Who was your single worst school teacher, from grades 1-12. No “Well, in this subject it was…, and in this other subject it was…”-please note the lack of plurals in the title.
In 4th grade I had Mrs. Warden for history, except for Fridays when she taught choir to the same class. I remember being taught about Lewis the 14th… because she refused to acknowledge that his given name wasn’t just a nickname for “Lewis”, and the rest of history that she taught was just as bad. Fridays? We had to sing along as she played the piano. Now, she never missed a note…and she never played the spaces. It was just one one long, plodding, joy robbing series of notes from beginning to end…and she played all the verses. Her version of “Silent Night” would have people longing for the comfort of Hell itself.
Mr. A taught high school physics. There was a better than average chance that any experiment he showed the class would not perform as expected. The textbook’s glossary was filled with circular definitions, which didn’t help.
The worst was probably Mrs. F., who taught second grade. She was a large, bad-tempered woman who seemed to dislike children. One time, she caught me reading ahead in the class’ DIck and Jane book, and made me stand out in the hall.
Dishonorable mention goes to Mrs. Torres, the terror of 5th grade homeroom, whose name I only mention because one of her nicknames among less than enamored students was “Torres the Bull”. True, she disliked me somewhat less than my older brother and sister, who also passed through her dictatorship and had bad memories of her.
Mrs. Krumuller was my third grade teacher and the worst one I ever had. She asked for a volunteer to work out a math problem on the chalkboard (remember those?), and when I failed to solve it she dressed me down in front of the classroom. She didn’t just say one mean thing and let me sit down, this was a multi-sentence tear down that included “your mother said you were good at math.” Her tirade came out of nowhere, I didn’t understand what I did wrong, and I was nearly in tears by the time I got to sit down.
I grew up reading encyclopedias so I had a fantastic grasp of basic geography. We had a really good US geography teacher in 11th grade until they had to shuffle things and the football coach / PE teacher was assigned the class.
He was obviously reading the lesson material the night before and made a lot of mistakes. I was a smart ass and let him know about them, so we butted heads the remainder of the year.
Mr. Kulhanek, who taught my freshman science class in high school. I attended a small Catholic high school, and I think they were desperate that year; I have no idea if the guy had any teaching credentials at all, because we certainly didn’t learn anything.
He was clearly a heavy drinker, complete with the red “drunkard’s nose,” and he often smelled like booze. He taught straight from the textbook, and it often seemed like he didn’t understand what was in the book. He somehow lasted a semester before the school parted ways with him.
He edges out the two septuagenarian nuns I had for teachers (one as my fourth grade teacher, the other my high school algebra teacher), who were kindly, but not sharp, and also didn’t teach us very much. Both of them probably should have retired several years prior.
Depends on how you define ‘worst’, but the most ineffective teacher I had taught junior college biology, and I don’t even remember his name. I went to class for about two weeks before i realized his teaching method was simply to read from the textbook. Since I could read from the textbook just as well as he could, I stopped going to class and only showed up for the tests. Midway through the semester, I showed up for the test only for him to say he’d dropped me for nonattendance. I argued that the college’s attendance policy didn’t allow him to drop a student just for not showing up, and attendance was not part of his grading rubric, either. I got reinstated, continued to show up only for the tests, got my ‘A’, and moved on.
She was my art teacher in 12th grade back in the 70s. She was frequently drunk in class, and got an early start on it too. She had been a beauty contestant back in the 50s, and when she was an art student at a mid-level art museum, she stole a minor Renoir from their warehouse (it wasn’t good enough to display, it was kind of an unfinished study) and she displayed it in her home, with some bullshit story about it being a copy. I am one of the MANY people who remember seeing it. Decades later, her daughter (The teacher was long dead by this point) tried to sell it claiming she found it in a flea market somewhere in West Virginia. The FBI was quickly involved. Good times!
7th grade science teacher at middle school Fort Benning. Bonus is a twofer: drama teacher and speech teacher, both at Monterey Peninsula College are exactly as bad as said 7th grade teacher was.
The teacher I had that was the worst at teaching was Mr Dale. My Freshman year in high school (1975-'76) I took an electricity survey class that was a prerequisite for an intro to electronics class. Both classes were over my head and shouldn’t have been offered to underclassmen.
Dale taught both of them. He spoke very quietly during the lectures and what you could hear was a strange mumbling somewhat akin to Boomhauer. We couldn’t make heads or tails out of what he was saying.
Then he would have tests that would have questions on them that weren’t covered in the lectures or the text. This insured nobody ever got a 100%.
Through elementary and junior high I loved math and was in math competitions. While my passions were cooled by a series of mediocre junior high teachers, my tenth-grade math teacher put an end to that love.
She taught algebra exclusively through lecture, using an overhead projector. She wrote equations on the transparency, mumbling through her steps, while standing directly in front of the projector. The equations were projected onto her wide bosom. There was absolutely no way to access the learning, except to try to figure it out from the confusing textbook, or from the posters around the room.
During tests, she told us not to look at the posters, where the answers to questions were displayed. But she sat at the back of the room not paying attention. Cheating was rampant: students would get up and walk across the room to ask someone else the answer to a problem. Somehow she figured out cheating was happening, so she started making different versions of the test. Students responded by trading test pages and solving problems for one another.
She made me think I hated math, until my senior year when I had one of the best teachers ever who rekindled the love.
Mr. G, 11th grade history class. He wasn’t much older than us. His method involved showing us movies every day while he napped. No real discussion, no real instruction. Couldn’t help but feel I was being “taught” by Hollywood directors.
My 10th grade gym/swimming coach - who was also the football coach - was fine with bullying. Here are some of the fun activities he condoned:
Target is standing still, minding his own business. Bully 1 sneaks up behind him and gets on his hands and knees. Bully 2 pushes victim over crouched Bully 1.
Target is walking. Bully runs up behind, jumps at him and encircles his torso with his legs, pulling him to the ground.
Bully throws a basketball at the back of target’s head.
In the pool, bully holds target’s head underwater until…whenever.
This stuff happened regularly, and I can still see Mr. H. watching and smiling.
It has to be the high school Literature professor who assigned us a Roberto Arlt short story with a missing last page. (she provided us with photocopied pages of the story to read in class, intellectual property not being something that’s much respected in Argentinian education… or anywhere else to be honest)
It was not very obvious but my then secret crush (and now wife) is a fan of Arlt and had read the story before.
When she pointed out that the story did not, in fact, had an open ending but a very definite one the professor failed her.
She even brought the book from her house days later to show her, but to no avail.
That was only the worst of that professor’s sins, she didn’t seem to give a fuck about teaching, my future wife and me used to spend those hours reading whatever we liked and chatting.
Mr. S., my high school physics teacher, had an unfortunate habit of getting confused by the force diagrams he himself was demonstrating at the chalkboard:
MR. S.: …so the answer is 10 Newtons.
STUDENT # 1: Wait, what about [factor A]?
MR. S.: [grins nervously] Well, uh…[erases and rewrites his answer]
STUDENT # 2: But what about [factor B]?
MR. S.: [grins nervously again, ignores the question and starts drawing a completely different diagram]
After enough students complained to her, the head of the school’s physics department started sitting in on our classes, and Mr. S. was replaced by a competent teacher within weeks.
10th grade Fundamentalist Christian Science teacher. The kind that believed Jesus rode dinosaurs. He was always trying to refute the science he was “teaching” us. The last day of class before Xmas vacation, we got a 50 minute lecture on what his savior meant to him and how science should be taken with a grain of salt.