Worst teachers/trainers/instructors you have ever came across

In My Humble Opinion
61

College level business mathematics course:

First day of class the teacher walks into the room and everyone gets their first look at her. There are audible gasps and jaws are hanging open. I don’t know how to say this politely, but she was amazingly ugly. She looked like the wicked witch from the wizard of Oz. Not her fault, of course, although the 12,000 cigarettes a day she smoked didn’t help matters.

Even though this was a college course, she teaches like we are all two years old. She writes a formula on the board, then draws a picture of a calculator so she could point out which keys to press, and in what order. Most of the course involved various formulas and she did that for each one. Drew a picture of a calculator with a list of which keys to press.

62

Sounds about right for most business majors.

63

In 6th grade we moved in the middle of the year. One week I was in an elementary school where we kept our stuff in desks to a middle school where we had lockers and I was taking classes with 6th-7th-8th graders. The math teacher was taking a poll on who would win a fight, Cassius Clay or the other guy. I had no earthly idea what she was talking about so she made fun of me. We didn’t watch fights or discuss them at my house. I’m sure it was very very important, I think this is who became Mohammed Ali, but I knew nothing about it. I was new and she made fun of me in front of everyone.

In college our astronomy professor just read the book to us. Once he turned two pages and didn’t notice. We didn’t mention it.

In college the music majors had to take Physics of Music as one of the two science courses. So the entire class is musicians. The Professor is creating two tones with a machine. The notes are the same. He raises one little by little and tells us to raise our hands when it sounds like two notes to us. We all raised our hands at exactly the same time. He said, “That doesn’t sound like two notes. That sounds like a trill to me.”
:smack:
(a trill is two notes)

My daughter’s 6th grade teacher told me that she didn’t understand questions, or at least when asked a question she would write an answer unrelated to the question as if she completely misunderstood. She’s now 17 and got 35 out of 36 on the ACT for reading. Everything that teacher told me about my daughter sounded like he was talking about someone else. No other teacher ever talked to me that way about her. I sat there in the meeting crying because supposedly she was a complete failure who spent her time looking out the window and ignored him when he asked her questions in class. We decided to ignore him. First I called her other 6th grade teacher, who had also been her 3rd grade teacher, who said she though our daughter was fine.

I used to skip art class in 8th grade. I just never went to it. I got an incomplete and no one ever said a word to me about it. I hated art and was really bad at it. The weird thing is that my daughter is good at art and is probably going to be an interior designer.

64

Ha – if you think this is bad, you obviously never took a Philosophy class. I swear, there must be some genetic connection between being good at Philosophy and being good at dressing yourself, but inverted. My Kant prof (classes three days a week) wore the same white shirt, purple sweater, and blue jeans every single day for the first half of the semester. He then switched to a white shirt (same one?) and black dress slacks that were probably part os a suit, but we never saw the suit jacket. That was for maybe another three weeks. Then, two weeks of the jeans and shirt with an orange sweater until, for the last week, it was back to the original purple sweater.

My Ancient Phil prof wore those chamois shirts that were popular at the time with cords, and that was fine, but he also wore, every day, thick gray or blue woolen socks with sandals. He was the best-dressed member of the Cornell Philosophy department. (He also hailed from Scotland, which is why, to this day, I pronounce the names of all Greek philosophers with a thick Scots burr.)

Well, my advisor also dressed OK; he wore button-down oxford shirts every day. But every single time you saw him, his left sleeve was carefully folded up past his elbow while his right sleeve was haphazardly cuffed twice so it sat halfway up his forearm with big wings flopping over the side. Also there were chalk stains on it.

My Phil and Peligion prof had a thing for vests. He wore all kinds of vests – suit vests, sweater vests, every vest you’d ever seen, although not every day. On a couple of occasions his vest of choice was a leather biker vest with about a thousand pockets on it. This over a dress shirt and slacks.

But I never mentioned these guys earlier because they were all good teachers despite their dress sense.

