The topic of wacky/interesting teachers had reminded me of my drama teacher. I am fairly certain that the reason people were so mean to him was that he made himself a big target. He overstated his abilities, which made students distrust that he even knew how to teach drama, and thus when people would do mean things nobody would stand up for him. He is probably the only teacher I knew who was bullied by the students he taught.
People swore to his face, tried to physically antagonize him, and mocked virtually everything about him. I felt a little bad for him, but there was so much he was doing to perpetuate it that I believed he had the power to do something about it. Plus, I believed it was the teacher’s job to manage the class, not the class’s job to manage the teacher.
Interestingly enough, while I learned very little about drama in his drama class, I learned quite a lot about managing high school students. Now that I am a substitute, I can use him as sort of a warning to myself. Being a sub, I do get faced with a good degree of abuse, but take it in stride. So if students query me on my car with the intent or implied threat to key/vandalize it, I make something up. I use humor and sarcasm to get the students on my side, so that while the students aren’t necessarily any nicer, they certainly aren’t directing their cruelty toward me.
When I was in high school my SAT prep teacher was a horrible, bitter woman who took it out on her classes. One day when she left the room for a few minutes one of the guys in my class took the buzzer out of a taboo board game that was in the room, taped it down, removed one of the “tiles” from the ceiling, put the buzzer up there and put the tile back. She spent about 10 minutes yelling before anyone would tell her where the buzzer was hidden.
One of the math teachers at my HS was kind of at the end of the scale. He had horrible big curly hair, he rode a girl’s bike to school with a flowered plastic basket on the front, while wearing Birkenstocks. My buddy had his class, and said the kids were changing their grades in his penciled grade book, and that once a kid managed to very gently turn down his hearing aide with a pencil point from behind, causing him to direct eveyrone to work on his own. I mentioned him to the autoshop teacher, who went to our church, and he rolled his eyes and refused to commnet further, seemingly because he didn’t trust his opinion not to come back and bit him.
Back in grade 7 I wasn’t doing well in school – I was terminally bored and skipped a lot of classes. As a result of this I was put into some sort of attendance program which was sorta like school but with only a few people per class, all of whom were trouble students. (Unfortunately their troubles were more rebellious/criminal in nature, whereas mine were mostly to do with social issues and not being challenged enough) The teacher was a really nice guy to be honest, and I’d loved to have had him as a regular teacher elsewhere. But the way the rest of the students in the class treated him was pretty shameful. Me being scrawny and shy didn’t put me in the best position to tell them to behave otherwise.
The worst thing I saw them do to him though was to booby-trap his chair. His chair was pretty threadbare and had a hole or two in the corners, so while he was away at a meeting or something, leaving us to ourselves for the duration, they stuck thumbtacks under the upholstery of the seat. When he came in to sit down, he stood back up pretty damn quick with a grimace of pain on his face. I was probably the only one that didn’t laugh.
I went to a all girls Catholic high school. We occasionally had a sub who should never have been a teacher to older students. She had no authority over anyone.
The majority of students at this school were snotty bitches. They would be rude; talking out loud over her, not showing up to class (once there was three people in class, me and two others), openly ridiculing her, changing her last name into a nasty phrase. It was horrible. A few of us who didn’t really fit in at this school were always nice to her. She was a nice lady.
Right after she subbed one time we heard she had a nervous breakdown. Then she committed suicide. I’m sure the girls at my school weren’t totally to blame but I’m also sure they didn’t help.
I enjoyed playing practical jokes on my teachers - or being involved in them. Since I was a bit of a brown-noser, I had a bit of an advantage
My English teacher used to sit in front of the class on a high stool. One day, she left me in charge on the class and walked down to the lounge for a few minutes. I took the stool, turned it on its side, and lay down on the ground next to it. She came back, saw me on the floor, and yelled. But, when she saw none of the other students were moving, she walked over to me, stood above me and tapped her foot on the floor - I looked up and said hello with a big grin on my face.
My Chemistry professor was a large fan of Steven Hawking; she took great offense if someone made a snide comment about his speech impediment. With the principal’s permission, I selected the intercom for her classroom only (I read the announcements every morning, so it was nothing unusual). I stated that the morning announcements would be read by our special guest Steven Hawking, did my half-assed imitation, and thanked everyone for their attention. The BEST part, however, was that she did not know that HER class was the only one that heard the joke. She had been asking other teachers about it all day long, and everyone thought she was crazy.
There was also the time we taped the Accounting teacher into her classroom. I didn’t think it would work, but it worked impressively well!
This was back in the mid-70’s… there was a lot of racial tension in our school at the time, enough so we were sent home from school on several occasions because of it.
In my English Lit class, we had a substitute teacher, a young woman pretty fresh out of college. She was doing her best to teach the class, when a group of black students just barged in and came across the room to talk to one of their friends. The teacher told them this was not the time for a social gathering and asked them to leave. And one of the girls walked over to her and smacked her across the face… and then…
The teacher was wearing those big hoop pierced earrings that were so popular in the 70’s…
…and she grabbed both hoops and… Ripped. Them. Out.
Tore her ear lobes practically off.
We all sat there in stunned silence.
The entire group was expelled, and we never saw that sub again. I have often wondered what happened to her.
