Your memorable teachers (both good and bad)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Everyone’s got some teachers that stay in their memory forever. Maybe they influenced you in a good way, maybe they were horrible, or maybe they were just different. Let’s share some stories of our most memorable ones!

My junior high school science teacher was like none other. He was 6’4" and had a booming voice. He liked to act threatening or insane to scare people. It worked, but he was hardly a bad guy. He was hilarious and got everyone interested in science by teasing the students or accompanying his lessons with great stories. Plus, he was RICH! He taught just for the fun of it, besides being a teacher he was also a high school basketball coach, owned a day camp, and owned a medical supply store. He drove a porsche to school. But he was also far from a stingy rich guy: To encourage class participation, he regularly handed out $1 and $5 bills. I made about $15 off of him in 7th grade.

In high school I had a music class taught by a gym teacher. This guy had really wanted to be a music teacher but budget cuts meant he’d be unable to get a job, so he taught gym instead. One semester, they needed an extra music teacher, so he volunteered to do it and I got him. He was heavily into rock music of the 60’s and our music class was more a history of the Beatles and Eric Clapton than anything else. He also encouraged us as far as modern music went, and had us bring in songs by our favorite bands of the era to listen to. (This was 1994 so we also studied Nirvana.) We were bad once and his punishment was making us write “I love Hootie and the Blowfish” 100 times…I’m not joking!)

The other most memorable teacher I had was my 1st grade teacher, who was insane. The Challenger exploded that year and she cried because a teacher was on board. She used to drag students out of the class by their collars, threatened to kill me for writing in a workbook (in pencil!), and once brought a fertilized chicken egg to school, broke it, and showed it to us to demonstrate what a dead chicken fetus looks like.

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bad teacher? You’re soaking in it…

I had a teacher in college, for a lighting-for-film class, who was teaching part time and working in the industry part time. The week before mid-term, I went to him and said, "Hey, it says on the sylabus ‘hours by appointment’. and there are some concepts that I don’t quite get about (x, y, z). I’d like to make an appointment to discuss them if I could.
He said, “No. If I had more time available outside of class, I’d be doing more freelance work.”
I was dumbstruck. Luckilly, I studied my ass off and got a B on the mid-term. The rest of the symester was him putting up movie stills on the whiteboard and saying, “Duplicate this”, then grading us at the end of the week on what we’d filmed. No interaction at all. He’d spend the class periods out doing other things.

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Had a Spanish teacher in high school who was a strange character. He was amazing with languages – pretty young guy and he was fluent in 8 or 9 languages. If you fell asleep in his class, he would paint your fingernails with white out, then drop a book on the desk next to you to wake you up. (No, I didn’t get that special treatment, but a guy sitting next to me once did!)

Also had a really good english teacher, senior year in high school. He often gave interesting assignments that made his class more fun than others. One of them was on “bad love poetry”. The assignment was to write a love poem, but the goal was to made it as cheesy, stinky, and/or just plain bad as possible (the premise being that all love poetry is bad, so why not?) They were all read aloud, and the class voted on the best (i.e. worst) ones. Mine came in 5th. :slight_smile:

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Oooh, well…I love these. And I should be asleep. So I’ll recount. More fun that way.

Let’s see. One of my English professors was a dude who looked…well…homeless. He taught by the “Stand up front and mumble” method. And smelled horrible.

Another English professor was a really, really old guy who read straight from the book and complained long and loud if you, like, went to the bathroom. He wanted us to raise our hands and ask permission. Like high school. I’ve never before (or since) run into this.

Another would lecture on one thing, assign us readings on another, and have tests that related to none of these. I quit studying, doing the readings, and going to class (except for the tests) and got a B+, better than quite a few people who worked.

I had one instructor tell me quite snottily that since I was taking 15 hours and working 20 hours a week that “Well, that’s only 35 hours a week, and some people work jobs that are 40 hours a week, so you should have plenty of time to study for my course.” He’d assign insane reading lengths and I wasn’t the first to complain. But, I was the easiest to pick on. Until I said, “Well, yea, but those people get paid for their insane amounts of work, and the boss doesn’t usually take such glee in drowning half his people in work.” He didn’t like that.

I had one that seperated people for talking. Like high school, again. Not conversation. I mean “I dropped my pen, can you get it?” “Sure…here”. Talking. And not during tests, just during regular class time.

