Your worst teacher

In My Humble Opinion
1

I had a few poor teachers in high school, but Mr Gilbert was something else.

Once a week for two years, starting when I was 12, our hearts would sink as we approached Wednesday afternoon. When the time came, we would file into his classroom with trepidation. We’d sit down and he’d bark at us to shut up. He’d then distribute Junior Lives of Composers. These were dry, dull books printed in the 1960s with poor duotone illustrations.

“Do your Bach,” he’d say.

Then in total silence, while Mr Gilbert read a book or did the crossword, our task every week was to transcribe, in our own words, what was in the book. Each class was an hour and twenty minutes long, and it would take three weeks to transcribe the life of each composer. When we finished we’d move onto the next. “Do your Schubert.”

That was the entirety of my Music education for two years. We didn’t listen to a note, didn’t retain even the histories of the composers we were supposedly studying. Everybody hated it, including, I suspect, him.

Finally he retired and a young woman in her twenties took over. It was like a scene from a cheesy movie starring Jack Black: in the first class she had us close our eyes, then played us Dark Side of the Moon and write a short piece about how it made us feel. The next week she played Smetana by Vltava and had us do the same thing. Then she got us to draw synesthetic illustrations of the music. She played excerpts of African drumming, classical music and the blues, and asked if we could hear the rhythmic connections. Over the next year she brought in different instruments and demonstrated how to play them, then let us explore them and make sounds with them without guidance. She inspired a couple of bands and each class would put on performances for the rest of the school, with even non-musical people begging to be included. Single-handedly she turned a weekly ordeal into something we all looked forward to.

Over the years I was sometimes taught by people with bad tempers, laziness or stupidity, but Mr Gilbert was the worst. He didn’t inspire anyone, didn’t make us think about anything, didn’t help us understand. We learned nothing.

2

Oh, I had a couple of doozies. My second grade teacher liked to paddle little kids, especially if she could make them cry. In those days, I cried if you looked at me funny. My mother was in the hospital, trying to stay pregnant long enough that my brother would live when he was born. So when I was distracted for ANY reason, she paddled me. Now, I do believe that there’s a time and a place for paddling, but she wasn’t doing it for disciplinary purposes, she did it because she enjoyed it. I wasn’t the only kid who was paddled, but I think I was paddled the most frequently, for the least cause.

In high school, we had an ancient woman for American history. Each day, she’d hand out some busywork, crossword puzzles or quizzes, and then take a nap until nearly the end of the period. Then she’d wake up, have us swap papers, and have us grade each other’s work. Pass the work up, and she would enter the grades into her book without checking the accuracy. Of course, most people made sure to sit by their friends and grade each other’s papers, so most kids got straight As. Her idea of a challenging question was “Who was the “It” girl*?” Her quizzes and tests and assignments mostly focused on American pop culture of the 1920s and 30s…and given her age, I’d say that was when she was in her teens and twenties. We never heard a peep out of her about either World War, or about why some of the colonists felt it was necessary to break away from the mother country, or ANYTHING except pop culture of a certain time.

*Clara Bow. I simply cannot tell you how much this knowledge has improved my life.

3

Kindergarten teacher who left the windows open, because she was too hot. Two kids (me being one) got pneumonia…

High school English teacher who didn’t comprehend the difference between a metaphor and a simile. Wrote, “The wall was like hitting a brick wall.”

College Complex Math professor, day after elections, 1980, walks in to class puffing a cigar (“No Smoking” signs clearly visible) saying, “It’s not every day we get rid of George McGovern, Frank Church, and Birch Bayh.” I walked out, and reported him to the Math Department.

4

8th Grade Science. Mrs. C. Don’t know how she ever got anyone to marry her. She was ugly, inside and out. Miserable woman, shitty teacher. She cared for none of her students. If you were a model student, she would mostly ignore you and you would count yourself lucky. If you were not, she made you a mortal enemy. I was in a 5-12 school. I was not coddled by my parents. I was a bit of a smartass, but I had no problems with other teachers like I did with her.

