Many of us have had plenty of teachers - some inspiring, some creative, some kind of crazy. This thread allows you to discuss a weird event or idiosyncrasy related to your years in school.
I mentioned in the “worst field trip” thread – my 7th grade science teacher took our class out behind the school to see the school’s septic tank, and even opened the cover so we could see inside. The whole thing was part of a lesson on drainage and how the soil provides natural filtration for groundwater, but actually taking us to see the septic tank was a weird touch.
Not very weird, but one regular substitute in elementary school was notorious for vigorously adjusting her girdle in the back of the classroom, thinking somehow that no one would see.
Shout out to Mr. Kroll, greatest English teacher ever… he taught us all about The Merchant of Venice while standing in his big waist-high trash can (we weren’t listening, so he bet us we wouldn’t listen even if he was standing in garbage).
Hmmm, this was middle school. Shakespeare (and not a comedy) sounds like a challenge to teach at that age… well, guess the trash can worked!
Oh, and he had a policy of “Don’t eat candy in class unless you have enough for everyon… oh, screw ‘everyone’. Just make sure you have enough for ME.”
Annnd, during reading time or when we were taking tests, we could talk him into spying on other classrooms and reporting back (with tall tales).
One time during a test, he burst into my sister’s class (taught by a fellow trouble-makin’ teacher) and cackled “Don’t mind me. My English class is taking a test, and I’m just waiting until I’m sure someone’s looking at another kid’s paper. Then I’ll pounce like a tiger, rip up both their tests, AND three students’ papers in every direction. That just leaves one row of tests to grade, sure makes my life a lot simpler…”
Durring an English class, the teacher laid down on the floor and pretended to be one of the stone effigies that you see on stone tombs. It made me cringe at the time, and I still feel embarrassed for him.
There was this one teacher who pulled a cruel joke on a kid who fell asleep in his last class of the day. He took the clock off of the wall and set it forty minutes ahead. Just before the bell rang, he had the rest of the class quietly go out in the hall and wait. Just after the bell rang, the teacher next door woke the kid and told him he was late for going home, look at the clock, he missed the bus, etc. The kid packs up and leaves the room in a panic to find the class out there laughing at him.
When I was in 7th grade, there was a nun who made kids do push-ups as punishment. Girks had to do them in the coat room, because skirts.
But I was a goody-goody, so I never had to do any. 
I had a Spanish teacher in middle school who lost. her. shit. spitting (literally - spitting on the floor!) in outrage and disdain because at the end of the first quarter, the overwhelming number of students had failed. All got D’s or F’s…was it entirely our fault that she was a lousy teacher?
And my daughter came home one day and said how her math teacher in a fit of pique was so mad at something, she tore the telephone off the wall of the classroom. Also lost. her. shit. (though we both agreed, yeah, a math teacher, that sorry sorry creature, no one was surprised at all.)
Professor graded my test in pencil, then erased the original scores/remarks (not very well, they were still readable) & replaced them with higher scores. It was a Discrete math test so this was very weird. Then he several times became confused & lost his place during lectures. After a few weeks of this, he disappeared from the class, never to return. It was clear that this man was not okay & witnessing mental deterioration is sad. I assumed Alzheimers, but never received confirmation.
My 7-8 grade teacher had his wife come in and give a big presentation on Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collision, one of the biggest pieces of pseudoscience ever made. No, this wasn’t a presentation like “this is crap, and this is how you identify crap.” That would have been useful. No, as far as we could tell, it was a straight lecture on a thing that (might have) really happened. This was 1975, not the 50s.
I hope no one was permanently damaged, but who knows. Maybe half the class grew up to believe The Secret.
Other than that, he was a great teacher.
My 6th grade science teacher insisted that sound was faster than light.
In one of my college classes, my professor climbed onto the frames (don’t know what the proper terminology for those structures are) that crisscrossed a window in our room.
I can’t remember exactly why he did that, but my guess is that the electronic mechanism that lowers the blinds was malfunctioning, and he was either trying to find out what was wrong with the mechanism, or attempting to lower the blinds manually.
11th grade Government teacher, note; this was “Government”, not “American Government” or “Civics”, told the class he could be bribed with chocolate. I am, as far as I know, the only student that took him at his word. Used to miss half a class once or twice a week to have a pizza delivered.
I don’t know, but I think he was trying to demonstrate something about corruption and bribery.
He’d probably be fired or censured somehow today for that.
Take one (very good) Chemistry teacher, a vat of liquid nitrogen, and add various objects.
Nuff said.
My 12th grade English teacher was a big Perry Mason fan. We had to watch the show every week, and the next day she gave us a test on that episode.
A chemistry teacher at my high school never used the blackboard; instead he used to write everything on an overhead projector sheet in blue pen. Then if he wanted to erase anything on the overhead sheet, he would lick his finger and rub out the writing with his saliva (repeat hundreds of times per day). His finger and tongue were semi-permanently dyed with blue ink.
I went to Catholic school k through 12. There was a lot of weirdness. Admittedly I was an attitude and discipline problem but everyone needs a hobby.
Now we all realize that Sister Marguerite Anne was bipolar, but back then we just thought she was crazy. One afternoon I was walking from Phys Ed class to lunch. I had not tucked my shirt in. She ran up to me and grabbed the front of my shirt and shook it while screaming at me that I was nothing but a slob and in violation of the uniform rules. It was a cheap shirt and it came apart in her hands. I spent the rest of the day wearing the remains of the shirt and my necktie.
Again, I do not claim that my interaction with this woman was one sided. She was easy to set off and many of us knew her triggers. Yes, it was cruel but we were kids.
At uni, our Professor of Animal Nutrition only gave double lectures ie 2 hours. He would begin with the clean standard sized blackboard and start writing in chalk. After he’d finished the first notation, he’d get a piece of chalk of another colour. Then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Progressively the board would fill with bon mots of wisdom written at varying angles into whatever (ever decreasing) space was available. Or over notes in different colours. He never tried to clean the board. After 2 hours you’d have thought Jackson Pollack was a world leading researcher in rumen polymorphonucleophagocytes or whatever was the topic of that days performance.
You needed to watch what colour chalk he was using. If you lost track of that you were stuffed.
I’m sure this seemed stranger in 1984 than it would now, but I had a male History teacher in college who became a full time cross dresser over the space of a week. One Monday he showed up with dangly earrings, the next day he added a flowery blouse, etc, until by the following Monday he essentially looked like a Monty Python pepper pot with a beard. He dressed like that (without explanation) for at least the next three semesters I was there. Everybody just got used to it. Speculation was that it was a political/feminist statement and not a gender preference, but like the rest of society at the time, we weren’t very informed about that sort of thing.
Besides one teacher who would make kids do push-ups, there was another teacher who would make kids do “Marathon Man” push-ups. (In the movie Marathon Man, which had recently been released, there is a scene with Roy Scheider doing push-ups with his feet up on a chair.) And another teacher with a barbell set in the back of the room who would make you do a set of reps if you acted up
But the odd thing a teacher did that I remember most was when we were reading Huckleberry Finn. There is a point in the book, I think around the Grangerford/Shepherdson feud, where a crowd gathers outside the Grangerford house and Col. Grangerford stands on the roof of the house to address them. To emphasize this point, our teacher climbed up on his desk and lectured from there. I remember that occasionally someone would be walking down the hallway, and as they passed the classroom door, would stop and do a double-take.