Your worst teacher

In My Humble Opinion
21

In the 5th grade I had a horrid witch of a teached named Mrs Wittenbach. She loved to belittle and make fun of her students. One instance sticks out especially in my mind, all these years later.

We had an assignment to read a story, and she had one of the really shy boys, named Brad, stand up to tell her the basics of what he had read. He was very nervous and kept saying, “And then, uh…” and she didn’t like that one bit. My name is Anna, and she told me that the next time he said ‘and then, uh’ I was to stand up and say “Yes, Brad drling, what do you want?”

We were both mortified. I will never forget that feeling of humiliation of everyone laughing at us and her smug smirk.

22

First grade: Sister “Reptile” (a play on her “actual” name). Brothers had warned me of her. She’d slap us across the face for misbehaving. Which was bad enough, but she’d also slap kids for making mistakes. I grumbled about that years later and my mother actually said that was OK (I think if I’d told her at the time, she’d have gotten pretty upset). One kid had a run in with her, and ran out of the classroom - I believe dragging was involved as she tried to keep him from doing so (she wasn’t a lot bigger than him - note first grade). I guess being nasty was the only way she could keep control over a classroom full of 50 (yes, fifty) first-graders.

In second grade, one of the girls got a really bad report card. In a rare moment of boneheadedness, Miss S. made her go down to the first grade classroom and show Sister Reptile the card. Sister Reptile knocked her down.

Seventh and eighth grade, Sister D - my 8th-grade homeroom teacher as it turned out - made it rather clear she didn’t like children. Spent a fair bit of time every class telling us how bad we were. She had a heart seizure (whatever that was - maybe they didn’t feel like using the word “heart attack”) and was out for about 4 months and we had a substitute. We were all glad. No, I don’t suppose we WANTED her sick or dead, but like in “Fiddler On The Roof”: “God bless and keep the Tsar - FAR AWAY FROM US”.

Speaking of that substitute: generally nice / good but in Religion class once, she had everyone name every religion they could think of, then say whether it was a Christian religion or not. So we were reeling off Catholic, Byzantine, Presbyterian, Methodist, Buddhist… Jewish… Moslem.

I said the latter two were not Christian. She insisted they were. I wish I’d had the gumption to stand up to her and ask what “Christian” meant and why she categorized those as such.

23

I had a kindergarten teacher whom I hated. I was not a deliberately bad kid, I just didn’t have a good understanding of social norms and was extremely sensitive (and still am). As a kid, I hated raisins. They creeped me out because they were all brown and shriveled, and whenever we got them for a snack, I would pass on them. One day, I stepped on a raisin that someone had dropped and it got caught in the treads of my sneaker. I freaked out because I didn’t want to touch the raisin to get it off (not realizing I could use a pencil or something). I don’t remember how I ended up getting it off, but weeks later…

…the teacher was giving a lesson to the class. I forget about what, maybe how to solve problems or something. And she said, “Remember that time Lauren stepped on a raisin? She should have asked someone to help her get it off instead of whining and crying about it.” She said this to the whole class, and I was mortified. Yes, I admit that I was a total crybaby as a kid, but for the teacher to announce the incident in front of the whole class, weeks later, was terrible, I thought.

There was another time when I saw a cartoon at home that mentioned a “sense of humor.” I had never heard of that phrase before so the next day during playtime I went up to my teacher and asked her what it was. She replied, “It’s the ability to laugh and think things are funny. It’s something that you don’t have.” Not that I expect teachers to coddle overly-sensitive students, but, seriously? I hadn’t misbehaved that day, so I couldn’t believe she would just say that to me, out of the blue.

Then in 10th grade I had an English teacher who was completely nuts. Every quarter we were expected to write 3 essays/stories. The topic could be whatever we wanted, and he would grade them on the number of words. I’m not kidding. I submitted the same story twice and he never noticed. We then had to pick one of those 3 stories to revise and hand in a neatly typed copy, and he would actually read those. But he wouldn’t count misspellings or punctuation errors against us because, “they’re just typos.” So that was our writing grade. For our reading grade, we had to read a certain number of books per quarter, whatever book we wanted. If you read 5 books, you got an A, 4 books got you a B, etc. The way he would determine this was to take us each out into the hall, have us put our hand on the Bible and ask us “How many books did you read this quarter?”

