Your worst teacher

In My Humble Opinion
41

Since a few posters mentioned teachers who didn’t care about cheating, and a few mentioned taking things into their own hands: My 9th grade algebra teacher (a class I shouldn’t even have been in, since I’d already aced algebra in middle school) didn’t say anything when another student, during tests, would literally walk across the room to look at my paper.

So I started writing deliberately wrong answers, and then going back and fixing them all in the last five minutes.

@XOldiesJock , parsing sentences is definitely a useful skill, and diagramming is one way to demonstrate understanding of how to parse them… but it’s not the only way, and you can know how to parse without knowing how to diagram.

42

Ohhh yeah I forgot about Ms Beasley the art teacher. I was not a fan of hers and she had a popular reputation I thought she was dismissive impatient and cruelly critical of my pieces.
I still have a clay jug I made in that class. No doubt It’s still ugly

Mr Dever, English teacher way past his prime and an active alcoholic who would ghost his class and show up late stumbling. Felt bad for him, took his class for easy credit my senior year.

43

I remember being taught that stuff, too. For whatever reason I couldn’t understand a bit of it. It was like a mental block. To this day, I have absolutely no idea what an “object” is, or a predicate, or a “subject”…

44

I’ve never understood the zeal to taught sentence diagramming, ok knowing the parts of a sentence may be somewhat useful, but enough to dedicate hour after hour, page after page to it? It would be far more useful to have the students read books during that time IMHO.

45

Worst for me was a 7th grade social studies teacher. I think she hated her job, hated kids, and probably hated her life. The routine was the same every day. The bell would ring for 1st hour and we’d all be in the classroom already. She would enter from the hallway still wearing her coat and carrying an enormous purse looking haggard , walk across the front of the class making eye contact with no one, plop her purse down, roll the overhead projector into place, turn off the lights, pull a book and just start writing word for word out of her textbook. That was our cue to just copy everything she wrote on the overhead into our notebooks. If there was an upcoming test she wouldn’t even open her mouth to tell us. Just wrote the date on the chalkboard. She was a real gem.

Worst teacher I’ve had, not for me personally, was an 8th grade gym teacher, Mr.Bull, who thought he was a drill instructor. First week of class he basically did physical tests to sort everyone into groups based on your athletic ability. The athletes he let do what they want, the average kids he worked to death on whatever sport we were on, and the unathletic he deemed unworthy of playing any sports so they were banished to running laps and doing sit ups, pushups, etc. for the entire hour until they “earned” the privilege to participate. I was lucky enough to be average so just tried to blend in like everyone else. What an ass.

46

The one I liked least was the secondary school physics teacher, Mrs Dale. She had one student in every class who was just the designated failure- and in my class, apparently because I’d missed the first lesson (my parents had taken me out of school with permission for the week for a trip). I found out from other students that it was the same in every class, one student singled out, rarely for any obvious reason.

It was constant low-level bullying, with occasional escalations. The incident I remember most, I’d been off sick the class before and hadn’t been able to borrow anyone else’s notes yet (I think I’d missed the Tuesday class and this was Thursday). Come into the class, and she’s set a quiz on the stuff covered.
She came round midway through the class with them all marked, and when she got to me just started yelling at me- we’re talking spittle flying, right in my face, yelling about what a complete idiot I must be to get such a pathetic score as 6 out of 20. I shouldn’t be in that class, I shouldn’t be in that school, it went on for ages…

The she handed out the rest of the table’s papers back, with a smile and a comment of ‘Oh well, we all have bad days don’t we?’ to the girl sat next to me.

It turned out I actually had the highest mark of the 4 of us.
She also once gave me a double detention for not having my notes in order. I had a grand total of 3 detentions in my entire time at school, and that was 2 of them.

The worst bit was that in parents evening, apparently she gushed about what a good student I was, and my mother- who’s never been much listening to anyone, then decided I was just being silly and making up stories for attention.

