A few years back, my daughter was teaching grade 6-7 science classes, and the last topic of the year was Sex Ed. She’d start the topic by standing in front of the class and reciting “Penis, vagina, penis, vagina, penis, vagina… now that we’ve got that out of the way…” and she’d go on to teach the topic. I can’t imagine dealing with kids that age and that subject, but once she got their giggling out of the way, it was just another science class.
My older sister had a math teacher the year Watergate was going on and she never learned algebra II. Some of the kids would get him talking about it and he would never get back to his lesson.
I had a history teacher in middle school who was starting to have a breakdown. He would start to cry in class.
I had a psychology teacher in high school that would put on a movie and go lay down on the back of the class where he had a sofa. Sometimes he wouldn’t wake up at the end of class. They actually had a procedure where students could file a formal complaint. Several of us did but in the hearing his defense was that he wasn’t feeling well, and the other teachers and administrator on the committee accepted that.
This one seemed weird even at the time.
7th grade gym class. The teacher told us we were going to play a new game. Then he described it:
All the students stand in a circle, single-file. You place your right thumb in your mouth and your left thumb up the ass of the student in front of you. When the teacher calls out “switch!”, you spin around and face the guy who was previously behind you and reverse thumbs (so you are now sucking on the thumb that was in the first guy’s ass and your other thumb is inside the other guy).
This was never actually done, of course, just his idea of a funny. I’m sure he did it with every class.
mmm
I also had a prof that could easily be led astray into some topic that had no bearing on the lecture of the day. He had been a rather serious amateur race car driver in his youth and so if someone in class decided that they didn’t want to hear a lecture that day they would ask him some random automotive question while appealing to his racing past:
“So, Mr. B, I’m thinking I want to swap out my Holley 2-barrell with a 4-barrel Edelbrock with mechanical secondaries. I really want more horsepower. Is that something you did to your race cars? Would that work?
“Well, the cheapest way to get fast and easy horsepower increases is to up the size of your air filter. Or get rid of it, but that has risks. When I was racing what I would always do was…”
An hour later he’d still be prattling on about racing.
But I think the single weirdest thing I saw a prof do was not give a shit about his audience.
I was listening to one of my history department profs give a lecture about something or another to an audience in a large lecture hall. This wasn’t a regular class lecture but rather part of a guest lecture series presented in the evenings across several weeks. The audience was about half history department students and other faculty and about half public guests. During the lecture one of the audience members raised her hand and asked him to pause – there was a medical emergency (someone next to her had passed out). He stopped mid-sentence, started at her for a long moment with a look of utter indignation, then walked across the stage to where a folding chair sat and promptly sat down and started playing around on his phone. Meanwhile the woman called 911 to request an ambulance while people congregated around her to try to help. There was some medical-type person in the audience and that guy rushed over and started talking on the phone to the 911 people, giving them all sorts of info in medicalese.
During all this the lecturing prof was getting more and more visibly frustrated. He repeatedly got up and paced the stage, glancing at his phone. He’d sit back down, play on his phone for a bit, glance up at the audience with a look of total disgust on his face, then go back to his phone. Lather, rinse, repeat. After a few minutes an EMT crew arrived, the medical guy from the audience gave them his observations, they did their whole rain dance of checking vitals and putting oxygen on the guy who had passed out, and finally they loaded him onto a stretcher and wheeled him out. All the while the prof kept stewing, getting visibly more upset. When everything had calmed down and everyone was back in their seats he stood up, returned to the lectern, and asked “we good now? Can I continue?” And then he picked up where had left off – literally mid-sentence.
I unfortunately had to take a course from him two terms later and that SOB was the most condescending asshole I had ever met. He clearly had no use for students and only taught because he was required to do so. He never honored office hours, yelled at students if they asked questions, and dismissed any inquiry as clearly too stupid to give any thought or time to. I had bad profs in grad school but this jerk was in a league of his own.