–Cliffy

65

I had on professor my junior year in college for “A History of England 1400-1700”. Unfortunately, as the professor openly admitted, it should be called “A Marxist History of England 1400-1700” because we learned much more about Marxism than we did English History. One thing that really drove me nuts was when he was talking about how Charles I (?) was trying to escape Oliver Cromwell and his people by getting out of the country. He went on and on about how exciting of a story it was and how engrossing it was … and then said, “You should look it up sometime and find out what happened.” WHAT? For god’s sake man, if you have an exciting story to spice up a semester of Marxist boredom, by all means, spill it!

I was, however, sorry to hear that only one year after I graduated, he retired and then shot himself. Not much of a teacher, but I didn’t have anything against him personally.

66

The same thing is true for professors of math, physics, astronomy, and computer science. I wonder if there are professors in any field who are good at dressing themselves?

67

My French History professors were always very well dressed, I thought.

I remember a European History teacher I had back in high school… every week or so, he would hand out an “Idents” assignment, and we figured out in very short order that he just wanted us to copy out of the book. That was it. You just copied everything the book had to say on each of the subjects he mentioned, and you got credit. It wound up being 20-30 pages of mindless copying, every week, for a school year. Outside of that, there was no real rhyme or reason to his grading policies. People who wrote sterling essays, ones college seniors would be proud of, sometimes wound up with C+s, and people who had huge tracks of material copied from encyclopaedias would get As. I kept a B/B+ average through the course, until the last quarter, when I started submitting raw OCR-scans of the textbook (complete with misreads and typos), smartassing my way through the assignments, and mocking him to his face (For example, I wrote one paper that consisted mostly of me trying to see how many of his… ahem… unique expressions… I could jam into one sentence at any given time, for example). I got an A that quarter.

I think that was exactly the wrong lesson for me to learn at that moment. :smiley:

68

Some of my communications profs are good dressers, but they came from television, where that sort of thing matters. The exception is the department chair, who is a cameraman when he is not a department chair, but he dresses in what he finds comfortable for that sort of work.

Robin

69

first year chem. Was split up to be taught by two profs. Prof #1 was a hoot. The very cliche of a Scotsman. Knew the stuff upwards and downwards and side to side, and no problem teaching it. Great teacher. Prof #2, who took over for the middle of the term was new to his post (first time teaching), a recent immigrant (from hungary) and apparently shy.
Literally 4/5 of the class skipped the entire segment taught by him. The few of us who remained were clustered around as close to him as we could be (to try to hear) and desperately trying to understand him. OG help you if you asked a question. I THINK he was he was trying to use examples translated from hungarian, and failing. Badly. They were nonsensical, rambling, muttered affairs that left you utterly lost. It was really sad actually, since you could tell he was trying.

Then there’s my business communications class. Another new prof. Could not have ONE class without references to his previous job. Not one. No matter what the question was, it became a reason to tell us about how awsome he was at his prior job. Wouldn’t have been bad if at least it served towards providing an explanation or answer to the question. Nope. Totally non related. I dropped that class after the second week, but I’m told it was the same till the end.

70

Second year of Medical school, Growth and Development course, taught by “Jack” and “Betsy”. Jack and Betsy were married, and had a son “Benjamin”. Benjamin, being six, had had the good fortune to actually grow, and develop, so Jack and Betsy felt he provided an excellent example to be used in demonstrating any and all concepts via home movies.

Here is Benjamin showing a “startle response”.
Here is Benjamin demonstrating “cruising”.
Here is Benjamin showing the concept of object permanence.

It began to get worse when they moved into Freudianism.

This is Benjamin climbing into bed with me (Betsy) when he was in his Oedipal phase. As you can see, Benjamin is pushing Jack away. Jack felt really rejected for that year, didn’t you Jack? You were jealous of my connection with Benjamin.

Then there was my personal favorite, when they discussed how grade-school kids would try to curse to get a reaction. Jack was teaching.

