Worst teachers/trainers/instructors you have ever came across

In My Humble Opinion
81

I never had a decent history teacher until I got to college. It was the course that was given to coaches or other teachers who had a free period since “anybody can teach history, right?” so they just read it to us from the book. The exception was a 70 year old coach (this was in the early 1980s- he was retired from public school but this was a tiny Christian academy) who had an interest in history as he saw it, but that wasn’t exactly a viewpoint backed by most professional historians (or most professional grocers, for that matter). The Depression was caused by Jews, the KKK was the only reason blacks didn’t end up slaughtering whites from coast to coast, Europe didn’t do a damned thing to try and stop Hitler until we got over there, etc…

The worst, though, was a woman who really did have a degree as social studies teacher but who didn’t know and didn’t seem to particularly give a damn about the subject and would read it aloud just like the coaches had done with some mispronunciations that even as a high schooler made me cringe (the “dee med-EESEY family of Florence”, “writer Rude-Yard Kiplinger”, “MIG-well dee Servants” etc.). I don’t know about all states, but in Alabama you only had to take at that time about 3 history (or poli-sci) courses above the Intro-Level to qualify for a social studies specialty in an Education degree- as an undergrad history major I had about 3 times the number of upper level courses you had to have to teach the subject. I think it’s a major reason there are so many people who think history is boring- they were taught by people who didn’t know it.

College teacher that come to mind are a thisclose to retirement Lit Professor who obviously was passionate about the subject but no longer gave a damn about teaching it and turned a blind eye to egregious cheating going on in the room. There was also an adjunct 30-something psychology professor who was more interested in finally being one of the cool kids in the class (hanging out with the cheerleaders and the jocks as “cool teach”- of course they were playing her like a dimestore guitar) to actually teach anything remotely useful and she made a dumbass journal project (I HATE THOSE!) count an inordinate amount of the grade, which majorly hurt me, then she moved to Hawaii at the end of the semester so I never had a chance to challenge her grading of my journal.

82

In the 6th grade, in a public school, I had a science teacher who told us that dinosaurs and men lived together.

In 9th grade math class, the teacher was obsessed with the Mob. Whenever someone didn’t feel like hearing a math lecture, he’d ask the teacher a question about Al Capone and then we’d spend the rest of the class time discussing that.

In college in 1983 or so, I had a macroeconomics prof. who was always saying, “The next president, whoever he may be, will preside over the collapse of the Western economy”.

83

In high school, my Spanish teacher for one year learned that I was an atheist, and decided to try to convert me to Christianity. This took the form of witnessing to me in class, taunting my about my lack of belief, and openly telling my parents and the assistant principal that I was going to hell.

The worst teacher I ever had, though, was a few years ago, teaching ancient history of the near east. He was a brilliant, brilliant man, Oxford-educated, knew everything there was to know about the subject, but could not teach one bit. He would stand at the front of the class at a lectern, and proceed to spend the next three hours telling us what he knew, in a slow, Ben Stein-with-a-British-accent voice. Never used any notes, and his lectures were always random and unconnected. He would do such fun things as say “Now… this particular Assyrian king, <name> :writes name on board: was killed in <ca some year> and was also known as <other, totally different name>” and would then spend the rest of the lecture referring to the king as the second name, without ever writing it on the board. Pretty much the only way to get useful information out of this guy was to ask him a specific question. He was a living encyclopedia of near eastern historical knowledge, but simply had no way to organize a lecture.

This was a small class of about 15 people, and it would not be uncommon for people to get up and walk out in the middle of the class. He had a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and when he came back, he would often find only 2 people left. I was only occasionally one of them.

84

The only bad instructor I am recalling (at least right now) was in a community college geology class. I am remembering he was a grad student, and it seemed pretty obvious he had been given no training in how to teach.

As I recall most of the time all he would do was sit at the instructor’s desk and read aloud from the textbook! :rolleyes:

85

His last name wasn’t Snape, was it?

86

For some reason, the PE teachers also taught the health[read sex]ed classes.
Real sex education had begun in the mid-sixties and most of us by then had had at least four years of it. Our teacher had left school before these mandatory class were given so most of us knew more than he and would often make fun of him by asking the most embarassing questions like, “Can a girl get pregnant if she’s menstruating? Will douching with coke prevent pregnancy? Can you get VD if you from kissing?”.

