Your worst teacher

In My Humble Opinion
61

Mrs. Gower, 5th grade. Apparently, I pronounced ‘math’ like ‘myath’. We were lined up outside the classroom, and she mocked me in front of the entire class. (Since then, I’ve tried to be careful about pronunciation. I think it’s also why I focus on accuracy.)

Another time it was reading time, where she would read, and the class would follow along. The story was about an animal (maybe a fox?) in the forest. One night, it came to a strange path and saw ‘two fiery suns’ coming toward it. Mrs. Gower stopped and asked us what the ‘two fiery suns’ were. Nobody knew. She started berating us for being stupid. When she finally revealed that they were headlights on a car, I came this close to saying, ‘But none of us drive.’ I really wish I had. I would have gotten in trouble, but it would have been a great memory.

62

My high school (prep) had quite a collection of characters, but the one which took the cake was my 9th grade English teacher, emigrated Israeli. She drove a 1960’s-era grey Mercedes, and according to lore left a package of eggs in her trunk years earlier, never deigning to open it ever again because she was terrified of what it would smell like. I myself simply couldn’t relate to her eccentricities, at all, and it was the only class I ever flunked (yes I was a gifted underachiever), but the summer school instructor while dry and boring did know his stuff, as did my 10th grade Lit teacher, a sublime guy who I related to very strongly. My buddy, who told me about the egg story, swore she turned his life completely around.

63

My worst teacher experience unfortunately concerns a husband and wife I had in high school.

In Grade 11, I had the misfortune of having Mr. A. for two difficult subjects, chemistry and biology. Mr. A. was an ornery old coot who yelled at students and sometimes even swore. I was told by a schoolmate that he was harsh on people in lower grades in order to weed out the weak ones and then if you stuck with science into the senior level, he was much more devoted. Anyway, I slogged through his classes. His grumpy teaching style was something I didn’t respond to well. I often simply tuned out. I ended up failing one class and just passing the other (I successfully upgraded both subjects in summer school with much nicer teachers).

Too bad I didn’t get Mr. S., a very kind biology teacher I actually went to on my free time in order to learn more about subjects that interested me (scientific taxonomy, contagious diseases, etc.)

If nothing else, Mr. A. was a character. He had his set of phrases he used (one that was unique to him was “you bet your bopper-boo!”) I spent so much time in his class that some of his mannerisms rubbed off on me (in particular, pronouncing “Thursday” as “Thursdy” – I still do this 30 years later!)

In my final year of high school, I had Ms. K., who – so I was told – was Mr.s A’s wife (at least her second marriage; supposedly her first husband had died of cancer and she would have met Mr. A. at school). Again for two subjects – the senior level of English that was required for college prep and an elective that as an aspiring writer, I was looking forward to, English Writer’s Craft. Unlike her hubby, Ms. K. had a calm and polite demeanor. However, there was a major issue with her teaching method: she would lecture as little as possible; instead, she would load us down with assignments that we were expected to complete independently (alone or in groups), with little guidance on her part, on a schedule, and then present to the class. She did give us some good materials for reading, but on the whole there was a too much writing and other work required of us, and relatively little effort put in on her part. I didn’t learn all that much about writing in that class. I also re-took the senior-level English class in summer school to upgrade the mark I got (apparenty half Ms. Kearns’ class ended up in summer school), in which I was again successful.

Ironically, every single one of my English teachers at high school and middle school prior to her was good, if not excellent. Bad luck of the draw.

64

The first name I came up with was my 7th and 8th grade math teacher who would.not.give.me.an.A because I wouldn’t waste time on her idiotic make-work assignments. Even though I did all the tests perfectly. Only teacher to give me less then A in math.

But my worst teacher ever was in a course I took in grad school, a course in Boolean algebras. (What, there is a whole course in Boolean algebras? Why?) Smbat Abian came in the first day with a book by that title, said that Halmos was a much better expositor than him (got that part right) and proceeded to read it out loud. A week later, a delegation of students went to him and asked if we could give all the lectures. The lazy bastard agreed and we did. I could on about him, but why bother.

65

I had the pleasure of having Mr G. for both health class and gym. Mr G. was a slovenly, stupid teacher who may have had some athletic talent at some point in his life, but those days were long gone. In health class, he basically told us stories of the disgusting personal experiences he had regarding hygiene when he was younger and how he overcame them. If it involved pus, blood or some transmittable disease, he had a story. There must have been a severe shortage of health teachers at the time.

Gym class was worse. He and the other gym teachers spent most of their time in the gym teachers office. When they weren’t discussing the football games they recently saw, they were administering corporal punishment via a wooden paddle. I’m not sure any of them enjoyed it more than Mr. G. All students knew that if was the one to paddle you, you weren’t going to be sitting for a while. He was dumb as a lawn chair and a complete piece of shit. Yeah, we didn’t really get along.

66

Mr. L (football coach) taught my freshman year Geography/History class. Didn’t teach anybody anything. The following was the sum total of his instruction on World War II:

“Stay away from the tanks. Everybody likes to shoot at the tanks!”

67

Ms. Kemp, rabidly liberal to the point of being overtly racist.

68

8th grade shop; his name escapes me at the moment - Mr. Stanford or Standish - something like that. He was constantly furious, and threatening to take boys into the materials room to beat them up. I still have a scar on my left hand from him throwing a tall metal shop stool at the kid next to me while I was carving a piece of wood.

He was quite tall (6’8"ish?), quite elderly (80+), and in hindsight, probably well into dementia. It’s kind of sad that he was forced to work so deep into old age, and I’m sure that part-time shop teachers were thin on the ground. But dang, he was a danger to us all.