Jack: Then the other day, Benjamin called his little friend Susie a bitch.
Betsy (from the back of the room-a large lecture hall with 150 students): Is that what he said?
Jack: Yes
Betsy: Why didn’t you tell me?
Jack: I didn’t want you to get upset.
Betsy: That kid is going to get it when I get homel

Most of the class stopped attending lectures by the time they got to the one on the importance of play. It was demonstrated via home movies of Jack and Betsy and their friends. The men were playing touch football, and the women were on the sidelines in cheerleader outfits cheering. I stopped attending class after watching Betsy shake her pompons.

We spent a lot of time speculating on just how much therapy Benjamin would eventually need.

71

Art 101 in college - actually, it was quite an interesting class, but the professor was… well, I guess deranged would be a good word.

After we took our midterms and handed in our term papers, she took off (with our tests and papers!) She sent word to the class that she was having a nervous breakdown, and never came back. The head of the dept hired a replacement, who gave us yet another midterm, and assigned a new paper (heaven forbid we could just hand in a copy of the one we already did). For the new paper, we had to go to the Whitney Museum and write down the name of every piece of art work, along with what period of art it represented.

Do you know how many thousands of pieces of art the Whitney has?! It took 5 of us 2 straight days to write it all down. Of course, the intelligent students just purchased the gallery handbook from the giftshop! :smack:

Worst part of this? I found out the following year my older sister had the exact same art teacher, and she pulled the “nervous breakdown” on her class as well!
-Wallet-

72

Oh, I thought of another one I had in college. Not a bad teacher, per se, but right before finals, he lost his grade book. Couldn’t find it anywhere. So he naturally did what anyone would do - gave everyone a straight 90 going into the final. If you did well, you got an A for the class, and if you did badly, you got a B.

Interesting. :dubious:

73

So. Has no one had absolute sons of bitches in class? Or have the mature, responsible folks among us just found ways to give them what they want and maintain the status quo?

Honestly, folks, I’m feeling very shut out here. Did I choose the wrong path for my life in 10th grade when I told my algebra teacher I wasn’t going to take it from him anymore?

74

Oh kee-rist. I just read about the nervous-breakdown lady, the egotistical pompous ass…and the convicted murderer.

So OK, I guess I did make a life-changing mistake telling an obnoxious control-freak teacher where to go in the 10th grade. After all, it’s the obnoxious control freaks who run the world, and we’d better learn early on how to please them…

:rolleyes:

75

Well, my Grade 8 teacher was an obnoxious, pompous ass, who played favorites and would ridicule me in front of the class at every opportunity. My mother made many visits to the school to see if she could find out what his problem was, and tell him exactly where to go. Many years after I moved away I learned that he was discovered to have been a pedophile, and was run both out of town and the teaching profession. Looks good on him.

76

I’d have to say my worst teacher was my spanish teacher who couldn’t speak spanish. Now, this was a private elementary school that took pride in the fact that they began teaching languages at 4th grade, and yet they hired two(the other taught french) of the most incompetent lunatics they could find. She taught us the same limited vocabulary words each year, and when the school hired an additional spanish teacher who could actually speak spanish, we all delighted in the fact that she would pretend to have conversations with him when all she could barely understand him. After we graduated, everyone who went to schools with language placement tests failed spectacularly. I took another year of spanish in 7th grade and by the second month we had covered everything I’d learned in elementary school.

My AP Psych teacher comes in a close second, though. She never taught us anything. Occasionally she had a student come up and teach, but mostly she had us do poster-making activities that I hadn’t done since 3rd grade. She loved to assign homework that required an hour’s worth of copying material out of the book. The test were even worse, since she graded essays based on the length instead of the material, and by december many people’s grades miraculously went from B’s to A’s because they tripled the length of their essay. You didn’t even have to write more, you could just double space. She only payed attention to the 5 or so people in the class who she liked, and the rest of us may as well have been invisible. It wound up working to our advantage, since she never noticed that people didn’t show up for class for a week or more. In the end, I took a B in the class because I never handed in homework but always got As on tests, and got a 4 on the AP without studying or attending half the review classes.

