A teacher drink gin in class, pretending it was water. She became terminally ill partway through the year. A bright woman. Quite sad.
Distractable teachers who could be persuaded to lecture about pet subjects instead of teaching, including: why Sunday shopping was immoral, Joey Smallwood, how fluid mechanics was like war, baseball, and engineering teachers fond of poetry or the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
A teacher who felt the class had poor posture, so “for gym” we learned how to walk. At age twelve. Around the soccer field for an hour.
A school where they carpeted the gym. Not sure if it was because the school was small or to discourage sports with bouncing balls.
a teacher who would excuse bright students and cared only about his side business of running a driving school
a teacher who would give you 100% if you could find his techno song online which incorporated animal noises
a teacher who (said he) got in fistfights with other drivers if he saw them throwing food wrappers or bottles out of their car window
a teacher who tried to get students in class to fight each other…
Speaking of teachers telling off topic stories, the same science teacher who took us to see the septic tank would frequently tell us stories about his trips to junkyards in search of a replacement door handle for his 1984 Volvo. Actually looking back at it now, at the time my friends and I were thinking “What a crappy old car”, but this would have been in the early 1990s, so his car wasn’t actually that old at the time.
In sixth grade, when they separated the boys from the girls, for ‘health’ class, the girls class featured a large illustration of the female reproductive system. Nothing graphic, ovaries, uterus, etc, the kind you see in any Dr’s office these days.
5minutes into class, the male phys ed teacher sticks his head in, to ask a question of the teacher. Her reaction was to gasp, throw herself in front of the illustration, even pulling her cardigan out at either side to maximum cover the image, and turn beet red!
Every girl in that room was confused. What? A medical diagram is verboten? Why on earth? Was this secret information?
The following week it went from bad to worse, she had a question box so we could ask her things without embarrassment. Because she had failed to cover this one detail, one of the questions was, “But HOW does the sperm reach the egg?” Also red faced, this time she grew angry, and refused to answer, accusing us of already knowing, and basically trolling her!
In tenth grade I had a teacher who said he’d give extra points if we included the word, antidisestablishmentarianism, on any test. I wrote it on every one!
My teacher in Grade 1 did not exude authority. The first day, she seemed confused when she entered the classroom (and she may have even come late). I became testy with her and several times, left the class without permission. Later, she enjoyed telling us spooky stories (in which she might make us a character, for example, in one, the teacher was a witch and turned me into a parrot for talking) or ones that hinted at her Catholic upbringing.
There was another teacher a few classrooms away, he had an unusual name, something like Mr. Lansoo. A couple of times, I had permission to go to the bathroom/get a drink, but he would see me passing by his class on the way there, and chase me back into my class! I never could understand why he would pick on me like that or under what authority he was doing so. In hindsight as an adult, I suspect he had found out from my teacher about the few times I had absconded without permission and, assuming I was doing so again, had taken it upon himself to stop me.
In middle school, the music teacher was an Elvis fan who had some curious ways of disciplining people. I’d heard of him throwing desks. Once, he made me stand by the blackboard, made me put his ear to it, and hit the board with a baseball bat. I was in his homeroom in grade 8. At first I was afraid of this; however, he showed me kindness and I ended up liking him a lot. I was quite upset the next school year in high school, when I heard that he had been suspended due to an accusation of sexual [something] from a female student. There was a trial and while I’m not completely sure of the outcome, I think he was found “not guilty.” However, he didn’t get back into the school system. I met him later when he was engaged in a job of a technical nature and he admitted to me “I screwed up” - whatever that meant.
My tenth grade science teacher was a Fundamentalist Christian and would chastise all the girls for dressing like sluts and all the boys for wanting to chat up girls. If he heard you swear under your breath during a test, God help you. He noticed me reading a Cracked magazine once after a test I finished early and tried to give me guff for it, so I offered to go with him down to the principal’s office and discuss it and he did a quick fade.
The capper: The last day before Christmas vacation, we got a 50-minute lecture about his God and what Xmas really means and how we were all sinful etc., etc., etc… I don’t remember any real science discussed in his class.
My 7th grade science teacher would tell us a bunch of war stories. He picked a few of us to do a special project. He had a giant wargaming tabletop game that he wanted us to play. It was a scale model of the Fulda Gap and one side played the US and the other the Soviets. I have to say it was really cool but a little weird for science class.
The next time I talked to him after 7th grade he was a general in the National Guard.
8th grade civics teacher got into a discussion with the entire class about how crappy our music was. Next day he brought in a 45 of Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” and made us listen to it, “proving” that his music was superior. We all rolled our eyes, made barfing noises, etc., after which he played it two more times.
I felt sorta bad for him because nobody even gave it a chance.
Oh boy. My sophomore biology teacher was an amazing teacher (the only one I’m still in contact with today), and he had a similar question box and promised he’d answer any sex-ed question. The first one he drew, he turned bright red and refused to read it, until folks were yelling at him. Finally he relented: "It says, ‘I’m tight. What can I do?’ "
That was the end of class for the day.