Through my 8th grade year, even my parents grew to hate this woman. She was truly a spiteful, hateful person. Had no business in the teaching profession. Teaching despite an obvious loathing of children.

When I “graduated” to freshman year, I was placed in her biology class and homeroom. I’m pretty sure she wanted to continue doing her best to make my life miserable. On the second day of school that year, my father scheduled an appointment with the principal and made it clear in no uncertain terms that she would not be my biology teacher or any other teacher to me, nor my homeroom teacher, ever again.

This probably sounds like a spoiled brat or helicoptor parent story, but this was a public school. In no other circumstances, ever, were my parents on my side against a teacher. Ol’ Mrs. C missed her calling. She was meant to work at the DMV.

5

I’ve often said that the film school I went to generally had teachers who were just there for the paycheck, the power-trip, or both. It was rare that I had a -good- teacher there.

One of the worst, however, was my lighting teacher. The first three weeks he taught us the basics. The rest of the semester was us doing re-creations of shots from magazines while he sat in another room (his office) calling around the city looking for work. This came to a head when the mid-term came along, and I came to him saying, “The syllabus says ‘hours by appointment’. I’m kind-of unsure as to some of the electrical stuff we’ve been doing, can I make an appointment to discuss it?”
His response? “If I actually had available hours in the day, I’d use them to do more outside work.”
(As a post-script, I did get a ‘B’ on the mid-term, but I missed the questions that I’d come to ask him about. Jerkface.)

6

In 5th grade, Sister Anastasia would hold the bathroom door open and watch the boys pee to make sure they didn’t ‘misbehave’. In class, she hit us.

7

It will take me a while and some more therapy sessions to figure out the worst.

8

Oh, the Nuns. That was K-4. The Nuns don’t count and they’ve been kicked out of my memory for good. :wink:

9

Mrs. Moore made my fourth grade touch her biceps while she bragged about her new workout routine. Yes, you heard that right. She made us feel her biceps while she flexed them. She threw a new tantrum every day, and delighted in buying cakes for the class that we never got to eat because we were all so naughty. She was a strange woman.

10

Er, I mean Vltava by Smetana.

I blame Mr Gilbert.

11

That would be the graduate school instructor from last summer who taught us absolutely nothing and was in fact so bad that when some students went to complain and explained how frustrated they were and how class was a total waste of time and money and outright admitted that they were on Gchat and Facebook rather than taking notes, the department chair said that this sounded like a more productive use of our time. He was duly fired.

Then there was the other instructor who spent about half of class time talking about his photography side business. I looked up some of his work once and it turned out to be BDSM. That was fun.

12

My worst teacher is pretty mild compared to some of these, but she was not a good teacher. She was my Grade 10 English teacher (I think - it was a looooong time ago). She loved bad students who didn’t give a rat’s ass, and ignored good students who were trying. I was one of the good students, being both a nice kid and good at English - after turning in the 100 lines of poetry she required, she took me aside and intimated that they were too good, and I had cheated and plagiarized them. I was too stunned to realize what was going on until later, so I didn’t defend myself - I was just bewildered. Yeah, they were good - wasn’t that a good thing? I was trying to do the assignment as best as I could!

Then there was the Physics teacher who attacked a student in class and dived at him, bowling him off his chair. That was exciting!

13

My 8th grade history teacher was pretty bad. He decided that my best friend and I were troublemakers (true enough, I guess) and that he didn’t have time to track each episode of misbehavior. He simply scheduled us for weekly paddlings at the beginning of every Friday’s class. He said this was to account for the prior weeks’ transgressions, whatever they were.

I’m pretty sure the other kids looked forward to this, as class started with him calling us to the front, instructing us to grab our ankles, and whaling on us with a wooden paddle. (3 licks each)

14

For some reason there was one period in the week where we wouldn’t have a proper class (you know like English, maths, whatever…), so we’d have to trot along to whatever room we were told to go to, whereupon our form teacher would turn up. Most teachers let their class catch up on homework or read, or whatever.