69

9th grade gym teacher. We had a coed race where the girl would hook arms with a boy on each side of her but facing the other way. Then the sets of trios would race with the girl running forward and the two guys attached to her running backward. My girl decided to run like a bat out of hell and of course we all tumbled. I wound up breaking my arm. Worst part is that for missing like 6 weeks of gym (that was the teacher’s fault) I got a medical C for the semester and that took me out of valedictorian contention.

70

None of the students respected our 8th grade science teacher, Mr. F. Instead of teaching, he spent most of the class time pontificating about his adventures, almost certainly made up as his stories were completely unbelievable. The one I remember best was that he said he was missing several toes on one foot because a shark bit them off when he was scuba diving. We asked him to take off his shoe and sock and show us, but he declined.

We knew he was a first-class bullshitter, but didn’t mind TOO much because it was fairly entertaining sitting in the classroom hearing him bullshit us.

Mr. F assigned a term paper on a topic that interested me, and I recall writing a very good paper that I was quite proud of. I stored it in my school locker until it was time to hand it in.

To my horror, the paper wasn’t there when I went to get it. Someone had evidently stolen it, perhaps to copy it and turn it in as their work, or just to be mean; I’ll never know. (Our lockers didn’t have locks on them, which seems weird in retrospect, but that’s how it was.)

I figured I wouldn’t be believed if I said “I had the paper but it was stolen!” so I said nothing to anyone, and accepted that I’d just get a poor grade for the semester.

Well, well. Mr. F never returned the term papers to us. We just got our grade for the semester, and … despite not handing in the paper, I got an A!

I’m guessing he lost or simply never looked at the term papers, and assigned grades at the end based on whether he thought we seemed smart or not. I did seem smart (she said immodestly) so I guess that was enough to get me an A. I’ve always hoped that whoever stole my paper was an idiot who turned it in as their own, and, to their surprise, got a crappy grade for it.

Oh well. At least he wasn’t too sexist to give high grades in science to females. It may have been his only good quality.

71

I’m not sure he’d be the worst teacher I ever had but my junior high English teacher was arrested for teaching under another man’s name using his credentials.

72

In addition to what you describe… I’m assuming that your school had roughly equal numbers of boys and girls? Did every boy need to run the race twice, and every girl only once? How did they make that balance?

73

Yeah, but you nearly won the Battle Of The Bands, right?

74

I’ve got a couple.

Consider Mr Jones, eighth grade math teacher. He was remarkably youthful, remarkably short, and remarkably wide. It would be an exaggeration to say he was wide as he was tall, but not by much. So of course, he was an immediate object of derision for a room full of eighth-graders. This, of course, did not mean he was bad.

What made him bad was his approach to classroom order. Specifically, he would ignore it. His back to the class, or facing it, he would continue writing or lecturing as the chatter grew louder and the horseplay got more and more overt, until after about 20 minutes he would suddenly shriek at the top of his lungs “SHUUUUUT UUUUUUP! SHUUUUT UUUUUUP!”. The class would get silent, he would calmly go back to lecturing, and the cycle would begin again. Probably we got two of them in any given period, sometimes three. One time he actually flipped his desk over, an old school (literally) wooden job–that must have taken a lot of strength! I felt sorry for him then and now, but certainly it was an ugly thing to have to experience on a day-to-day basis as a student, and I doubt I learned any math that semester.

For a different kind of badness, there was Mr Barallo, a high school physics teacher. He kept a column in his grade book exclusively for his female students, in which he would rate their physical attractiveness. We knew this because while the class was doing assignments or experiments, he would call male students to his desk one by one, show them the book and ask their opinion of his ratings. Whether he used that column in calculating their final grades, I do not know. Why one of us male students didn’t inform an adult, or at least tell one of the girls, “Hey, did you know . . .” I couldn’t tell you. It was the 80s. (I believe eventually he was fired, but I don’t know the details.)

75

My 6th grade science teacher HAD no credentials, and was fired once that was uncovered.

76

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For example?

77

Probably Mr. M, seventh grade homeroom. That was for English and Math; for other subjects, we walked between classes.

Anyway, Mr. M came up with the brilliant idea of individualizing each student’s learning. Great in theory, I suppose, but lousy in practice. What it boiled down to was that the brainy students got more work and more difficult work, than the less-brainy students.

I was brainy, so I got to read and write a book review of Hilton’s Lost Horizon, while some of my classmates got to read and write book reviews on Green Eggs and Ham. I was working out of a Grade 10 math book, while some of my classmates were learning their times tables.

This approach to teaching had the extra added bonus of making the brainy kids easy to spot. Any reading material beyond Dr. Seuss? Any math books at eighth grade or higher? You’re a target, and your classmate bullies can bully you mercilessly.

When I returned to school for eighth grade, Mr. M was no longer teaching there. I do not know why, but I can guess.

78

So can I. “I teach 3rd grade. What the hell am I supposed to with these kids you passed on to me that read at a 5th, 6th and even 10th grade level??”

79

field. It was Stanfield. :ptooey:

80

Much the same for me. The football coach gave out his own “awards” during a pep rally (voted on by his team).

I got “Most Likely to Die from Terminal Acne”, and had to walk across the gym floor in front of the whole school while they jeered and laughed. After me a shy girl in my class received the “Kodak” award, which he proudly announced was for the “Most underdeveloped and overexposed girl” in the school. She was in tears.

Junior High (middle) school remains one of the darkest and most horrible periods of my life.