77

“…by pouring their derision upon anything we did…”
School in general was hell, but the experiences in fifth grade are ones I’ll remember until the day I die.

My fifth grade teacher was a racist bitch. No, I am not saying she was racist in the way that Al Sharpton calls everybody a racist, but actually ridiculed the black children in the class. She’d often “keep her eyes on” us, and in the office, I overheard her talking about the “blacks” who lived “in the projects”.

On top of that, she was a horrible teacher who intimidated the students by checking the insides of our desks and lockers (which were in the classroom), and dumping the contents on the floor, making us pick it up ourselves, and having the students look at us while we did it. She egged the students on at times, having them chant “DUMP IT! DUMP IT!”
If a kid threw up in class, she’d make him clean it. She’d often yell and turn red. I remember drawing a small comic of her turning so red that her head exploded.

All of her students were afraid of her. I remember there was a boy named Andrew in my class, whom she made cry on numerous occasions, because he kept losing his homework. She called parents’ houses for the most petty of things, and gave detentions with the drop of a hat.

And the worst thing about it? None of us, none of the students, nor the parents, could do a goddamned thing about it. I remember telling my mother about this horrible woman, and my mother alerted the principal. The principal said "She is one of our finest teachers here. Most likely, there is a problem with your child.

When I was abused by a student she liked, she accompanied him to the police station and coached him about what to tell the attorney when he was questioned.

Goddamnit, I’m upset as hell, and I’ll say her name. Ms. K. Lowery. Saying her damn name makes me sick. I hope she dies as bitter and alone as she was the last time I saw her.

One of these days, I’m going to find out if she still teaches at that school. I’ll go over there, call her out of the classroom, curse her out, and make her feel like I did every goddamned day of that horrible school year. I do not care what anybody tells me, I firmly believe she had a vendetta against me, and other students.
I hope she eats a bullet.

78

I had a couple in law school. One I actually had on two different occasions. He was a visiting prof, not on staff, and for good reason. He taught absolutely nothing. In the Expert Witnesses class, he would sit there and read deposition and trial transcripts to us word for word, after he’d already given us copies of them. So that we could “follow along”, I guess. yeesh.

But worse than that was my Legal Practice prof. It was her first year teaching, and I’ll wager it was her last. Here’s the thing about law school: the professors have a very “go do your own learning somewhere else” attitude in class, but generally, if you ask them a direct question, they’ll actually answer you. Not her. She steadfastly refused to answer anything, preferring instead to just say, “You need to find that out for yourself.” Problem is, Legal Practice is the one class where the prof is supposed to give you the answers. It’s the class where you learn to use the library, the various books and computer resources, and how to do research. If you don’t know how to do that, you can’t find any answers for yourself! And yet, she just blew us off whenever we asked her how to find something.

On top of that, she tried to fit in with us. She invited us all to a local drinkery after the end of term, proceeded to get so drunk that she broke two glasses by clumsily dropping them, and crawled all over the pool table. Our professor was asked to leave. When I left, my fellow students were trying to talk her out of her keys.

Couple that with the fact that she was discovered to have been screwing one of the guys in my class, and I’m pretty sure she never taught again.

79

A lot of my classes are like that. What an easy job for the tutor. I hate going to tutes taken by my classmates, because they’re awful (the tutes). My classmates aren’t teachers, and they don’t fully understand the material or know what you’re supposed to say - that’s why we’re students in the class. Yet, we’re supposed to take the class every week. It’s crazy.

80

Not a personal story but one of my favourite bits of irony. A Melbourne football team engaged well known Australian cricketer Dean Jones to provide some inspirational wisdom to their team. Jones turned up to training and introduced himself in the dressing room, “Hi I’m Dean Jones but you guys can call me ‘Legend’.” The team went back to their conversations among themselves and no-one spoke to Jones either during or after the session.