The alternate worst teacher was at university, where we had a lecturer in Horticulture, which was supposed to be the main focus of the degree, whose entire class on plant genetics was not only the same one from the school syllabus- just Punnet squares, same as we covered age 15- but he got it wrong.

I heard later that he used to teach at a different campus in the same group, doing the adult RHS classes, but he was so terrible that a student punched him for teaching the course (a national qualification, externally assessed) so wildly wrong that several other staff sided with the student.

47

As an (retired) educator, this is pretty appalling reading. The common thread is that these people all seem to be deeply broken human beings to one extent or another, who at the very least would seem to be in the wrong career (not that they would be any more competent anywhere else). I am well aware of the times that I have screwed up and still regret them.

48

Once I learned how to do it, I loved diagramming sentences. I still love it. I’m 64, and I haven’t been required to diagram a sentence in over 50 years, but I have been known to do it for fun now and then. It’s a good fit for my native pedantry. Or maybe it fed it. Or both.

As for my hapless biology teacher who dropped me, I learned something about the way he gave graded tests. This was ca 1980, when scantron answer sheets were the norm for multiple guess tests. This guy was too lazy to take his stack of tests and feed them into a scanner for correcting, though. He took an answer sheet and used a hole punch to punch out the correct answers, then used that as a key to overlay on the scan sheet he was correcting. He could see the correct marks in the holes he punched, and if he saw a blank box instead of a filled box, he just put a red tick mark on it. He’d correct tests on the fly as they were handed in, so he’d be done pretty shortly after the last test was turned in to him. Once I saw what he was doing, if I got to a question where I wasn’t sure what answer was correct, I marked all the boxes I could not eliminate as incorrect. Got 100% on every test after that. Is that cheating? I dunno…

49

In high school we needed to take only one PE class the entire 4 grades and most people took it during summer school. Well I made the mistake of taking it during the regular school year and it was a lot like you said but less so. The worst part of it for me was when we were doing pull-ups. The people the teacher designated as athletes were allowed to jump up and directly start their pull ups, thus keeping a lot of their momentum from their initial jump, and not lower themselves fully before starting their next one. Whereas I had to hang on the bar for a few seconds so that I lost my upward momentum (and also tired myself out), while the teacher grabbed my legs to make sure I wasn’t shifting them to get an advantage (and probably pulling downward a bit in the process too). And then repeat the process from the very bottom, 180 degree angle, for the second one. I think the most pull ups I ever did was 2.

Turns out I never needed to do it the proper way. One time a couple years ago when hiking I did a one handed pull up with my off hand in order to prevent myself sliding down a steep gully when the soil crumbled. When it crumbled I was standing only on my tip toes and holding onto an overhanging root with one hand: I did have the luxury of pushing myself up a little with my toes, but could not use my feet to help me since the root was overhanging. Then once I pulled myself up to a near 90 degree angle I could chug my way up a bit more until my primary hand could grasp another branch and give me leverage to pull my legs up.

And this was when I weighed dozens more pounds than I did in high school and still did no actual arm workouts*. So I think it’s safe to say that I wasn’t objectively bad at doing a pull up from a well-rounded renaissance man perspective, since I could do it when I needed to as long as it was my way.

*I do run quite often, and think that it does do something for your arms, because my arms are just as frequently sore as my legs are afterward.

50

My 9th-grade gym teacher was another pretty bad one. Like many other gym teachers, he didn’t care about the rampant bullying from other kids. In his own words, “If I called fouls, this basketball game would be nothing but a foul-shooting contest”. No, if you called fouls, there wouldn’t be as many.

He also had an absolutely ignorant grading system. He set a bunch of tasks for the students, like weight-lifting (IIRC, the passing grade on bench press was to be able to bench your own weight, because that’s supposedly what the average man can do). On each task, you got a letter grade. Then, he put those letter grades on the standard four-point scale, and added them all up. Take that number, convert it to a percentage of the possible points, and use that to get the student’s final grade. So if you managed to get a C (2 points out of 4) on each task, your total grade would be 50%, an F. “Don’t blame me; I didn’t write the laws of mathematics”.