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I remembered two more that were worth a mention:

My American History teacher in HS was obese, had narcolepsy, and in his spare time was a paramedic. I used to wonder what would happen in he fell asleep driving his ambulance. He used to doze off quite often in the class and if he did it while standing up someone would always hurry to push a chair behind him so that he wouldn’t fall. He weighed so much we figured if he fell he’d really hurt himself. He was a really nice guy.

For all 4 years of high school, my Spanish teacher was an Italian dwarf who was mostly deaf, even with his hearing aids, and had difficulty seeing as well. He smelled like rotting meat and shopped at Gap Kids for his clothes. How’s that for an unlikely combination?

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I had a teacher once that was on so much pain medication for his back (from a car accident) that he would fall asleep in class. He would yell at students for walking behind his chair. He was later fired and arrested after threatening the principal with a gun.

I also had an English teacher that would smoke and sleep in class.

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Ha, memorable math teacher in high school, Mr. Green, just probably the best math teacher in the State of California.

Mr. Alpheus Green

Called Mr. Alpheus P. Green by my older brother, who was possibly inserting a false Pea.

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I think it was the sixth grade. The nun I had used to swear in Polish taking the Lords name in vain. She also would get mad and wipe everything on her desk (which was in the front of the room) on the floor as she cursed. Then she would yell at kids to clean it up.

One year it was the end of the school year and we got a class picture. I was passing mine around for others to see and someone drew a mustache on her photo. She was livid! She grabbed the photo from me and slapped me really hard on the back. I was mortified. I ran into the bathroom and cried.

Later that night I told my parents and they called the police and I went down to the police station and made a report and they wanted to take pictures of me (but I had sunburn)

The police called her and told her that I was pressing charges and she begged and pleaded with them not to do that because her mother was very old and she needed to take care of her.

So my father left it up to me to decide to press charges or not.
I cut the nun a break.

The next day (which was the last day of school) I went in to collect my report card and sitting next to my report card was a fake ivory medallion of the Mother Mary on a chain.

The nun and I never spoke about the incident again.

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Best teacher:

My Spanish teacher, Mrs. Henckel, whom I had in my sophomore, junior and senior years. She made the class fun. We’d observe cultural events celebrated in Spain and Mexico. On these days we’d bring food and decorate the classroom in a festive style. I got all A’s throughout the class for the entire three years. I and several other students also got to go with her to Mexico for a week.

Other cool teachers:

Mr. Turnbull, fourth grade
Mr. Hyde, fifth grade
Mr. Fisher, eighth grade (chemistry and physics)
Mrs. Steward, ninth grade (earth science)
Worst teacher:

Mr. Ricketts. The class was herpetology and ornithology, the studies of reptiles/amphibians and birds, respectively. I had this class in my sophomore year and I hated it. I only took it to fulfill credit requirements. Mr. Ricketts was an asshole and everyone hated him. He had a passionate personal interest in birds and expected everyone to share his enthusiasm. One time he gave us a quiz in which we had to identify the species of birds in a slide show, the slides taken from his own photos. In many of the slides the bird was small and distant, sillhoutted against the sky, which composed about 95% of the image. Most of us bombed this quiz. I ended up getting a D for that semester.

Runner-up for worst teacher #1:

Mrs. Turnbull, my ninth grade English teacher (no relation to my fourth grade teacher AFAIK). She was a bitch (I didn’t really like most of my English teachers anyway, but this one was the worst of them). She always yelled at everyone for the littlest thing. Students began to revolt and would do things to disrupt the class and piss her off on purpose. She’d send offenders to the office, but would never follow up on them, so most people just hung out in the bathrooms until the bell rang (it was the last class of the day.) One day she was so pissed off she left the classroom and the vice principal had to come in and take over.

Runner-up for worst teacher #2:

Mr. Eaton, seventh grade Reading. Mr. Eaton was very anal retentive. He required us to adhere to very strict and formal standards in how we organized our papers, wrote out assignments, etc. He’d mark off points for the slightest deviation from his standards. His classroom was a very structured environment. If one forgot to bring all of his materials he’d be marked as tardy for that day, even if he showed up on time. As a result I had racked up three tardies even though I was never late for the class. He liked to use big words, too, words that few seventh graders would understand. Kisd made fun of him for always wearing green suits.