We had a teacher who would read from the Bible in a low monotonous drone and everyone would fall asleep.

Then he’d slam the Bible down (to wake us all back up) and start asking questions about what he’d just read. Of course none of us had heard a word of it.
I did a stint in a school in the UK and had a teacher who thought it hilarious to mimic/mock my Irish accent.

15

The same thing happened to me in 8th grade. I wasn’t a great student. I rarely did homework, but I always aced tests. Anyway, we had a big poetry assignment, ans when I got my paper back, it had a big “A” on it… which was then crossed out and replaced with an “F” and a note saying “Don’t plagiarize!”

I was pretty confused. I asked her what she thought I’d plagiarized, and she said that the poem was simply too good for me to have done it, and that the grade would stand.

My mom came through for me. She fought it all the way up to the superintendent, and did her best to prove that my poem was original. How do you prove that something doesn’t exist? This was before the internet, so it was even harder back then.

Eventually the teacher gave in (after having me write *another *poem to prove that I could actually do it). She then changed the grade to a C… because I had turned it in during class, instead of right at the beginning of class when it was due. I had written the first poem during class.

Luckily, she was the worst I ever had.

16

Do your Smetana.

17

Dr. L.

I had a campus job, and Dr. L was having an affair with my boss, which would have been a scandal if it had gotten out. I didn’t care and neither did any of my fellow student employees. For some reason Dr. L seemed to think she could intimidate me into keeping my mouth shut. You’d think she’d have been extra-nice to me, so I’d be inclined to keep her secret, but instead she bullied me and tormented me. I didn’t give a shit who she slept with.

18

Sounds kinky!

19

I haven’t had any particularly cruel or disturbed teachers, luckily.

But I had one lecturer for a mathematical finance class who was pretty awful. He’d spend maybe half of the lecture talking about hanging out at the bar with his buddies. Then he’d spend the other half trying to prove a theorem off the top of his head, clearly without preparation; he’d go in circles for a while until he’d give up and say “The lecture notes are on the web site, so you can look up the proof there.” Uh, thanks…what do we need you for, then?

I gave up going to those classes pretty quickly.

20

My older brother had a Teacher From Hell when he was in the 6th grade. This was a private “Christian” school. Quite a few of the teachers had their own children attending the school. Sometimes in their own classroom.

Anyway, my brother was consistently picked on by one of those children whose mom was a teacher. The kid was an 8th grader, his mom was my brother’s teacher.

One day, during lunchtime, this 8th grader (and two of his friends) stuffed my brother into a large trash bin, and locked down the lid so that he couldn’t get out. My brother, who was usually a stoic lad, quiet and shy, finally cracked and ratted out his tormentors to his teacher.

Oddly enough, nothing happened.

My brother decided to escalate things, and went over the teacher’s head by reporting the incident (again) to the guidance counselor, the vice principal, and the principal. In writing.

Weeks passed, nothing seemed to be happening. Then, even though, he had desperately wanted to handle the situation without involving our recently-widowed mother (one of his tormentors loved to tease him about being a Mama’s Boy, etc.) he finally did. Fireworks ensued.

My mother stormed up to the school and demanded to know what would be done. There would be consequences for the boys who had been tormenting her son, or she would be withdrawing ALL of her children from the school immediately. And this month’s tuition check would be cancelled.

Suddenly, the principal snapped to attention. Money was at stake? Oh, dear. He summoned my brother’s teacher (and her repugnant son) to his office, where he asked the boy to explain himself.

“He deserved it,” declared the kid.

“Yes, I can see where it was probably well-deserved,” chimed in his mother. My brother’s own teacher.

Well there you have it. My brother apparently deserved to be stuffed in a trash can by three boys who towered over him. Naturally. The boy received a verbal warning, the mother/teacher received no discipline whatsoever for not reporting my brother’s complaints.

When it became apparent to my mother that that was REALLY all that was going to be done, she withdrew us from the school in protest. And indeed, stiffed them a month’s tuition. The principal was genuinely perplexed as to why the situation had played out in this manner.