51

I had nuns in elementary school starting in the mid 60s, many of them older and still pissed about how soft Vatican II had made everything. Lots of physical and emotional violence.

However the worst was a lay teacher I had in fourth grade. I could swear she washed out of nun training for being too psycho. She had a wooden triangular ruler that she would hit you with. One kid she got so tired of hitting with the ruler that she would make him stand in the corner and hit himself in the palm of the hand repeatedly. If the slaps weren’t loud enough she’d got over and show him how to do it.

52

My Spanish teacher in both 10th and 11th grade (she taught both Spanish I and II). She was fairly young, probably hadn’t been teaching all that long, and I suspect she was hired mainly because she was a native Spanish speaker. Many of her assignments were bordering on pure busy work, and were more like art projects that were only tangentially related to learning Spanish. For example early in the year she had us making children’s counting books. Sure, we labeled the items in Spanish e.g. “uno gato, dos manos…” But we wasted probably weeks of class time simply assembling the books, and at most learned basic numbers and few nouns from it.

53

It was probably my first grade teacher. She was a first year teacher, and was quick to paddle anyone who did something she took exception to. I never got the paddle, but she came up to me when I was sitting there doing my work and smacked me on the leg, saying I was “disturbing the whole class.” When I couldn’t find some work I’d done once, she stood over me with a paddle while I looked for it. Other kids had it a lot worse than I did; she thought nothing of pulling a kid up out of their seat and whaling on them with a paddle. Years later my nephew had her, and my brother said she wouldn’t even listen to parents, much less kids.

54

(Sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.)

“O mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school. We have tortured every teacher we have broken every rule. And tomorrow afternoon we will hang the Principal as we go marching on!”

“Glory glory Halleluiah. Teacher hit me with a ruler. We’ll bop her on the bean with a rotten tangerine as we go marching on…”

There was a more violent alternate version: “We’ll meet her at the door with a loaded .44 as we go marching on…”

We used to sing that song gleefully in elementary school.

55

Or “I met her in the attic with a German automatic…”

56

I’m a PTS’d survivor of 1950’s Catholic School. My worst K through12 teacher BY FAR was 7th Grade, Sister Mary Jane (Dominican Nun, School Sisters of Notre Dame, in the quintessential penguin costume.)
With the hindsight of a young adult I saw how profoundly disturbed she was, never should have been left alone in charge of pre-teens. No corporal punishment but the emotional/psychological abuse was horrific. Typing this, 65 years later, I still hope that woman is in the hottest corner of Hell.

57

On top of spaghetti
All covered with cheese
I found my poor teacher
Face down in the mud

58

I’m related to a line of school teachers and classified employees so almost always thought of them as totally worthwhile.

In contrast they didn’t ever think much of administrators; I’ve had to dispel my own biases in thinking of them.

59

My worst teacher was probably my second grade teacher. We spent much of the year working on our scrap books. Sh never corrected arithmetic as far as I could tell. One of the smarter boys in the class would add 27+15 and get 312. (That is he didn’t know how to carry) I tried to convince him he was wrong, but she never corrected him. Fortunately, I was sick quite a lot and my mother talk me a lot t home. My mother later told me she’d ask the teacher what they’d covered the day I was sick, and she’d get the reply “Oh we worked on our scrapbooks.”

60

I’ve had my share of stupid mean teachers, but time has mercifully expunged my memory of them. So instead I’ll talk about Mr. W, my 9th grade science teacher.

He was an unrepentant alcoholic, which I didn’t realize at the time but is obvious in hindsight. He wore dark glasses in class and once told us kids how he mitigated a hangover. (Lots of water before bed)

Also he completely believed in the pseudoscience popular at the time. Cryptids, ESP, UFOs both ancient and modern. He taught a unit on ESP. Between him and Leonard Nimoy I believed in all that for far too long. I mean, it’s science! Right?

Despite all that I have fond memories of the man. He was actually decent guy, personally and he sure was interesting. He made school, which I absolutely hated, a little less miserable.