I went to a military school that had monks as the majority of teachers. We had a biology teacher who I think was off his rocker and really had no control over the students. He regularly graded the students based on what he thought their behavior was. If you were a “known” bad boy, he’d grade you poorly whether or not you actually misbehaved in his class.
One of the worst things I saw happen in his class was one day when some of the kids brought firecrackers to class and were throwing them at him, lit.
Another more common thing they would do had to do with the lab sinks. This was a lab classroom and there were these long “trough” sinks between the lab stations. The kids would plug up the drain at the end of the sink and then everyone would turn on their boiling hot water and fill up the sink. When it got close to full, they’d float paper boats down the sink to get his attention. He would put his hand in to unclog the drain, but he would never admit that the water hurt. He’d just get this smile on his face and tell the boys that they shouldn’t do whatever it was they’d done wrong.
He also would show movies in class (usually at the start of class) nearly every day and at least once a week someone would cut the film while it was playing so it would trail onto the floor. He’d always spend the film time over in the corner grading papers, so the kids wouldn’t let him know about the film until there was a big pile on the floor, then he’d come running over and have a fit about the whole thing.
Last time I saw him was about 10 yrs after I graduated. I was driving around on the campus showing my g/f at the time where I’d gone to school and we ran into him. He said he’d just left feeding his chickens. He was experimenting with feeding them garbage and they were laying green eggs for him.
9th grade. Gym class with Mr. L. Now, this was not on purpose, but it was not good for him. We were playing basketball, and one girl bounced the ball in such a way that it went wild and hit Mr. L right in the sack. He grunted, covered himself and staggered off to the equipment closet for a few minutes.
Now, as I said, I don’t think “Kristy” did this on purpose. The problem was, one girl, “Sheila”, didn’t know what was wrong with Mr. L, and asked us. So we explained, and then she asked for a clarification, and then a clarification on the clarification. So by the time Mr. L came back, we were all falling about giggling and clutching ourselves, and of course he thought we were laughing at him.
And what was really a shame was, the previous unit, we’d had Mr. M, who made Vernon from The Breakfast Club look like Ned Flanders. If anyone deserved a shot to the nuts, it was him. Mr. L was a great guy, and no one would have done this to him on purpose. Poor sod.
We had a very uptight biology teacher (who refused to teach us about contraception because of her Catholic beliefs) and a very unruly kid, John, who’d just joined from a London school. This teacher had the biggest real tits I have ever seen in my life, and wore tight sweaters, and a very big nose.
One day before class, John got a piece of chalk and drew a huge caricature silhouette of the teacher’s profile on the board - massive jugs, bubble butt, and a gigantic hooter. I was simultaneously horrified and fascinated to see how she would react.
She came into the classroom, clocked the cartoon, then to my surprise she got a duster and wiped it off the board very, very slowly, following each curve faithfully, leaving the outline on the chalkboard. Then continued to teach the class normally.
In my opinion this was absolutely the best way anyone could have handled this - we were shocked and shamed by her reaction, and John never bothered her again.
My first year of high school I had this geometry teacher. SHe was this very quiet, mousy woman who no one really liked, wasn’t a very motivated teacher, and had no control over the class.
We would talk over her in class, sit there and listen to music (using headphones) during class, throw things out the window, brazenly cheat knowing she wouldn’t call us on it…and so on.
Midway through the year they were doing some construction on the school and we ended up with about a 3-inch square hole in the floor right by the windows. As there was a classroom directly below us, people in my class would steal things off her desk and drop them through this hole.
Eventually she had a nervous breakdown in the middle of class (after someone broke a window). Just sat down at her desk and started crying. She ended up taking a week or two off, then on our final, didn’t even grade them, just passed us all so that those of us (there were several) who would have failed didn’t risk having her again.
My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Searles, was widely known to be the toughest teacher in the school. He was a former journalist and focused very heavily on writing. Students in his class were required to write a two page essay each day and complete a book report every week. I personally liked him a lot and credit his teaching for the fact that I was easily able to coast through the first half of middle school.
A few years after I had him, he made local news when some student emptied a bottle of hand sanitizer (the type that’s about 70% ethanol) into a glass of water on his desk when he was out of the room. Mr. Searles ended up being hospitalized and lost his job because of the incident.
You see, he wanted to have the student who poisoned him actually punished, rather than the brief suspension that the student actually received. He thus, pressed charges. This angered a lot of parents, especially given that Mr. Searles was white and the student involved was Hispanic, so some people chose to see his actions as racially motivated. Having been in his class, I know he would have reacted the same way no matter who the student was. Still, there was enough of a firestorm over this that he had to quit. I often wonder what happened to him.
I went to a private boarding school in north Georgia, and had some very good teachers there, as well as one bad one. One afternoon after basketball practice, the boys team picked up the VW Beetle belonging to one of the teachers and gently placed it on the steps leading to the Circle Building, which contained the gym, theater, pool, etc. The look on that woman’s face was priceless!
In 12th grade we took some religion class and everyone had to write an autobiography. We could tell the teacher just wanted to be nosy, this wasn’t really about “discovering ourselves”. A group of us got together and wrote them for each other. They were full of incest and other horrible things. My friend turned one in that said her mother was an alcoholic. She got to leave school a few times to go to Al-Anon meetings. I went with her since I was her best friend, we even drove there in the teacher’s car.
To this day I don’t know if her mother was an alcoholic or not. Even though she didn’t write her own autobiography I have a funny feeling it might have been somewhat true.