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As a teacher I thought I’d add my 2 cents. My most influential teacher was my high school english teacher. Had he not been a philosopher right out of grad school, I would not have persued my dreams at that time in my life. 17 and didn’t care about anything…He taught me through his actions and coolness to become the man I became. As a matter of fact two years ago I sent him a letter saying how much he had profoundly affected my life. As a successful college instructor now, I thought he’d be proud. He said he began to cry when he read it, and I was the only student who had ever written him to that effect.

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I will never forget this one “Social Studies” teacher. He also taught history. One day he was telling us about Mr. Comstock (pronounced with the “Ahm” sound) who was credited with discovering the Comstock (pronounced with the “Ohm” sound) lode near Virginia City.

I was amused and confused to no end by the apparant discrepancy. Which was it? Did he actually name his discovery after himself, but with a mis-pronunciation of his name? Or was it some bizarre coincidence that the discovery was named with a homonym of his last name? :smack:

The football coach taught geography also (this was a small school district). The sum total of knowledge passed on by this guy was, “Stay away from the tank! Everybody likes to shoot at the tank!” and that holding 2 fingers up will get you 3 drinks at the bar in some foreign countrys because they count the thumb as 1.

Our highschool had a lesbian PE teacher and a history/spanish teacher that was arrested years later for child molestation. This guy was WIERD!! He would sit in the back of the room during film strips and pick his nose and eat boogies! I remember when I first heard the rumors about him doing this. I thought it was just bullshit. But I saw him do it with my own two eyes!!! :eek:

We also had an english teacher that was at least 500 lbs and had a small beard.

She was a woman!

How is Rap like Porn? Both are better with the sound turned off.

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Oh, yea, we had a nun in my school (Catholic) with a very black, very bushy mustache.

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I loved Mr. Murphy, my 11th grade math teacher. He was very clear in his explanations, funny, made everyone comfortable, and was never tried to embarass the students who didn’t do so well. He had this book of Top 10 lists, and every now and then he’d have a contest with us to earn points on our tests if we could get at least half of a list (e.g. “top 10 dramas of the 1980s”). Every year the yearbook is dedicated to 1 or 2 teachers who the students nominate, and he was one of the two.

Senior year of college, I took a class called Intimate Relations and it was instructed by Teresa, a grad student. She was very smart and engaging, made us laugh quite often, and was very supportive of class discussions (a class of about 250 people). Because of the sensitive material, she made a point of making sure people knew they could ask anything whatsoever and not feel ashamed. One of the best days in that class was when she had students come up to the board and write all the nicknames and euphemisms we could think of for male and female genitalia.

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My freshman year of high school, I had an exceedingly memorable physics teacher. For the first half of the class, we had a long-term sub who knew his stuff, but was really boring to listen to. For the second half, our “real” teacher arrived. As far as everyone could tell, he was the exact opposite of the sub: interesting to listen to, but had no idea what he was talking about. I remember him saying, with great pride, that he could curse in Arabic, then saying something which sounded Arabic, then announcing, “I’d probably get fired if anyone knew what I just said.” This was on his first day. There are too many anecdotes about this guy to include, but he was fired less than a semester after being hired. For being drunk (and drinking) on the job. His grading scale was…interesting, I think is the word. One of the kids in the class failed every test, didn’t turn in any homework, never even opened the book, and was high on the rare occaisions that he was in class. He got a C overall.

Also in HS, the woodshop teacher was great. The most laidback teacher ever, at the start of the class everyone had to copy the safety rules, which were about 8 pages typed. When people would start bitching, he’d go lock himself in his office and check his email. Once we actually started working, he had a stereo set up in the shop, and so we’d have jams while working. One time, when a teacher whose classroom was a portable behind the shop gave us a dirty look for blasting Back in Black, I asked Petrucci if he cared. “Fuck 'em. I was here first. If they were stupid enough to build classes next to the woodshop, they need to expect some noise”

OK, this has gone on way longer than I intended, but let me just say that Mr. DeVries for HS econ and Professor Sundbeck for astronomy in college were both quite good, and I wanted to recognize that, but don’t have room to go into detail.

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Hmmm…the bonkers teachers are the ones what always make the best stories…

There was a nun at my high school called Sister Marie Alice, and since she signed everything SMA…well, that’s what everyone called her…poor woman – only after I became a teacher did I understand what hell we put that woman through. The order finally transferred her to a non-teaching position to give her a break.

