One more: This is from college.
I had a professor who came to a class Holloween party as an Abortionist. His costume was complete with large amounts of fake blood and a “bloody” speculum.
Freak.
My most eccentric teacher would be Mr. Eurcons, 7th grade science.
His classroom was a jungle. He had all the desks arranged in a rough spiral and you sat according to your grade highest grades in the center. All along the windows sat fishtanks filled with fish, small animals and various other critters like tarantulas. He had large cages with birds in them and lots and lots of potted plants. Tables around the room contained extra plants and tanks of stuff. Sometimes you would find a spider spun its web from a plant to your desk. You weren’t allowed to disturb it at all.
Each term we had a large project due. One consisted of growing flowers. Another was to analyze the sexual reproduction of a certain species and homo sapiens was one of them. I got a type of insect. These projects were most of your semester grade. Not something easily left for the night before.
Extra credit could be gained by bringing in bugs. My friend and I carried baby food jars in our book bags so we could snag extra credit on the way to school in the morning 
I wish I kept my notes from this class. He covered biology better than my 9th grade biology teacher did.
I also took a Technical Writing class in college that reminded me a lot of this science class. The professor was ex military and hippie all in one.
The bulk of our grade consisted of a technical manual to be passed in at the end of the term. He handed out a sheet of possible subjects for research and told us to pick one. He said if he had to sit and read anything that long and involved it would be about something he found interesting and about something that wasn’t readily available at termpapers.com. My subject was Alkahest.
He gave very specific assignments and I never understood why so many of the kids had problems completing things. If he said: make an org chart and all headers will be neatly boxed in black ink with straight lines, someone from class would use blue pen and circle the headers and complain when they got an F. :rolleyes:
Grades were calculated for every class and you were listed on the attendance list by grade and title. He gave everyone titles based on their rank. He was the president and everyone else ranked accordingly from executives, to clerical staff, to janitorial staff. I saw people cry in that class when they saw their grades.
I also had the worst high school calculus teacher ever. He had 3 suits and 4 shirts and 6 ties and wore them in the same pattern. He also knew nothing about calculus. He was tenured and a couple of years away from retirement and biding his days. I needed to pass in some homework and get the new assignments one morning because I would be spending the day at the hospital so I went to every teacher before school. When I hit his office I explained everything and handed him my homework. He looked at me and asked me what class I had him for: calculus, then he asked me when he taught that? I replied 1-2. Calculus with this man was my first period class and the one he was on his way to teach in 10 minutes and yet he had no clue. He only taught one calculus class that semester it wasn’t that he taught calculus all day and needed to know which session I was in. Needless to say I was not well prepared for college calc!
I had just turned 17 when I started college. A professor let me hang out in his office between classes and let me read from his private bookshelf while he was teaching his classes. I read *Justine * and Juliette and the *Story of O * ,among others, all from his extensive collection. His wife became convinced that we were sleeping together when I kept answering his phone. She started showing up unexpectedly at his office. All this went completely over my head, I had no clue about the stories that were all over the campus until several years later. Oh well, I was innocent of all accusations.
Where to start? Looking back, I think my quirky teachers outnumbered the normal ones, especially since I was in French Immersion and we were convinced Quebec sent all their nutcases out west to teach.
The strangest was one I got stuck with for multiple classes from grade 8 up to grade 10. She was permentantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. One day she put on some “soothing” music to supposedly calm our nerves while we wrote a test. Problem was, she had the volume cranked up all the way. When a student asked her to turn it down, not off mind you, just down, she freaked. For a moment I thought the poor person who had spoken up was going to get their head ripped off. This same teacher also had a difficult relationship with advanced technology such as the 1970s VCRs the school had. One time she had the whole class troubleshooting the thing before someone finally noticed she hadn’t plugged it in. Another time, she nearly broke the VCR trying to shove a tape in upside down and backwards. Yet another time, she did get the VCR to work, then left the room while we watched the movie. The movie ended and she hadn’t come back yet, so no one bothered to stop the tape, so we discovered the hard-core porn she had taped after the movie. When she did come back, she stood and watched it for a while before finally stopping the tape.
Social Studies: Mme. Cloutier, more commonly known as Mme. Clueless. During tests, people could discuss the answers with their friends on the opposite side of the room without her noticing. She also made us all practice rolling our r’s in a way that made us sound like we were trying to cough up a hairball. Eventually she moved back to Montreal.