87

The two worst:

11th grade US History, taught by an asshole that walked upright like a human. About the second week of the class, I went on his shitlist and the rest of the year was a living hell. He would verbally abuse me in class, calling me lazy/stupid/retarded/whatever crossed his mind. I quit doing any work in the class and would turn in blank pieces of paper with just my name on them for tests. I complained to the school management and was blown off completely. At the end of the year, I knew I was not coming back to that school for my senior year, so I told him off in class. He started in on me for something and I wound up calling him a worthless prick. I then apologized and said that I was incorrect, because a prick is part of a man and he wasn’t a man, he was a worthless piece of shit. I then picked up my books and walked down to the study hall. I went there every class for the rest of the semester.

He was fired halfway through the next year, got caught screwing one of the other teachers on the desk in his office. I hate that man still.

And my college economics professor. Senile, boring, incomprehesible mumbling, you name it. The TA wound up teaching us what we needed to know in order to pass the tests.

88

Once upon a time I had an Organic Chemistry professor so dreadful I’ve actually blocked his name from my mind.

He wasn’t even really a bad teacher per se and he was very, very competant in the field.

The problem was that he was invincibly, religiously conservative with his notions of gender roles mortared in stone at circa 1850. On the first day of class, he informed the class (which was a little over half female) that women seeking degrees in anything other than Home Ec or Education (if they were spinsters only - he used the word “spinster” and everything) were an abomination against God. After which, he refused to acknowledge in any form the female students in the class. If you raised your hand, he would ignore it. If you spoke, he pretended you said nothing. He did collect assignments and tests, but no person with breasts received better than 32% on any assignment that semester. At one point, I handed in an assignment that was precisely identical to that of my male lab partner. I received a 28%, my partner received a 93%. Fortunately, the college had an iron-clad policy requiring that all tests be identified by student ID number only. It’s the only reason any girl passed that class.

Also, at one point during the semester he cornered me in the Solution Preparation room where I was mixing up a variety of reagents for another chemistry class I was TAing that semester and informed me - point blank - that the only reason I could possibly be serving as a TA was that I must be “fornicating” with the professor. Which came as an enormous surprise to the professor in question - who had come up behind the guy. My organic chem prof then informed me that while it was laudable that I was doing my Christian duty by attempting to find a man and have some babies (my only proper role, remember?), I shouldn’t be doing so outside the bounds of holy matrimony. However, since I was already a fallen woman, he’d raise my grade if I were willing to fornicate him as well.

I accidentally dropped a one-gallon glass bottle of pure hydrochloric acid on his slacks on my way out the door to the Dean’s office - followed by the prof I was TAing for.

As far as I know, he still teaches there.

89

I didn’t realize how many bad teachers/profs I’ve had until I read this thread and was reminded of them.
*My fifth grade teacher used to dig the earwax out of his ears with paper clips and eat it. Everything else I have to complain about sounds really juvenile now, so I’ll just say he was a world-class jerk.
*My high school health/phy. ed. teacher. Og, where do I start? When he taught us about the birds and the bees, he called contraception “contraptions.” His tests were hand-written and most of the answers were right in the question. In phy. ed., he’d make up his own games, and change the rules on us during the middle of the game. He was an idiot.
*One of my college lit teachers failed to show up the first day of class because she had to coach a soccer game. She did this at other times in the semester without bothering to let us know, too. All she talked about during class was Faulkner, Faulkner, Faulkner. Which would have been just fine, except we didn’t read any Faulkner the entire semester! :smack:
*Another of my college lit teachers was the biggest pervert I’ve ever met. Rumor had it that he graded his female students by the size of their breasts. If a book we read had anything in it about sex, he’d spend an entire class period discussing it. He later got in trouble for this and the second time I took a class from him (Yes, I’m that stupid.), he told us he had to skip over those parts now. This guy also had a reputation for marrying his students, and when they got too old, he’d dump them and find a younger one. It was not uncommon for him to start statements with, “My first wife …”

90

I had a professor who was exactly the same way with Moby Dick, the gauge of all literature in his estimation that he compared everything else we read (from Mark Twain to William Faulkner to James Thurber [literally] to Don Delillo. Moby-Dick was written in 1851, Melville died in 1891, and this course was Twentieth Century American Literature, but he had to go whaling every damned day.