Then there was the woman who was my teacher when I were 10…extreme mood swings. At Krimble one year she discovered the boys were passing around a naughty photo, took it from them, and then ran about the room like a madwoman, ripping down all the Christmas things, and flung them into the cupboard, shrieking that the Baby Jesus hated us…demented, yes, but then she decided that the boys needed to know that what they were doing was humiliating to women, so she grabbed the lad what had had the pin up, made him march to the front of the room, and told him to drop trou & pick a girl to paddle him. We were just bloody gobsmacked (this was about 25 yrs ago), and just terrified, really. Nothing ever happened at that time, although she quit teaching after that year…

Then in graduate school I had a madwoman I can’t name as she’s still teaching…she was a right bully who was upset that I had been accepted in place of a student she had wished for, and had received funding…I was in a small tutorial with taught by her, and I was quite good on the topic, but daily she would berate me and tell me how stupid I was – she would fawn all over the other student and offer her research opportunities, then turn to me, and say, ‘Of course, I don’t mean YOU, just Martha.’ We had to write a very specific sort of research paper, and she warned me that if she found out I had had ANY help or advice, even asking someone to proofread my paper, she would have me thrown out of the school on cheating charges.

She would also pull the, how many classes was I taking…three…hmmm…ok, that’s 9 hours in class a week…how much time did I spend preparing for each class…2 hours a day each…hmmm…is that all? Why wasn’t I a better student since I had so much free time?

Between her and the fellow who was my supervisor I nearly had a nervous breakdown, as this was my first term in grad school, and I thought this was perfectly normal behaviour on their part. He told me my first meeting with him, that a successful graduate student worked at least 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. He also would make his PhD students write massive dissertations – they were the stuff of legend, 700 and 1000 pages long! I looked at them in the dept director’s office…unbelievable! Now here’s the big surprise: I knew a man who’d gone to grad school with this guy, and he said every time he saw the guy, the guy was out playing touch football or watching tele in the lounge…and his own dissertation clocked in at 100 pages or so…

Unfortunately, I had to take a second seminar from the female grad prof, and she refused to approve my research paper topic…week after week I went nuts trying to come up with something for a 500 level grad course what would be acceptible, and she would turn them all down – until the last week, when she said my topic was ok, but she would have to fail me anyway as no one could possibly write a good term paper in only a week…

It’s funny, too, as when I was a TA, sometimes before class we would shoot the breeze about strange teachers and then I would feel very self concious when I turned my back on my students, which would make everyone laugh – I did rather enjoy teaching, actually! I used to tell them, PLEASE if I have a line of chalk on my backside from leaning against the rail, TELL me, just don’t snicker. Maybe that’s what makes a successful teacher, not to have this us against them that seems to be the situation when you have a maniac in the front of the room…

I have had wonderful teachers and professors, however! My first day at uni, I was a shy little mouse, and I remember my professor, a Tudor historian, was larger than life, amazing gentleman (who, when he was at uni, was Gene Wilder’s roommate)…and watching him tease and have give and take with the other students, I remember thinking, ‘That’s how I would like to be! I wish I could feel that comfortable with a professor.’

When he died a few years ago, his brother wrote to me about it, and I was just gutted…the letter I wrote back was what they used as the funeral eulogy…

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Lets see… Mr. T… Tom… Tomz… Dammit, thats why we called him Mr T! Tomzcek or something like that… Hell I dunno… freshman science teacher in any event… Made class cool and fun with stuff he’d demo… First time I evewr saw a laser! He aimed it at a piece of tissue paper and we were all AMAZED that it didn’t blast holes in things, ala Star Wars… Left it there for the entire class and just before we left, had a couple people from the class feel it… It wasn’t even warm!

Mr. Scott Eshelman… An English teacher… Actually CARED about getting his students motivated, very unlike many of the other teachers I had during the course of my education. He was also the first person to suggest that I could actually write. I’ve spent the intervening twenty years trying to decide what i should write… Thanks a LOT Mr. Eshelman! ;D

Another English teacher… This one NOT so good… She was an old woman who had failing eyesight… She required that all assignments be turned in on wide ruled paper. I’d already bought my school supplies and bought all my notebooks college rule. She began failing my assignments without even reading them. For reasons I won’t go into in this thread, I was raised by my grandmother, an English teacher by trade. She saw me failing assignments that should have been Bs at least and reported this teacher to the school board. I got to have a different teacher the following semester.