More Social Studies: Mme. Clueless’s replacement was a slimeball. Sleaze oozed out of every pore. Got fired after one year because he told a classmate that she would receive an A on her project if she attached a photo of herself in a bikini.
Math: Yet another French Immersion class. The teacher looked like Hercule Poirot - short, bald, waxed mustache. Liked to claim he was god because his initials were G.O.D. Was fond of wearing red underwear with white pants. Otherwise a great teacher.
History: Not a French Immersion teacher this time. Constantly smoked in the classroom (this was in the mid-90s). His hair and skin were all the same shade of nicotine yellow. Was a highly entertaining teacher, but could not leave his personal biases out of his teaching. In particular, he was quite fond of giving us his personal assessment of the intelligence of the prominent figures of the 20th century.
English: Believed there was only one possible interpretation of any piece of literature. Constantly gave us homework assignments full of open-ended questions related to one’s interpretation of the reading. He would then ask students to read their answers out in class. As the student read, he would seem to be nodding encouragingly. Once the student finished, he would say, “Well, you could be right, but you’re not” and launch into his only possible right answer.
There’s more, but this is long enough as it is.
Freshman year at college (a rather shaky liberal arts department; it’s not really what we’re here to do) we developed the habit of referring most of the liberal arts teachers by their medical conditions. We had the pregnant lady, the deaf lady, etc. The cream of the crop was the allergic lady. She was allergic to dogs. She owned three of them. Therefore, she never felt well enough to grade anything.
Lots of weird teachers (some better than others) here at school, but mainly they’re just funny to watch. One is so anal retentive that he reserves time for digressions at the beginning and end of each class and will just out-talk you if you try to bring one up in the middle of the class.
High School–
In physics we watched Saturday Night Live reruns more than we did physics.
The top banana of my educational experience, however, was my Italian teacher. At a certain point she deciding she would retire in a few years and it went downhill from there. But let’s start at the beginning.
She drank a thermos of espresso twice in the course of the day.
Despite her habit of hanging up posters around the room, she refused to let me put one of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling.
Frequently she assigned reports on opera. When CD’s (remasterings of old recordings, for example) got scratchy sounding, or when the volume needed adjusting, she took care of this by wiggling the antenna on the all-in-one boombox.
Her favorite act, though, was to break open one of her canned ‘you kids today’ speeches. There were several themes which were generally worked in:
Once again, none of you did your homework properly. You kids today have it so easy. Your parents give you everything, and it makes you materialistic and lazy. You spend too much time at the mall and never study. Your parents buy you cars and clothes and you don’t care about anything else. I was different. We came to this country when I was nineteen and I always did all my homework and I cleaned the house and I cooked and I took in laundry to make extra money and then I gave it all to my parents and I always got A’s in school and always did everything adults told me to. [from what she told us in the course of three years, we can deduce that either the rest of her family were total deadbeats, or she herself was a severe workaholic. Take your pick.] You kids take everything for granted. My husband and I are never materialistic like that. We give each other meaningful gifts for birthdays and holidays and they always mean something beyond what they cost.
–five minute interval, during which she may or may not have actually taught–
oooOOoohh! Guess what my husband me for my birthday again this year! Another Lexus!
Granted, she had to cope with a lot. The kid in front of me was still trying to spell Ciao ‘chow’ in a dictation after six months in the class. And she did have a sense of humor, even if it was warped. There was a sign over the door to the classroom:
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi chi entrate qui.
Leave (behind) all hopes, you who enter here. (from Dante’s Inferno)
She always pointed that one out before pop quizzes.
Looks like you were pretty thirsty during high school 
Huh. I wonder if being logged in as my roommate counts under Gaudere’s Law.
No kidding. My gen psych professor always sounded disturbingly upbeat about the various illnesses and issues in the case studies we reviewed in that class. Phineas Gage, especially, was a source of much amusement. And another professor (he specialized in the psychology of death) apparently got in trouble years ago when he got in a student’s face and asked her if she would kiss her parents’ corpses during a funeral. She was quite offended and fiasco ensued.
In high school, my AP English teacher was a very cool woman. My class formed the AP English Mafia and she was the Godmother. She even let us have a Christmas party and we made t-shirts. More memorable was the survey of western literature class I had with her – she was also teaching 10th grade English at the time and spent large portions of time reading aloud from the worst essays. We would all have nice bitching sessions about how evil other classes were. In terms of actual schoolwork, we would do group projects and she let us do loads of fun group activities and class always seemed more like a kindergarten. We had masks made up for characters from Oedipus Rex and fingerpainting and board games hanging everywhere. I actually learned tons from those two classes and I wish all of my classes had been like that. Even if it was a bit ridiculous sometimes.