I had a history professor who had absolutely no sense of humor and loved to criticize the low Southern intellect (begging the question “why the hell don’t you move back north?”, but in fact he retired from 25 years of teaching in Alabama and moved to a small college in Georgia, where he continued to do the same thing). He was mighty proud of the fact he had never having missed one day of class in all of his years as a professor; he was actually proud of the fact that on the day his wife gave birth prematurely to a son who was born with a serious lung infection, he still made his class. (The child survived and more amazingly the wife stayed with him.)

91

Must have been a twin of my 9th grade math teacher. He spent his youth laying RR track and pounding in the spikes with sledge hammers (and thus was still strong as an ox) and had hours of stories about those days. He’d spend most of each class telling stories and then realise how much time had passed and rush though explaining the material. (He actually was a good teacher when he could keep his mind on the math). … He also had a tendancy to leave the room during tests, so my normal B’s would become A’s when I cheated off the guy in front of me and the girl behind me brought her C’s up to Bs by cheating off me.

Just before I got to high school, the guidance counciler ‘retired’… but everybody knew he was forced out by the work of a friend of mine. She was 4 years older than me and a straight A student and as a senior was looking at colleges. The guidance counciler actually told her “Oh, you’re too pretty, you shouldn’t go to college. You’ll never find a husband then. Men don’t like smart women, so only ugly women go to college because they know they can’t find a man to take care of them.” It was the early 80’s when he said that in rural PA. She raised holy hell with the administration about it and over the summer he decided to ‘retire’.

My worst story (not very bad considering others tales) was a middle school history teacher who would fill 5 chalk boards with his notes, very specific notes outlining the material already written on the board before we arrived to class, that we would spend the first half of each class frantically copying down into a notebook just for that class. His notes used a specific format (not sure what it’s called) like such…
I
_A
__1
__2
_B
__1
__2
II
_A
__1
___a
___b
__2
etc…etc… where you would use ‘I’ ‘II’ for topic headings, ‘A’ ‘B’ for subject headings, ‘1’ ‘2’ for general information and ‘a’ ‘b’ for sub info inside the general info…

At the end of each grading period, he would collect our notebooks and grade them! All you had to do was copy his notes exactly and get an A. It was only a small portion of our grade (the equivilant to a weekly quiz) but he was a History Teacher! He said he was also teaching us to take notes. Fortunately I liked history and did well enough on the tests and real quizes that I decided I could afford the loss of a few points and I stopped copying his notes and used the note book for my D&D charectors instead. Heh heh…

92

How about the music teachers at my high school?

Jazz Band. Assistant band director comes out and keeps rubbing his nose. “Wow, it is Friday and we haven’t even practiced this piece yet.” It was only Tuesday. Supposedly he was only using the cocaine to lose weight.

Perhaps the band director could have stepped in? Nope, he was too busy drinking in the music library.

How about the orchestra director? Nope, he was too busy smoking and embezzling money from the school.

That was a fun year.

93

Grad school in Physics. One professor taught a required course. He’d start each session by telling us how stupid we were, compared to students of the past. He’d give homework assignments with inadequate information to solve them. We eventually formed an “underground” – when someone found where he’d cribbed the problem from we’d pass the word. The original source usually had enough information to enable you to do the problem.

One week he gave the assignment from the previous week over again because he didn’t like the way we’d all solved it.

Over 1/2 the class dropped out after the fuirst couple of weeks. The rest of us stayed. It was a required course, and we didn’t want to wait until someone else was assigned to teach the course.
He chain-smoked through each session and drank copiously from his coffee cup as he mumbled through his lectures. It turned out later that it wasn’t coffee he was drinking.
I passed the course. But if I had to go through the samer thing today I’d lodgte a complaint instead. Worst course I ever had. Worse than the professor who “lectured” by reading aloud from the textbook.

94

I have had my share of bad teachers, including one high school English teacher who could have made porn tedious.