I once found his CV online and it was something like 12 pages: he listed every single paper he had ever presented and every lecture he had ever given. The debacle I witnessed was clearly done just to have another addition to his CV.
I don’t remember this, but my mom tells a story of when I was in first grade I was reprimanded severly by my teacher for drawing some generic domestic scene and coloring the people in it with brown skin – something that was apparently unacceptable to the old bat. She said the people in the picture should have white skin. My mom was livid and scheduled a meeting with the teacher and the principal to read them both the riot act. She was a nurse and scheduled the meeting for immediately after she got off work. During the meeting the teacher doubled down on her criticism of my drawing, saying that her students should be drawing people that are represented by citizens of our little community, i.e. white people. “Like us,” she said, which was the last straw. My mom pointed to the sleeve of her crisp-white uniform and asked “Now, Mrs. J, can you tell me what color this is?” Then she pointed her arm and said “Mrs J, can you tell me what this color is? Are they the same color?” The teacher finally shut up.
My mom is old and half demented now but still likes to tell that story.
To be fair, an academic CV does list every paper and presentation. 12 pages isn’t a lot. Mine is something like 39 (and omits at least another 30 pages of outreach presentations, newspaper articles, other jobs, book reviews, etc.). But I’m old, man.
My grade 3 (1961-62) teacher used to travel around the class room strap in hand looking for kids who were acting up. I remember her words clearly. “If you’re making a ‘hubbub’ you’ll get the strap.”
One time, the teacher was out of the room and the class clown stood up beside his desk and said over and over “I’m making a hubbub” as he bounced up and down flapping his arms. Unbeknownst to him as his back was towards the door, the teacher had reentered the room behind him. As he was making this “hubbub” she reached out and whacked him several times with this strap and said “I told you not to make a hubbub”.
And in case anyone wonders why teachers lost corporal punishment abilities, examples like this would be why.
In college I had a theater professor, who, one day during a lecture, got agitated that people didn’t seem to be paying attention.
So, he stopped, and then said really loudly, “What if I stood up here masturbating, would that grab your attention?,” which caused the entire class to laugh their asses off.
i accidentally discovered the young cute new English teacher was taking care of a sibling that needed extensive monitoring and was paying it by supplementing her income on weekends and vacations by working for an escort service 2 towns over …
How do you “accidentally” discover somebody’s working as an escort? You weren’t “accidentally” a client were you?
I had a high school science teacher eat a daddy-long-legs on a bet. She said it tasted like mint. The student she made the bet with had to eat a fly.
On football game days the cheerleaders wore their uniforms. I had a civics class with one of them… When we walked in the teacher would say “Donna! Get up on the desk, let’s get a look at those knees!”
My trigonometry teacher’s name was Mr. Miracle. He was from Miracle, Tennessee (so he said) and was about 5 feet tall with a squeaky voice. If you were attempting to solve a problem incorrectly he would say “You can’t shoot a pink elephant with a blue elephant gun.”
Not so much did as said.
When I was in the 8th grade, being 1964, the cold war was still going pretty strong. A teacher said she wasn’t worried about atomic weapons because they were so heavy, citing the fact that the B29s that had delivered the two atomic bombs on Japan were barely able to take off. “They’re so much more powerful now; how will they ever be able to get here or we get ours to Russia?”
I pictured in my mind’s eye the President picking up the red phone to SAC. “I’m mad at those Russkies. Go a drop our entire atomic arsenal on them!”
An hour later the SAC commander calls back. “Gee, Mr. President, no can do. Every one of our bombers crashed on take-off and the missiles only got about halfway out of their silos before falliing back in and exploding. It’s a real mess.”
I did not mention this to her – I felt she was better off living with her delusion.
This may be the most perfect Dunning-Kruger example I’ve ever heard. She was confident in her ignorance that she’d noticed a problem that none of the people involved had noticed–so confident that it didn’t occur to her what a screamingly obvious problem this would be.
