Seventh grade gym teacher, whose name I’ve repressed. He allowed bullying to go on, and as one of the favorite targets, I took a lot of it. A sadistic fuck who had no business being in education.
Hm… I think I’m going to go with Brother B., my 10th grade theology teacher. He was an authoritarian discipline-freak, who didn’t much care what he was disciplining a student for, as long as it was discipline. He once gave a student a detention for holding a pen in class, and another student one for walking too slowly in the hall (the student was going from one room to the room right next door to it). My detention from him was for disrespect, because I responded to something he said with “yes, sir” (it should have been “yes, brother”). It got to the point where, if Mr. R., the dean in charge of discipline, saw a detention slip from Brother B., he wouldn’t even read further, and would just dismiss you.
His academic methods weren’t much better. For instance, he required everyone to take notes using this strict format he enforced, with huge margins so you could only use about 20% of the page, and things we absolutely had to have in the notes and things we absolutely were not allowed. And then he’d inspect the notebooks regularly. One of my classmates re-typed his note (in the exact required format), because his handwriting was terrible, and Brother B. insisted that the work must have been done by his father, because “that’s not your handwriting”.
Thankfully, he was dismissed after that semester.
Mr. Walker, high school algebra. He just did not care. He explained how to do algebra and gave assignments. However, at that age, I also did not care. Mr. Walker would wait patiently while we copied each other’s homework and cheated on tests. More than once, I put my name on a test paper (to get one point of credit) and turned it in blank if there was no one around to copy from. It was all the same to Mr. Walker. He wasn’t a bad guy, though.
My AP English teacher who slept with three of my friends and committed suicide when it came out.
My high school gym teacher. Gym mainly consisted of throwing out sports equipment and letting us set up our own games. Throw out footballs (and one soccer ball) in the Fall, throw out basketballs in the gym in the winter, Throw out baseball equipment in the spring. Occasionally make an effort to try something new (Flag Football! Yay!), but not often.
The main reason hated all this was because I got a “B” for gym every semester, and I was trying to be a “straight A” student. So one semester I beefed up my performance and made ure that I was seen doing so. The gym teacher even commented “I see you out there, putting in the effort.” I was sure I’d get an A for that semester.
But I didn’t. I got a “B”, as usual. Screw him.
Another gym teacher was memorable. He once told us that "Happiness was when you hit yourself on the head with a hammer fifty times, and then stop. we all thought he was maybe a little too happy.
Miss E, who was the prototypical ‘old-maid’ schoolteacher and taught me in 3rd and 4th grades in our 2-room country school. Not to brag, but I was way ahead of the 5 fellow students in my class, book-wise. She recognized that fact, but instead of giving me additional and more challenging homework in a particular subject, she instead gave me a B, thinking that it would inspire me to seek additional learning. I was distraught, because I had done all the assignments and aced all the tests. Only when my Mom (a teacher herself) confronted Miss E., was my grade changed to an A.
Not quite a teacher, (he never taught me, but… he was in charge of the boarding hostel in the high Anglican boarding school I attended.) Mr. Querl only cared about rugby, and rugby players. I didn’t play rugby, so I was a second class citizen to him.
I should write a follow up poem to the great Phillip Larkin’s sad but beautifully written poem “This be the verse”, except on the theme of sadistic sports fanatics who have part-time jobs as teachers, rather than Larkin’s citicism of parents.
No horror stories from me. I was lucky all things considered. The worst I can recall is my second physics teacher my senior year in high school. The teacher at the start of the year died about a month into the school year, and so the school was stuck with having to assign someone who didn’t know physics all that well to teach the class. But that teacher did the best she could, and it was still a good experience.
Wouldn’t that make your first physics teacher the worst teacher?
(too soon?)
I don’t know what this means.
Reminds me of a geography teacher we had. He’d ask the class a question, and if the person answering didn’t get everything perfectly correct, he’d rip them a new one. Every Single Time.
We quite quickly figured out to never, ever volunteer to answer a question.
He’d then get mad at the whole class for “Not knowing anything” when none of us would volunteer an answer.
The whole damn semester was like that.
7th Grade English teacher. A mean old bitty who was just running out the clock until she could collect her retirement check. She completely robbed me of my joy of English by her insistence that we follow the textbook to the letter. She’d give us these assignments that would require us to assign adjectives to minor characters who were mentioned once inone sentence, because that’s what the book said to do. She also once told the class “I don’t make mistakes.” That in itself was a mistake.