 	Then there are the “flakes.” These are the teachers whom, while you have to take the class, usally because it is required, don’t count on actually learning anything. I began dividing them into “dangerous flakes” and “harmless flakes”. 

             Harmless Flakes were the ones who while you wouldn’t actually gain anything from being in class, it wouldn’t harm your grade. One teacher I had for sociology would spend his time rambling on about anything that came into his mind, he once spent three days discussing the new Guns and Roses album. However, when test time came, he tested out of the book, and graded fairly liberally. Didn’t learn squat, got an A.

Dangerous flakes were a different story. The best example of this was a freshman comp teacher I had who decided that he was Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society.” Except he was so busy being “cool” that often things like grading papers would elude him. He would assign a paper to write at least one a week, not unreasonable for a comp class, but would take three weeks or more to grade the frelling things. So if you finally got the first paper back, and figured out what you were doing wrong, you had turned in three others with the same mistakes. Got out of that one with a B, but still didn’t learn anything other than to avoid this guy at all costs later in my academic career.
95

Middle-school math teacher. He was regarded as extremely cool and fun. Didn’t do shit in class except mess around, tell jokes and generally goof off. The grades were based on a set number of quizzes and tests since he didn’t “do” homework or out-of-class assignments. Hey dude, the one hour per class I spend (not) teaching this stuff is enough, and even that cuts into my toking up time, man.

My parents were incredibly puzzled as to why I was failing math (and sheesh, so was I! I’d been a straight-A student and academic competitor) until…just before the end of the school year (!) it comes out that something like 90% of the kids taking his math class are flunking out.

HUGE dust-up at school. Parents all over the place threatening all sort of things.

All of us who were in his classes were given the opportunity to take one semester of the same math class with a different teacher beginning the next school year, and if we had at least a B average by the winter break that December, the failing grade in Mr. Asshat’s class would be erased and we’d get the grade we got in the new class and full credit for the class.

I scored an A average when I’d completed the one semester in the new teacher’s class and my previous F was deleted; I heard at the time that almost all the kids who had taken this offer had passed with at least the B average. There were some who were just having difficulty with the material and I heard they ended up staying on for the full year in the new class, but an overwhelming majority of us did well in the new teacher’s class - perhaps because she actually TAUGHT the subject matter. :rolleyes:

Once the new teacher got hold of us and spent some time teaching, the material wasn’t so difficult to grasp. Too bad Mr. Asshat couldn’t even be bothered to spend any time actually teaching. He was gone the next year. :wally

96

High school Spanish teacher. He made up seating charts on the first day of class and we were required to sit in those seats. Miraculously, all the prettiest girls were seated at the front of class. I changed to Speech after the first quarter. I’d had three years of Spanish already and he wasn’t teaching me anything new. In fact, we were using the same book I’d had in the previous year’s class with a different teacher. I heard that he was later fired for sexual harassment.

High School English teacher. Nice Southern guy, couldn’t teach for shit. Grading was more subjective than most English grades in that if you didn’t agree with his interpretation of the story, you wouldn’t get a good grade. It was so bad that several of the students talked about filing a formal protest against him. I kept my head down, told him what he wanted to hear (or wrote so well he had to give me a good grade; I later scored the highest out of three classes on the AP test for English). I was very grateful when I got to go back to Mr. G. for my senior year. Mr. G. was a great teacher.

Calculus 2 Professor. She was either absentminded or senile, take your pick. She showed up to class late, didn’t teach half the things in the book, made up her own tests based on some abstruse conception of what college students are supposed to learn. When someone would ask questions about how to solve one of our homework assignments (from the actual text, thank all the Little Green Gods) she’d get halfway through and have some kind of problem. She’d skip steps and come out with the right answer, but we still wouldn’t have any idea how to solve it since she’d skipped most of the part that was a problem for us, or she’d skip steps and have no idea what she’d done to come out with the wrong answer. Often, a good portion of that part of the class would be spent on her trying to figure out her mistake. She’d sometimes use techniques that we hadn’t learned yet and when we asked about it would exclaim, almost as an aside, that we’d love it when we finally learned it. . .in Calc. 4.