So our 45 minute class period was technically supposed to be used for all this readin’ and writin’. But instead he would get a TV from the AV department and play movies and shows. This was the early 90s so we watched “The Fugitive” movie, “Fire in the Sky,” and I forget what else. For TV, he must have really been into Fox, because we watched The Simpsons, The Critic, and Herman’s Head.

I actually would have enjoyed all this if it wasn’t for the fact that English was my favorite subject and I had actually been hoping to learn something that year. If only Mr. Crazy had been my math teacher instead, I would have had it made.

24

I had some pretty great teachers growing up. So my worst teacher experience was not a very bad one, but still leaves me scratching my head. It was Junior year of high school, Art II. We were given an assignment to practice 8 different shading techniques. Everyone the class drew 8 circles and shaded them. I drew a person and used the different shading techniques on different areas on the drawing. At the time I thought it was pretty clever and was really happy with how it turned out. She put everyone’s drawings around the room except for mine, and I got a B. The B wasn’t the big deal, but on the back of the drawing, she wrote “too creative” next to it. I was dumbfounded.

25

What I always dreaded was the visiting professors we would get as undergrads. The were invariably from overseas and had such thick accents and messy handwriting, so taking notes and understanding their lectures usually was a struggle. This, coupled with their general disinterest in us as students and the knowledge that they would leave at the end of the school year, made for some pretty ineffective classes that were to be avoided if possible.

26

What’choo talkin’ 'bout, Willis?

27

My college Calculus II teacher, who made it very clear that you had no place in his classroom if you weren’t (a) a Math major and (b) male. I was neither. Only academic class I ever dropped just because I saw no possible way to pass it, due to no fault of my own.

(The Story: It was the second semester of my freshman year. I was a Psychology major who’d taken Calculus I the semester before, despite having had no business being in that class (I was a poor math student and hadn’t taken trig or pre-calc in high school; I tried appealing to my advisor, to no avail). That teacher was wonderful, and with her help and a shitload of hard work I managed to pass with a C+. I was then done with my required math courses, but had heard that Calc II would be required if I wanted to go to grad school – and, with my major, grad school was a foregone conclusion. So I registered for Calc II, and you know the rest. I wound up changing majors sophomore year, and never did take/need that Calc II class.)

28

My teachers were all generally good with a few exceptions.

“Drunk Physics Teacher” is pretty much self-explanatory. He was so dumb (or pickled) that he would use one student’s answers to the test as the key for grading all the other tests. Anyway, the student flubs one of the question and the teacher winds up grading everyone else as wrong; we all figured out what he was doing pretty quick from that.

I had one bully of a teacher, but the entire thing played out in some sort of crazy high school drama. I’m still amazed at what happened.
There was this one teacher who treated students like shit. I really didn’t like him, and I didn’t like going to that class. One of the more outgoing girls in my class talked to her mom about it and they formed a group of students to go complain to the principal. I was in this group. We met with him during homeroom and part of first period.
I also didn’t care for the principal either, but I have to admit, he came though on this one.
Anyway, the day of the meeting went mostly as normal (or so I thought), but apparently by lunch word had spread of the complaint and meeting. There was serious drama that I missed. Another group of students formed a group defending the teacher and much teenage arguing ensued. Thankfully, I missed all that shit.
Anyway, the Class in question occurred immediately after lunch and the Principal showed up, there was a discussion about what is and is not appropriate behavior in class for the teacher. The teacher apologized. The principal assured us that the teacher wasn’t going to be fired, blah blah blah. And after that everything was okay. He was actually a pretty good teacher once he started suppressing his asshole tendencies.

My sister’s reaction: “Thank god someone finally did something about him.” She didn’t care for him either.

29

Mr. Carey - 10th grade Honors World History teacher. Apparently, his personal philosophies and family anecdotes were more important than learning world history. We heard about his vacations, and his ideas on child-rearing, and how they shared family time every evening, enjoying “taste treats”, whatever they were. He would talk an entire class period away on his personal topics or opinions. I didn’t much like history, but I really hated the monologues about his home life.

Mrs. Wickwire - 12th grade Honors English. She was a ditz who confused knowledge with opinion. I remember one test where she asked “What do you think was the saddest line in the story?” Apparently, there was only one correct answer. Forty years later, and I still remember that! I also remember a paper I wrote that I was particularly proud of. I got an A- with the comment “Your bibliography was in the wrong form.” No comment on what I’d researched or my conclusions, nothing about my approach. Just a gig on a format. I guess everything else was perfect, huh?