Mrs. Fowler, 3rd and 4th grades.
The reason I had her for two years (no, I didn’t flunk) was that the powers that be decided to take about a half dozen bright third graders and put us in a fourth grade class. They thought we’d benefit from occasional exposure to more advanced lectures and discussions.
But the classes were mostly taught separately. While she taught the fourth grade, the third grade was to be working on assignments. And vicey versey.
And woe unto anyone caught listening to the other class (which in practice was almost exclusively third-graders listening to the fourth grade class). Even if we’d finished our assignments.
Once she wrote on my report card, “Listens to fourth grade”. When I explained it to my mother, she laughed. To paraphrase, “Shows an interest in learning. Headed for trouble”.
Oh, and explaining this idiotic class structure almost made me forget the important part: she was a mean, angry, sadistic bitch. Always yelling. Embarrassing us in front of the class. The time-honored math-problems-at-the-chalkboard method (who the hell ever thought that was a good idea?).
Oh, and a self-described “stickler for handwriting”, which I was always terrible at. What I’d give to go back in a time machine and tell my eight year-old self that bad handwriting doesn’t mean you’re stupid.
A few years ago, I reconnected with a childhood friend who was in that class. She had been a straight-A student, but recalled lying to her mother about having stomach aches, to avoid the Wrath of Fowler.
Mr. Carey - 10th grade “World History” - at least that’s what the class was supposed to be. All I remember was him talking about was stuff his family did, including their evening “taste treats.” I honestly don’t recall him ever teaching anything about history, tho I suppose he must have since we had tests and stuff. I never was a fan of history classes anyway (my interest sparked later in life) and he certainly didn’t help.
Out of curiosity, I looked at my 11th grade yearbook - he was gone. Coincidence??
Not to speak for @Czarcasm, I’m guessing it means she had a poor sense of rythmn and gave all the notes the same duration.
A week or two ago, my sister told me a horror story along these lines.
Her fifth grade teacher was mean. Not only did she tear into students, she did it to make a coterie of kids in the class laugh.
My sister’s friend Becky was from Brazil, who was just learning English. The class was studying planets, and the teacher said, “Becky, what planet are YOU from?” Becky didn’t understand, so the teacher said, “Write the planet you’re from on the board.” Still confused, Becky went to the board and hesitated. The teacher spelled it out: “P-L-U-T-O,” which Becky dutifully wrote.
The kids jeered, Becky returned to her seat humiliated, and Becky never came back to that class after that day.
Definitely my 8th grade shop (“industrial arts”) teacher. He was an unrepentant racist, including being a Son of the Confederate Veterans. He would come up and drive his knuckle into your thigh if he thought you weren’t being busy enough. Many bruises later, I learned to at least look busy. His idea of teaching was to have us plane (a hand plane we had to sharpen at the start of each class) a single small piece of wood every day until he could run a square across each edge and not see any light. It took most of us over eight weeks of class to meet his expectation. Next, we had to chamfer four edges with a hand plane so he could do the same thing with a 45-degree angle. This took several weeks. We never ran a power tool or did anything remotely useful as he read magazines throughout the classes.
At the end of the first grading period (six weeks), he gave every single person in the class a C. He said nobody had done better than the minimum and nobody had screwed up. My parents were livid, as I had been on the honor roll forever and the grade would keep me off. And, not to get too personal, he always wore starched white shirts with dirty collars.
His son was in a lot of my classes and he was a pretty decent guy.
Fortunately, he got caught banging the music teacher in the band instrument storage room and got fired at the end of that year.
I can name pretty much every one of my teachers 1-12, and there’s not one I can say was really “bad,” although some were better than others. Having said that, though. . .
The one teacher that would qualify was my fourth grade teacher Mrs. McCulloch. She wasn’t bad, just mean. Just seemed to have a nasty attitude in general. Later, in high school, my guidance counselor said that, yes, she did have a bad attitude because of some *personal things in her life. She was near retirement, and actually died during the school year.
*Mainly her husband had died young, leaving her to raise two teenagers on her own on a teacher’s salary, and although her grandparents were relatively affluent for the time and place, none of that affluence had made its way to her.