Mrs. Carpenter. Introduction to Data Processing. Fresh out of college. She was Mrs. Mainframe. The class was taught on Apple IIc computers. She’d type a filename to get it to launch and she would get an illegal command message. I told her to type LOAD “filename”,8 like I had to on my Commodore 64c and lo and behold it worked! Before that quarter was done she had me grading people’s assignments and in general acting as a teacher’s aide. When the semester ended she assignmed me a failing grade for the class since I hadn’t “done my own assignments”. The other students in the class actually petitioned the principal to change my grade. he refused since I had not, in fact, done my own assignmetns. The fact that I’d as much as taught the class was irrelevant. I was unable to move along to the advanced data processing classes because of a failure to complete that class. I did not want to take the class again because she was still teaching it. Hey Mrs. Carpenter! Guess what?? I own an IT company! So there!

Out of high school and into college. I signed up for Psych 101 in order to fulfill a humanities requirement along with about 28 or 29 other students. First day of class this 5’2" brunette psychopath comes into the room announcing that she is to be referred to as Doctor or Professor. No assignments may be turned in beyond the posted due date and TIME. In general showing herself to be a little Hitler… The second day of class the numbers had dwindled slightly. Only about 22 of us left. Day three the instructor walks in, sees that there are only about 15 students left in the class and says “Ok, now that we’ve gotten rid of the people who were only here to fulfill a humanities requirement, my name is Cindy…” We were dumbfounded… And it was a fantastic class…

::Salute Cindy and all the other great teachers out there putting up with uncaring students and parents and unreasonable administrations. If it weren’t for you and all those like you, the world would be a miserable place today.::

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My worst teacher was my 4th grade teacher. She’d had my brother a couple years prior (he was a bit on the troublesome side). She automatically thought I would be a “bad” student. She would keep me in at recess for dumb things. While being held in at recess she would “assign” me spelling words to write rediculously high number of times over and over. If I didn’t get it done I’d have to stay in the next recess to finish with additional “work” tacked on. Needless to say it was self propetuating and I rarely got out for recess that year.

Best teacher was my 5th grade teacher. She was patient, kind, generous, and helpful I loved that teacher. She made school fun and exciting.

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Am I the only one who doesn’t understand this? I hope not…

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You know, I remember the good teachers more than the bad. I mean, I can remember that my fourth grade teacher was horrible, and I didn’t feel that I got anything out of the class that year, and the same for my senior year high school English class, but I never bothered to remember the details. They just weren’t important enough.

I had a few really good teachers, though.

Mr. Arnold, my Jr. high math teacher. He had the worst jokes – mostly “booger” jokes – and some bizarre little speech habits. But he was always interested in how each and every student was doing. He connected with them on their level (I guess that was the point of the jokes), and even let them go at their own pace – ahead or behind at points. I now can appreciate what an enormous amount of work that must have been for him.

Coach Myers, who taught World History in high school. Now, I went into this class thinking that any teacher who was normally a PE teacher (he was the wrestling coach) couldn’t possibly know any academic topic. I also have never really liked studying history – it’s all been dry, uninteresting, chaff to me. I had already shut my mind before the first class and decided that I wouldn’t like it.

I was so wrong. This guy made everything come alive. For the only time before that or since, he made me see the connections between events, the people involved, their motivations, and so forth. It really came alive in his class. I had to admit that I was wrong to have assumed he wouldn’t know anything (which meant I didn’t make that assumption after that). I finally understood why one of my close friends really loved history. And even though it’s still not one of my strong subjects or main interests, from time to time, I actually pick up a book and read about a history topic that interests me at the time, and I doubt I would have ever done that if not for that class.

Mr. Nelson, a high school math teacher. He was dry, with a monotone voice. An ex-engineer, who had retired and took up teaching. Yet somehow, his course was interesting, and I got a lot out of it. I remember going with a friend over to his house after his wife had died, and that was the only teacher I had done that for.

Not a favorite, but just weird (and memorable) was Mr. B, the crazy physics teacher, who always used to tell off-color jokes (the only one who didn’t care if they were age appropriate), and tell us how he would go gambling across the border and bring back paper sacks full of cash. He knew his subject, though.

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Sejal_Traurig – she was called SMA cos it was the letters of her name Sister Mary Alice – that’s how she signed off her name.

This was an Ursuline school, and the Ursuline order of nuns are a teaching order…she had many, many problems maintaining discipline, much of it brought on by her own bullying tactics. Since this was in the States, she asked the main convent of the order, which is in New York, I believe, if she could be moved to another Ursuline Convent, and preferably one that was not associated with a school; I think she ended up in an administrative office in Rome.

Hope that clears things up!