I can’t think of anything weird as in bizarre. I did have a band director in middle school who had a short temper and would yell at us kids, throw stands, break his baton, and things of that sort if we were making too many mistakes.
Chem teacher made ‘pop rocks’ and spread them in the hallway for people to step on.
My ninth grade history teacher had a room like a museum, packed clear full of genuine historical artifacts. He even, like a museum, had a closed-off room next door to his with even more artifacts that he didn’t have room to display. And whenever he got to a lesson where one of those artifacts was relevant, he’d take it down and pass it around the classroom.
At one point, we had, circulating through a room of thirty 14-year-old boys, two swords, six daggers, a heavy flail, a shield, and a helmet.
This same teacher had a grading scale based on the standard A = 4, B = 3, etc, and would average all the grades together on that basis. But he extended it. A+ = 4.5, H = 5, H+ = 6, and a “Hum-dinger” was 7 or more. I sometimes got “Hum-dingers” of up to 11 points. I’m pretty sure that, by the end of the year, I could have turned in a blank paper for my final exam and still gotten an A (of course, being the kind of student I was, I didn’t try it).
It’s somewhat unusual, but how is it weird?
I wish we could have afforded liquid nitrogen. Instead we got to play with mercury. Roll it around on the desks, handle it, whatnot.
Ninth grade General Science teacher - he was the best and I learned so much from him. I suppose this isn’t weird on the scale of some of the things mentioned here, but when he noticed that someone wasn’t paying attention or dozing off, he’d kick the metal trash can. THAT got everyone’s attention!
In that thread, I mentioned that one of my favorite field trips was when our science teacher took us to tour the sewage treatment plant. Same teacher for this entry. This was middle school, probably 6th grade. In the middle of a class, she said she had to take care of something and left the room. A few minutes later, she came back in, wearing an old ratty wedding dress (presumably hers, presumably ratty from doing this skit) and in a high pitched sing-songy voice said she was “The Great Pheoc” and went on and on for 10 minutes or so. To this day, some 30 years later, I still think “PHEOC, problem, hypothesis, experiment, observation, conclusion” when I need to remember the scientific method. So, it was odd, and it’s one of the many, many reasons a lot of students (and I think, other staff) didn’t much like her, she was quite an oddball, but a lot of the stuff she taught has stuck with me and she’s one of the big reasons I’ve always gravitated towards the hard sciences.
A while back I was listening to someone. I want to say it was Neil deGrasse Tyson, but it could have been Bill Nye or, for some reason, I can hear Adam Savage saying it. Whoever it was, asked the listeners to think about their favorite teacher or the one that had the most impact on their life. That teacher may or may not have been the best teacher or the most knowledgeable teacher or any of those things, but they were passionate about their subject. They truly cared about it. In my life, this was that teacher. She loved teaching science and about the only thing she loved more than teaching science was her students.
What was weird, if not unethical, were the objects used to demonstrate changes in elasticity when frozen to about -200C
9th grade geometry, Mr. Hooks. He was a short squat marine with a Ve-ry Point-ed Voice That Pro-Nounced Ev-ery Syll-able. When he’d come into the classroom, he wouldn’t close the door the regular way. He’d grab the hinge side of the door with his fingers, release them, and let the momentum of the door close itself.
He would draw a stick figure with a sombrero named “Pedro” as a class aid. “For example, if Pedro wanted to know the length of the shorter side of a 30-60-90 degree triangle, he would…”
We asked him once who he thought the best president was, and he replied “Eisenhower, because he did the best thing possible. Absolutely nothing.”
One guy in our class said before Mr. Hooks entered, “I don’t feel like doing any work today. I think I’ll get him talking about hunting.” Sure enough, we spent the whole class listening to Mr. Hooks talk about rifle scopes.
A truly great American eccentric.
The Cleveland department of sewage has a really great PR department. A few years back, they had an open house tour that they publicized with the tagline “You’ve really gotta go”.
And @Just_Asking_Questions, your school could have afforded liquid nitrogen. It’s only about a buck a liter. There are some precautions that need to be taken in transporting and storing it, but nothing beyond the capabilities of an elementary science teacher.
One of my English professors at college was at a reception being given for a visiting author. He suddenly leaped into the air, banging his head against a chandelier, which made one of its bulbs go out. Then he knocked some ash from his lit cigarette onto the rug, and skipped out the door. Another professor stomped out the fire he had started on the rug. The other professors told me that it wasn’t the first time he had done this.
Early 70s, 4th or 5th grade, I had a teacher who said if we all passed an exam halfway through the quarter he would teach us Speed Reading. We did. He did.
It didn’t stick.
There was a teacher at my high school like that. Painfully easy to get him off topic and onto something unrelated to school. He was well aware of it too. If he’d catch himself drifting into an off topic story that he wanted to finish, he’d write a time on the board (ie 10:30 because class ended at 10:45) and tell the class that someone needs to raise their hand and let him know when it’s that time so he can finish up the lesson.
My science teacher’s husband worked there, which is how we got a tour. I suspect they still do regular tours for schools, but once a year during a large city wide event (Doors Open Milwaukee), they open up to the public, as do a ton of other places around the city.
My ninth grade drama teacher had a couple of her old students crash our class one day, wearing camouflage, waving fake guns, and screaming at us to get down on the floor. Mostly we were confused and just went along with it, but one girl freaked out crying and screaming for help.
This was supposed to teach us something about improv.
Oh, boy.
One morning our Latin teacher walked into a particularly raucous classroom. After the bell rang and the noise continued, he walked behind his desk and sat on the floor. He put his hand on the desk and stuck his feet out of the bottom.
He said: “I’m hiding, I’m hiding, and no one knows I am here, because all they can see are my feet and my hands.”
You could hear a pin drop.
I had a professor in college who mentioned in passing that she had psychic powers. She said very casually, like it was a perfectly normal thing to say.
My eighth-grade teacher was particularly enamoured with the school’s laminating machine. He would often laminate rather large food items (muffins, etc.) onto card stock and then pin them to his floor-to-ceiling bulletin board. I have no idea how he got these things through the machine without breaking it, but they came out pretty flat. Some of the pieces he had pinned to the wall had been there for years without developing mould, which was a point of pride for him.
I’m not sure this is all that unusual. Pretty much every math professor I had in university did the same thing. (Come to think of it, they didn’t always use blue markers, but I don’t remember any of them erasing mistakes with anything other than their fingers.)
My high school chemistry teacher liked to play little pranks, like the time he did a lecture about conductivity of liquids. He had several beakers lined up with different mixtures and took turns dipping wires with a battery and a light attached into each of them. As he went down the row of beakers, each one had slightly different results from the bulb not lighting at all to being very bright.
Then he got to the last beaker and the bulb didn’t light up…until he started making magician-like hand gestures and it began to flash on and off with each wave of his hand. Amazing! (Well, until we figured out that he was surreptitiously shaking the beaker so that the liquid level dropped from side to side to where the tip of one of the wires or the other was out of the liquid)