Asuka wrote:
I have no idea why the Professor brought in an episode of Bullshit! if he knew he was going to censor the curses anyway.
He wanted you to see the content of the show, and he wanted to cover his ass if one of your classmates went complaining to the principal about being exposed to this shockingly Godless content. Been there.
Debate is literally a class intended to teach you how to bullshit.
As a high school debate coach with 35 years experience, I take exception to that characterization. We do not teach how to bullshit. We teach students how to coalesce the vapor of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension!
I wish I’d had such a teacher 35 years ago. Come to think of it, wish I had a debate class.
Heh. I will say that when I’m doing book clubs, I really encourage kids not to read ahead, and when someone does and starts talking about parts of the book that others haven’t read, it kills the discussion, and gets right up my nose.
I think I can win this one. The weirdest thing one of my teachers did was not be a teacher. Seriously, Jr. High English teacher was busted midway through one semester for using another person’s name and credentials. This was in the early/mid sixties.
Did he try to get the class to join a battle of the bands?
And also how to speak simply and clearly in plain language! 
Ahhh, the movie Teachers. One of the very, very few teacher movies to feel somewhat related to reality.
The only thing I would change is the beginning scene where the woman he had a one night stand in found out he was a teacher…instead of smiling and say ‘call me’…she should have been upset and stormed out in distress screaming “I can’t believe I slept with a teacher!”.
I left teaching long long ago primarily because of the money. However, I was getting sick of the lack of respect women had for the profession. It was not uncommon to have things going well with a woman and then she finds out…and POOF! Disappears.
The time that still sticks in my mind is that friends and I went out and we met a group of women. One took a liking to me and one thing led to another…and the next day she found out I was a teacher. She was SO upset. Keep in mind both of us were in the latter half of our 20’s. She was so upset she called the Superintendent (My Boss) and complained. Instead of him telling her that it was my personal life and I did nothing wrong, he called me into a meeting and basically suggested I do not date…or go out. Seriously. I was already on the way out and sending out non-teaching resumes but that really put a fire under my butt. The lack of respect teachers have in this society boggles my mind.
I don’t know if this is weird or just somewhat remarkable. From October to late March back in '75-'76, we had a movie in health class every single day. The teacher was the head basketball coach.
In central Indiana… the team did go 26-1 that year, so there’s that.
My fifth grade teacher Mrs. Hopkins noticed that my good friend Karen didn’t drink her tomato juice one day at lunch. She decided it was her job to force Karen to drink it, and she brought it back to the classroom and put it in front of Karen, insisting that she swallow it.
All afternoon long, Karen refused. When it was time to go home, the teacher wouldn’t let Karen leave (she lived within walking distance of the school, so there was no school bus to miss). Nor did she take any steps to inform Karen’s parents why their daughter didn’t show up from school on time.
Karen never did drink the juice, and her mother eventually showed up at school and yelled at the teacher for doing that. But as far as I know, that was the end of it. If Mrs. Hopkins faced any disciplinary action for her behavior, we students never heard about it.
That reminds me of the day a teacher forced a kid to eat his green beans, which he claimed to be allergic to. I don’t know if he was actually allergic but I have a vivid memory of him crying and puking green beans back in his tray.
I had a teacher in high school who was color-blind. He was my first class of the day and he’d come in every morning and ask if his clothes matched. He kept extra clothes in his office in case he got it really wrong. His wife would usually lay out his clothes for him but if she was out of town or something he was on his own. He was an awesome teacher so we resisted the urge to mess with him.
I can get not spoilering the book for everyone else but when I was in the second grade I could read tolerably well. The reader books we had were kept on a shelf in the back of the classroom and stayed in the classroom. There were six volumes and on entering the class we’d line up and pull whatever volume we were working on that day.
I’d pull two volumes and had read all six before Christmas. Thereafter I’d just pull whatever volume the class needed and had a library book as the spare.
Totally. My book clubs these days are with kids reading in the 97th percentile or above: they know their way around a book. I ask them to limit their reading in this book only, so that discussions will be better and more focused, but to read whatever they want once they’ve finished the book club reading and taken enough notes that they can participate well in the assignment. It’s deliberately a very different experience from just snuggling down with the book, and I tell them as much.
When I was in middle/high school this would have been sheer torture. When I got going on a book I liked, it was not something I could stop. So, unless you only assign books that are a slog (which is torture of another type), I’d be the kid in the corner snickering at people’s guesses about what was going to happen next.
And speaking of teacher’s launching into side topics, it reminds me of one of my favorite memories of a class in grad school on Quantum Electronics, taught by a professor who had done his graduate work in the Townes Lab (Nobel Prize winner, inventor of the maser). He was lecturing about some aspect of laser physics and a student asked him a question that started him on an anecdote from his graduate research, which led to a series of personal stories about various pioneering experiments in lasers. At some point, he looked up at the clock and realized that 45 minutes of the one hour class had passed. Without missing a beat, he turned to the class and drily stated: “But I digress…” and then turned back to the board and the equations he’d been writing out.
In sophomore chemistry, the lesson was about acids and bases. One sort of stoner kid bravely asked, “Is that like acid-acid? You know, LSD?” Just asking about something druggy was pretty out of bounds at that Catholic HS at the time. The teacher got real serious and calmly explained that he’d done a lot of pot when he was younger but that LSD really freaked him out and he’d always been too frightened to try it. We all just stared wide eyed. For a teacher to admit to past drug use at that quite conservative school with a load of shithead sons of hardass Chicago PDs was just about unthinkable.
In a junior year 2D design elective, we got pretty good lessons on things like use of color and negative space. But after the lesson and we put pencils to paper, the teacher would wander the classroom, look over our shoulders at our work and shout ‘Gestalt!’ in a bad German accent. Now, maybe I missed the class (or possibly a prerequisite course, I transferred schools that year) where it was explained what that word meant but, at the time, he might as well have been Spagett! It was years later before I learned the term.
Chemistry teacher in high school taught an entirely class without speaking - just writing on the board and gesticulating. She did say at the beginning that it was how she was going to teach the class, and I’m not sure if it was something she did that day because her voice wasn’t feeling up to it, or if this particular material always got this specific treatment for some reason.
We also had a substitute teacher (who eventually became one of the regular subs) get known as the “cheeseburger lady” because she supposedly responded with “No, I’m a cheeseburger” when asked if she was a sub. I don’t believe I actually heard the supposed start of this nickname, but it became widespread pretty fast.
whoops… ii must of forgotten and reposted it.
what happened was I went back to the hotel and I was bored and mentioned that to the guy passed for security … at the place and he handed me a card and said 'call here the girls arent that expensive or hardened pros …just single mom types making extra money on the weekends "
Now i thought it was just a stripper type of thing when i called and neglected to ask specifics … which they wouldnt of given me anyways …and yeah she knocked and when i opened the door we blinked at each other and she said " well at least it wasnt one of the morons and walked in and made a call and I was comped and we spent the rest of the evening hanging out really …
I try to assign the good stuff, and yeah, I acknowledge that it’s hard–but I expect them to do hard things. It’s not like there’s any penalty for reading ahead, except that I give them a little grief over it.