Out of the blue, a full birds & bees talk in 5th grade. He had a female teacher present when he did it.
I didn’t have all my facts straight by then so it might have helped but seems very strange in retrospect. No warning, no note sent home to parents beforehand, nothing like that.
We had a substitute teacher in middle school that used to sing “If I were a rich man” to every single class he subbed for. Yadda di da di da di da di dye dum!
I had one teacher who repeated everything he said twice.
I had one teacher who repeated everything he said twice.
I had one teacher who repeated everything he said twice.
The weirdest thing was one my (high school) teachers who almost completely ignored the course material, and treated the class to a monologue of his personal political and social beliefs. Day after day for an entire semester. And the course was state-mandated for all students. I still don’t know how he got away with it.
I had an English teacher in high school who had a hook hand, eye-patch and used a cane as he walked down the hall; not for support but to thrash back and forth and clear a path through the students. In retrospect, those were no doubt war injuries and he can’t be held accountable for that but he probably was still responsible for taking time out of class to tell us about the guy in France who sassed-talked him so he broke both his arms with an iron bar.
Academically, he allowed failing student the chance to write a book report for extra credit. He had some laborious outline you had to follow, describing each character with at least two paragraphs per attribute: Physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, etc. Plus stuff on plot, themes, meaning, and so forth. He then gave a set amount of points per page. I was blowing off class and hit the Book Report zone at midterms and realized that if I wrote some giant book report, I was fine. I wrote twenty-plus pages over a weekend (cheating in a sense in that I wrote it about a trilogy rather than a single book) and went from something like 200/500 points for the semester to 800/500 points – at which point I then stopped paying attention to the class again and still got an A+.
Mid 1970s I had a HS chemistry teacher who, while the class was taking a test, would disappear into the chemical closet to smoke.
My first class at secondary school, aged 11, was with an elderly geography teacher called Mr Troughear, who still taught as if he was a WWII officer i the RAF. He was retiring that term and seemed to have decided fuck it, nobody can do anything to me now, so I’ll do what the fuck I like.
Our class was the one that ended up being notorious for bad behaviour. One boy, let’s call him Alman Dowin (he had a similar weird name) threatened to throw a chair out of the window. Mr Troughear dared him to do it. Even gave him the chair. When Alman refused, Mr Troughear got up and threw it out of the window himself.
(The story at school was that Mr Troughear threw Alman out; he wasn’t quite that insane).
Over the course of the term, you got 100% if you underlined everything in the exact way he wanted it - two underlines on the title, in red, three underlines on something else, I couldn’t even get it right then - and zero if you got one line wrong. The whole class could earn 100% back by answering some random question about WWII. I was the class history buff, and oh, the fucking pressure. But either I got them all right or was confident enough in my answers that Mr Troughear - who, I suspect, was getting a bit fuzzy in his memories - let me get away with it.
We all really liked him. And his actual classes weren’t bad at all. They were old-fashioned lecture style, which was a bit of a relief when all the other teachers were putting us in groups and requiring actual input.
The day he retired, he sat there chuckling and yawning to himself in the teachers’ row as the headmaster - who always wore a cap and gown, like we were a posh school in the 1950s rather than a rough-as-fuck comp in the late 80s - gave a long speech about Mr Troughear’s career. Then he got up, took the whatever it was he was being given, probably a watch, said something along the lines of “thank God I don’t have to teach any of you buggers again,” and left.
I would say the weirdest but you wouldn’t believe me.
I did have a (great!) Physics teacher who spent 20 min on a problem using multiple chalkboards…and when he got the answer it was wrong. he looked in the book then looked up at the board and said “Oh fuck!”.
I did have a math teacher 9th grade who said Pythagorean theorem as Pit -ha-gur-en. A student had to ask him to repeat because we didn’t see what it was right away. He was also a coach of 2-3 sports…so…not REALLY a math teach most likely though certified.