclear, Mr. O------- veers off the beaten curriculum and decides to play a recording of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” for my class. Well, it is performed in English, after all. So, O------- gets a cassette player from the school’s a/v closet, right? No. Instead, he brings in a toy robot, marketed at very young children in the '70s, with a built-in cassette deck. This particular robot is quite grimy and banged up: think R2D2 after it was hacked up and out of that Dagobah swamp. With a Summertime Dream tape where Kenny Baker should be. The red LED eyes of the robot are supposed to flash to the beat when playing music, but since “Wreck” doesn’t have much of a beat, the eyes just sort of occasionally flicker, as if the robot is slipping in and out of a coma.

At this point you may be thinking “Mr. O------- sounds like a pretty cool teacher. He’s trying to get kids interested in English through popular song. Plus, bringing in a toy robot is campy fun and shows good, self-deprecating humor.” Let me assure you that this was not the case. Mr. O------- was rather eccentric and did not enjoy a good relationship with his students. Much more likely that the voices in his head told him “No Mark Twain for your fifth period class today, Captain O-------. They must instead hear ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ from the belly of a filthy, semi-conscious robot. It is all part of The Plan.”

As you can imagine, the wattage and fidelity of this plaything were those of tin can telephones without the rope. NO ONE in the class could make out the words, even in the front row. Anyone trying to convey this to O-------, however, was met with a look of confusion and disgust, much like the look he gave everyone when he found out that we had not been taught how to diagram sentences in elementary school. (I never did learn how to diagram sentences, BTW, and yet I am somehow able to muddle through life.)

“Wreck” is a long song, and everyone had given up trying to hear it by the time it ended. O------- was furious at this and meted out punishment in the form of a pop quiz on the song which he obviously was making up as he went along. Junior high school: strange days indeed.

132

I tried to make this post eirlier, but it dosn’t seem to have taken. It’s my first, so be gentle!

Working in a library I have had occasion to run across more than a few examples of teacher stupidity.

My favorite was a group of forth graders  who were working on a project on the american civil war. As part of the project they had a list of people on whom thay had to write papers. The problem was, that no one on staff could find any information on any of them. They had an assignment sheet full of supposedly promenent people that as far as the resources in the library could tell, didn't exist. I even went as far as to ask the members of the local civil war round table (you know, those guy who can tell you Robert E. Lee's shoe size from memory), no luck. Finally the truth came out, the teacher had bought one of those "historic novels" (never saw the book, but bets Fabio was on the cover). The books was a work of fiction with a historic setting. The teacher had assumed that the characters were real people.
133

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by RickJay *
**

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by gigi *
**

What? is that right one in four of going HHHTTT? Shouldn’t that be 64 instead of four?

134

Oh God, PE teachers…
Here are two high school lousy memories:

  1. It was very hot, well into the 90s, and I asked the PE teacher if we could go into the gym and work out instead of playing outside. She said, “It’s NEVER too hot to play!”
    She’d never heard of heatstroke, apparently.
  2. On a very hot smoggy day, when there was probably a smog alert in effect, the teacher made us run around the entire field. Then I got bronchitis and missed a week of school.

What is with these people??

135

5th Grade History/Social Studies:

The teacher that was there at the time had it laid out that for each marking period, we would learn about a section of the states for the USA. No problem, we all get through about three-quarters or so of them then she leaves on maternity leave. So we get this substitute teacher who I guess was supposed to know his stuff.

This strange teacher instead of focusing on having us finish the rest of the states, he has us reading things from the book from chapters or two before on the states that weren’t really important for us then. The tests were really weird and stuff from him. He liked to focus on the “South” and the Civil war so some student brought in their Civil War Era Type Rifle (15 years before the guns in school stuff) and records with Hank Williams Jr. song, etc.

We never did finish the states so come 6th grade, the new teacher that took over was doing a map of the US. Same class from last year. Guess what happens when we got to the last part of the US - nobody knew it. It was over the Summer, we didn’t bother to study ourselves. Blamed on that teacher but nobody cared. The other teacher gave us a good system to study for the states. We actually learned the rest of the states since this other teacher had to teach us but that was weird.

136

Believe it or not, there is a good reason for this.

The book The Wizard of Oz was written with the Populist party in mind and everything in the story is symbolic. Like the Witch of the West- symbolizes the elements, and the whole going to Oz is like the farmers/etc. showing their grievences. Oh and the flying monkeys are supposed to be Native Americans (PC or what, man? :)) Oh and Dorothy’s shoes (in the book silver) represent the currency issue. So although your teacher may have been taken in by a UL, he did have your historical interests in mind.

137

Not according to Uncle Cecil, Zoggie.

If a teacher told you it was about the Populist movement, then that person deserves a post here in this thread.

138

With regard to Jamie Lee Curtis, the same UL was extant a few decades ago, but it was about Kim Novak at the time.

With regard to PE teachers, I remember once when I asked the coach (the Neanderthal, not the illiterate) for a jumprope so that I could jump rope during PE instead of wandering around on the court while the jocks played basketball around me. (Of course, I didn’t phrase it like that.) He gave me a rope with a broken handle.

Ben: “Could I have one that isn’t broken?”

Coach: “Why?”

Ben: “Well, I’d just prefer-”

Coach (in a sudden, baboon-like rage) “I DO NOT CARE WHAT YOU PREFER!”

Sheesh, if I had known jumpropes were a sensitive issue with you…

This is the same guy who would assign us to play “murderball.” It’s like dodgeball, but all the bullies are on the same team, and you’re allowed to throw the ball very hard, so that the bullies can get the joy of hurting people. At the start of the game, the bullies were excitedly talking amongst themselves: “Yeah, I’m gonna get Ben!” “No, you pussy, Ben’s mine!” Coach: “Hey- watch your language!” Of course, since the bullies weren’t very smart, they didn’t realize that while skinny kids are weak, they are also highly maneuverable. They also didn’t realize that hurling the ball with all your injury-causing might makes you even less likely to hit the skinny kid. In the end, the game was a draw- I was the last person left on my team, and the bullies were reduced to begging (yes, literally begging) me to let them spike me with a basketball.

You know, sometimes I wonder what happened to those guys. I imagine they’re being hired to talk to school assemblies about their football days.

-Ben

139

When my twin brother and I were freshmen in highschool we switched a class on april fools day. I went to his english class and he went to my science class.

The teacher that taught the class that he was in thought that it was all funny and laughed about it (she figured it out because she knew us personally)

However, the teacher of his english class didn’t notice the switch but everyone in the class did. Later, a student told her what happened and she threw an absolute fit. She went screaming to the principals office and we both got saturday school for it, but it was worth it.

140

When I was in third grade, we had a substitute teacher one day who was supposed to help us finish a certain writing project.

The project was writing a poem or something about an animal of our choosing. I chose the skunk, and I wrote a nice poem about it.

Now, we were going to write up our poems in our nicest handwriting and illustrate them as well, and all the poems were going to be hung on the walls around the classroom, so the sub wanted to see all the poems so she could help us with corrections, etc., before we did the final draft.

I got my poem back, and she had inserted the letter “r” into every skunk in my poem. They all read “skrunk”!

Hanh?

I was usually a compliant kid, but I was sure there was no “r” in “skunk.” I didn’t take issue with it, or even question it, but when I did my final draft, I just ignored the "r"s.