Some others:
Kindergarten: Our music teacher was used to teaching high school and had zero classroom management skills for 5-year-olds. He was perpetually furious at us for not sitting still for lectures about music history. The one time I remember us being still was when he told us the story of Prometheus chained to the rock, with his liver torn out by eagles (?) every day. Maybe it’s not the most appropriate story, but that’s where I got my interest in mythology from.
Third Grade: Our teacher taught us that the vowels were a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y, and sometimes w. The hell of it is, she’s right–but we’d never learned it that way before, and nobody else taught us that afterwards. She was from Ireland, and I thought for years that she had some Welsh thwnkwng going on. It didn’t help that when we were supposed to research an animal from Africa, she turned down my idea to research mound termites, because termites aren’t animals.
Sixth Grade: My teacher was a freakin character. He was violently allergic and hostile to cats, and taught us grammar with sentences about terrible things happening to them: “What is the direct object in the sentence ‘The cat ate shards of ground glass’?” For Christmas we all chipped in and bought him a stuffed animal: Earl the Dead Cat. He hated cigarette companies with a passion, so when Camel had a deal where smokers could get a free T-shirt by calling a toll-free number, he gave us all the number and encouraged us to call them to get a shirt and waste their money. When Teddy decided to circulate a petition to see who hated Dennis, the teacher decided that since Teddy thought himself so much above the rest of the class, he should show it, and made Teddy put his chair and desk on top of a table and sit there for the rest of the day while the rest of us bowed at him when we walked by. When he got sick of me having a messy desk (and boy howdy was it messy), he picked it up and dumped it outside, telling me I could come back in when I organized it. Since I genuinely didn’t know how to do that, I sat outside crying for like an hour.
Tenth grade: My algebra 2 teacher was the most incompetent teacher I’ve ever known. She taught entirely by overhead projector, mumbling down to the projector as she stood in front of it writing formulae on transparencies. If you’re picturing this right, you’re seeing the transparencies projected onto her bosom. Cheating was rampant in her class because she couldn’t teach and also because she sat at the back of the room paying no attention during tests.
We had a teacher who brought in his record collection and let us borrow them like a library; lots of 60s stuff, some good
He did a week discussing the Beatles, and other discussions on Fiddler on the Roof, The Prisoner and Dr. Strangelove. He showed a lot of movies and Old TV, mostly good. Also taught the class to ski - downhill and cross country. Also had a daily vocabulary list - with words like floccinaucinihilipilification and batrachivirous.
Another teacher had us do calisthenics each morning for a couple minutes to some guy singing “King of the Road”. Why? Dunno.
Yeah. I was going to come in here and mention my 7th grade science teacher who got into a big screed about Star Wars (the proposed satellite-based nuclear deterrent system), and said that the reason it was dumb was because all Russia had to do was cover their missiles in mirrors, and it would bounce the pulse right back at the satellite.
Oh–there was the French teacher who brought in a videocasette of French commercials for us to watch, but warned us she would be fast-forwarding past some of them because they had nudity.
I don’t think any other class of ninth graders has ever watched a movie in French class so closely.
We had a French teacher assign a book of short stories, all of which involved graphic violence. (I’ve had little call to use the vocabulary we learned). Except for one about blades of grass in a field of wheat singing prayers as the farmer mowed them down.
I can’t help but chuckle, because Milwaukee’s sewage treatment plant is on this island sticking out into Lake Michigan (downwind from the city… good work, engineers of ancient times).
So we’d often work “Jones Island” into our grade school taunts: “Don’t forget, Joe-Joe, ya gotta wash your clothes before school if you work all night on Jones Island.”
Or “Oh, Ervie, Brunhilda was lookin’ for ya, wants to go out dancing. She said to pick her up at 8… yo, Jimby, what’d she say was her address, again?” “Jones Island!”
It worked as a one-liner, because every single kid in Cub Scouts had gone on a tour of the place (and probably exaggerated the smell…).
11th grade history teacher showed movies while he napped; almost no discussion. Final exam was Pick a topic and choose a side(?). You can learn a little history from Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns but, come on.
When I was a college freshman, I had a TA who felt very superior in pointing out what “garbage” The Sound of Music was. He called it “the Sound of Mucus.” Many’s the time I wish I had a time machine to point out to him John Coltrane’s cover of My Favorite Things.
When I was in one of my Navy electronics classes, shortly after a lecture on safety and the importance of not working on “hot” equipment, one of the students grabbed an “energized” component, started shaking/vibrating, then the lights went out and when they came back on, the guy was lying on the floor. We all kinda froze except for one guy who went over to put a folded jacket under the “victim’s” head. Yeah, it was staged by the instructors, and I think we all sensed it because they didn’t do anything or say anything when it all happened.