In college, my art professor was one interesting character. He always walked around wearing this hat and trenchcoat and the absolute worst tie-jacket combinations. In addition, he was constantly sniffling and rubbing his nose. He also really liked his alcohol and he’d talk about going drinking over the weekends. He was also really perverted in that tolerable old man kind of way, talking about how pretty all the girls on campus looked during the springtime in their shorts. He also really liked to talk about how he lived in India for seven years. (He really liked to talk…mostly about India and how Bush is an idiot and how modern art and architecture really sucks.) But even more often occurring in conversation were the two questions he asked at least three times a week over the course of half a semester: “Has anyone been to Italy?” and “Has anyone read the Greek play Antigone?”
He was also big on planning far too much than could realistically fit within the time frame – it wouldn’t normally matter, but this was only one unit in a semester-long class and we had to make a presentation for the other students enrolled in the class in other units at the end of the time. I learned a great deal about Greek and Roman architecture and how liveless modern architecture is, but he had loads more stuff planned for class that we never got to, which was a bit disappointing.
I suspect the man was actually amazingly brilliant (he got a big grant to go restore this Indian theatre he found or studied intensely or something like that), but his brain was just constantly in a fog out on Mars. He was the source of most of my amusement that semester, but you really would just have to know him.
My health professor was also really out there. He is the supremely liberal professor that all the right-wingers warn you about. He walked in the first day in a Hawaiian shirt and wild curly hair all over the place and told everyone to call him “talks to trees” because he felt that it represents his spirit. Class started off everyday with 3 minutes of meditation and a greeting time. I learned very little about health in that class…just that America is evil, Asia is the source of all things wonderful, and Australian aborigines deserve a large amount of worship. Even that wouldn’t’ve been a problem, even if it didn’t relate at all to the subject, except that he told me both that I have no focus (based on my answer to the question “Why am I here in the world?” Apparently snarky, even if quite serious, responses were not acceptable) and that I will never be fully healthy because I’m an atheist AND refused to acknowledge perfectly legitimate points of view from his students despite claiming to be openminded and willing to listen. Plus he e-mailed loads of glurge to everyone every single day and gave a final exam on material that had never been reviewed in class and wasn’t contained in the textbook or class packet. But the glurge was the killer. I disliked that man to an extreme.
I forgot to mention. In Grade 6, we had art; the regular art teacher (a rather humourless lady in her late 50s/early 60s) was on leave, and her son was teaching the course. He was the original wild artist, with crazy hair and who (I think) wore sandals to class (this was a rather stuffy private school, understand).
Once, I told him that I tried to read Nicolaides’ The Natural Way to Draw, and then joked that I couldn’t get through it because I couldn’t find anyone to pose nude for me. He immediately started taking off his clothes. Startled, I said that I was joking. He stopped, but said “Never joke about Nicolaides!” in a very ‘sacrilege!’ tone of voice.
A few more that I’ve remembered:
Grade 11 Chemistry: The teacher always turned off all the lights and read what he was writing on the overhead projector word-for-word. Naturally, people would start to fall asleep, especially when his class was first thing in the morning. So if the teacher noticed anyone drifting off, he would start to yell random words as he lectured. Also, his favourite word was hooey. For some reason, one day he came up behind my lab partner and I as we were working, and he yelled “HOOEY!” at the top of his voice. I’d caught him out of the corner of my eye so I had a bit of warning, but we practically had to peel my partner off the ceiling.
Grade 12 Chemistry: Another teacher with a limited wardrobe. He always wore the exact same outfit for the entire week, with his favourite article of clothing being a t-shirt of the periodic table where the radioactive elements glowed in the dark. His classroom was a deathtrap - there were jugs of sulphuric acid perched atop precarious stacks of books. And yet he wondered why no one took his safety warnings seriously.
And one from university:
My calculus professor was a late-middle aged Eastern European man for whom the seventies had never ended. He always wore his shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel, so we could get a good look at his gold chains and copious chest hair. He also wore cordoroy hot pants on a regular basis - a rather brave fashion choice in Montreal winters.
Yep. I don’t think I ever learned how to properly spell that word. 