Had quite a few teachers who had no business in the classroom, but one I remember as being especially worthless was an English teacher I had for 8th and 9th grades. She was obsessed with one thing: diagramming sentences. Every homework assignment, every quiz, every test, every mid-term, every final was diagramming sentences.
I might add that she was a real stick-up-the-ass in the personality department. I loathed her.
Even at the Junior High level, I already knew how to write and speak proper English. Memorizing what went on slanted lines, dotted lines and pedestals seemed like such a worthless endeavor. And it was. I was terrible at it. Flunked almost every test.
I spent 50 years in various communications-oriented positions: Radio DJ, TV news reporter, newspaper correspondent, communications for a national non-profit organization, TV advertising copywriter, and since I retired, tour guide for a local historic site.
And I couldn’t diagram a sentence if my life depended on it.
So funny, because my worst teacher was also my 12th grade art teacher! (Though in my case it was the 90s, not the 70s.) Her name was Miss Lee.
I have 3 stories about how awful she was. Well, two about how awful she was, and one about how I sort of got revenge.
Anyway, Miss Lee was a terrible teacher because she was an idiot and she didn’t give a crap about her students. There were a handful of kids who were her “favorites” for whatever reason, and everyone else could go to Hell. I was not one of her favorite students. I’m not sure if it would matter if I was though, because she was just terrible at her job, a bad person, and just low intelligence and/or lazy (which I eventually took advantage of).
The first story isn’t even about me. I had a friend John in that class, who at one point turned in a fantastic painting as his assignment. I remember how proud he was turning it in to her, and she rightfully praised him for it. Later on (probably the next week), she stopped by and asked him why he hadn’t turned in his assignment, and he said he had, and was very confused. I was sitting right next to him, and I backed him up, telling her that I watched him turn it in, and it was really good. She said that she didn’t have it, and so she was going to have to give him an F. My friend was extremely upset, as you can imagine.
A couple of days later, I was in the library (as I did every day at lunch; I would hang out with friends there rather than actually getting lunch) and I just happened to notice his painting hanging on the wall! So later that day (art class was my last class of the day) I mentioned to Miss Lee that I saw John’s painting on the wall in the library. She looked confused, then said, “Oh yeah, I remember now… It was so good I gave it to them to display.” I asked if she was going to correct John’s grade, and she shrugged and said she would, like it wasn’t a big deal.
In another incident, I received my report card in the mail (as often happened) and on my report card, it said I was failing my art class. I was totally confused, as I’d turned in every assignment and I had never gotten anything lower than a B on any of them. Also, Miss Lee never warned me that my grades were low or asked to talk to me about it. My parents were pissed at me, and I insisted that it had to be a mistake (and keep in mind I had been an honor roll student my entire time in high school) but my parents didn’t believe me, and since it was a Friday they grounded me all weekend. The following Monday, in class I confronted my teacher and asked her why I had an F; what assignments was I missing, or what could I do to fix my grade? She checked her info, and said that no, I had an A- grade. I then asked why did my report card say I was failing?! She, as usual, got a confused look on her face, then understanding dawned. Another student with a last name almost identical to mine was the one failing, and she accidentally mixed our grades up when recording out grades. I told her I had been grounded all weekend, and my parents were acting like they wanted to kill me, so I begged her to give me a note explaining the mix-up. She shrugged and reluctantly did so. No concern or apology at any point. And as I recall, my parents didn’t apologize for disbelieving me either; they maintained that it was still somehow my fault. My parents were not the best either.
My last story was how I got revenge. Miss Lee announced that she would be doing an optional field trip for students on some weekend. They were going to the Seattle Art Museum. It was worth extra credit. I had no intention of wasting any of my weekend spending time with my stupid teacher, so I declined. On the Monday after that weekend trip, she announced to the class that she hadn’t taken attendance for the trip, so instead she asked anyone who attended to write a short essay about what they experienced and how it affected them. So I thought, okay, I’ll write an essay. And I did, and made it as generic as possible; I said that seeing the exhibits broadened my understanding of what my art could do, and it was a big inspiration, especially seeing the variety of painting styles and thought-provoking sculptures. I didn’t mention any specific exhibit or even type of exhibit, of course, because I wasn’t there and had no idea what might be there or not. She took my essay and gave me total credit, boosting my grade up a bit.
Anyway, Miss Lee, you were a terrible teacher and an awful person who couldn’t care less about your students. I hope you didn’t ruin too many kids in your career and that things turned out badly for you.