Most of us gave up trying to learn anything from her and had group study sessions a couple times a week. The class ended up being basically self-taught. Combine that with the fact that I was too broke to afford a graphing calculator (regular scientific ones were darn cheap after those came out) and I was extremely proud of the C+ I earned in that class. Best damn average grade I ever got.

97

Ask him if he will help you learn to converse in Italian? Maybe he would, and you’d learn more that way.

98

Oh, I had my fair share in my sixteen years of education…

10th grade health/wellness class was split into two sections; for half of each semester, it would be a P.E. class in the gym, and the other half of the semester was in the classroom with the health book. This guy wasn’t a bad guy at all, but he just was… interesting. He was ex-Marine, so he ran us tubby weakling 15-year-olds through the hardest workout we’d ever had (I’ll admit it–I was out of shape enough that I blacked out) for the first few days of class, just to scare us, and then let us play basketball or volleyball… but if we misbehaved, it was drop and give him twenty. In the classroom portion, he had the general coach-teaching-health awkwardness. My main memories of the class were when he spent thirty minutes talking about how happy he was to own his Lexus (which he had saved long and hard to get on his coach’s salary!), and then another lecture about why uncircumcised penises were gross.

I don’t remember much of my 11th grade government class except for the fact that the teacher had this tic… when he’d lecture, about every two or three words, he’d say "Mmmkay?’ and his shoulder would twitch up towards his ear. Once in a 40 minute lecture, I counted 94 'Mmmkay?'s. The three branches of the US government are the executive-mmkay, the legislative-mmkay, and the judicial-mmkay…

My worst teacher ever was my American Sign Language teacher my junior year of college. It seemed like the requirements for teaching ASL at my school were just “be Deaf”. And lucky me, I got a teacher who was very into the inclusiveness of the Deaf community, and if you didn’t have Deaf/hard of hearing family members or didn’t plan on going into work with them, she wondered what the hell you were doing trying to learn their language. Her way of teaching was to introduce a sign, and then go around the room and have everyone (in a 30+ class) do it. And if you messed up, or didn’t get the facial expression, you’d have to do it again. And again. And again. I think once we killed about ten minutes with this girl who didn’t understand that what she was doing wrong; fellow students desperately tried to write notes to her (since it was a no-talking-allowed class), only to have the teacher snarl at them for interfering (and if you haven’t ever been bitched out in sign language, it’s quite an experience.) I’ve taken other immersion-style classes in other languages, but often there would be the point when communciation would break down entirely and in order to keep the class moving, the teacher would have to resort to English just briefly; since that wasn’t an option (well, it might have been, with writing, but that wasn’t allowed) in the class, it lead to a lot of frustration and wasted time. I kept consulting with my best friend (who had taken many ASL classes) to see if it was just me and this was how ASL was done, but she said her experience was nothing like that. This teacher also had a habit of not showing up for class if it snowed… or if it just rained. Now, a New York blizzard is one thing, but I don’t think a thunderstorm stops the trains coming from Jersey. She missed at least four classes doing that, two of them three-hour intensive sessions. Learning ASL could have been a really enjoyable experience, but instead it was frustrating and I learned incredibly little. I got a hand held up in C shape in that class.

…someone mentioned earlier in this thread about “minor incidents that you’re still bitter about”, and she sure gave me one. There was a “no talking” rule during class, which was perfectly understandable. One day, though, after class had ended and as we were walking out of the classroom, the girl who sat next to me asked me a question about my (then interestingly dyed) hair, verbally. I responded to her in just a few words, but that was enough time for the teacher to swoop in on us and start “yelling” about how we were absolutely not allowed to talk in her presence ever, because it wasn’t fair to her if she couldn’t understand. …yes, I suppose I’ll try that one on the people I see on the subway who are speaking Spanish or Chinese? “Pardon me? Could you speak English? I was trying to eavesdrop and couldn’t understand you.”

99

In community college I had a 60ish year-old “professor” who routinely came to class drunk. Lectures consisted of either “read the book and answer exercise a, b, and c, then grade yourself” or he would share how good Mexican women (including his wife, gah!) were in bed and the kitchen (he was a white guy.)

Once in a while he would ask all the men in the class to come outside and he would share a particularly salacious story about Mexican women and his adventures in Tijuana. Yay! Culture and language!