In college, in the school of engineering, no less, I had one professor who required us to *memorize *definitions and give them back, word-for-word on exams. No need to understand concepts - just recite! I passed only because I happened to be good at memorizing, but I don’t think I learned a thing. I don’t even remember what class it was. Sadly, his stupid class was required for my major.

Finally, a grad student for a required Electrical Engineer class in Feedback Circuits. Just to give a frame of reference, this was in the 70s - there were no laptops. Students still walked the campus with boxes full of punch cards. But in the EE building, there were a few terminals where you could input directly to the campus mainframe computer when you had projects to do. FEW being the key word - you had to sign up for time, and more than once, I was in there in the wee hours of the morning.

This particular grad student was arrogant, and fond of saying “It’s a piece if cake!!” and “This is so simple, a child of three could understand it!” Sorry, Skippy, but there are no 3-year-old children in this classroom, and I was and Aero Engineering major, so EE was not my strength. My only salvation in that class was my lab partner - he really understood what we were doing, plus he knew how to use the computers.

Our final project involved optimizing something via feedback loops. We were working down to the wire, at 2AM, trying to optimize by substituting different variables. We were pretty punchy. So, for no logical reason, we put pi in as a variable, and the output graph was decidedly phallic. At that point, genius took over. OK, and a little insanity. We set that graph aside and finished the project with a reasonable result - I guess, since we both passed.

Then we let our evil genius run wild. I bought a lined tablet like first-graders use and a box of crayons. We wrote a lab report by “A Child of Three”, in crayon, of course. It followed the required format and included the explanation that while the project was a “piece of cake” we felt it was more appropriate to go for “pi” instead. I know we added references to other stupid things he liked to say and do, and naturally, the phallic graph was attached to the report.

Unfortunately, the reports were turned in on the last day of class, so we never found out how he reacted to it, but it felt so good to give him a bit of snark.

30

I’ve had a few. One of them, to this day, baffles me.

8th grade gym class was outside that day, we played kickball. The bell rings to go back inside and I happened to have the ball, so I tossed it to the teacher. It bounced a couple of time as it got to her, I didn’t throw it hard. I turned around and started walking towards the door, when, out of nowhere, wham! The ball hit me in the middle of the back. It bounced back to her as she screamed “How do you like it?!” She picked up the ball again and hit me in the chest with it. It bounced back to her and I, not wanting to be hit with the ball again, smacked it out of her hands. The eventual outcome of this was I got suspended for two days for “striking a teacher.”

Then there was the theatre history professor who had a vocal tic so bad that we eventually started counting the "as such"es. As I recall I got up to 84 in a 50 minute lecture.

31

My primary school was nasty. They called their teaching method “the old-fashioned way”. I think the idea was no wishy-washy “2 teddy bears plus 3 teddy bears”, but it also implied teaching by cruelty and humiliation.

My last teacher there was Mrs Brunt. French was taught by having us memorise a text, then stand up and go down the line with everybody saying one word of the text in order. If you said it wrong she would make everybody laugh at you and you had to sit down.

Getting the whole class to laugh was a primary teaching tool for Mrs Brunt. And if you made a mistake she would ask the class “and why is gracer wrong?” and the answer would be “because she is stupid!”.

When we had to choose secondary schools she made us come to the front of the class to say where you would go. One boy refused to tell her. She bullied and tortured him for about 15 minutes. So when I had to go up and I did say. She started laughing, went to get another teacher and they both laughed at me while I stood at the front of the class. Then she said I was too stupid to go to that school, and I was bad at languages. She wrote to the school saying they shouldn’t accept me.

Years later I ran into her. I wanted to say: “You dumb piece of shit, I have an IQ of 140 and I speak 7 languages” but couldn’t work out how to say it. Anyway, secondary school was so much fun after that. I will never forget that feeling right at the beginning: I felt clever, and like I was worth something. It was amazing. Almost worth it, just for the contrast!

32

A college professor. This guy was an adjunct professor who came in once a week, taught two three-hour classes, and supposedly enriched us all by virtue of his real world experience. I was studying IT Management, he was ‘teaching’ two information systems related classes, so I was in both of them.

I knew more about computers than he did. He struggled to get his laptop to work. I spent more time getting the projector working right for him than he did actually teaching. He mostly rattled on about his 200+ patents (I checked online and could only find four), big sailboat(s), and cool (bogus) stories. I finally called him out on one of the stories - it involved the structure of the internet, and for someone who’d supposedly spent a career in technology he obviously had the whole thing back-asswards. Fortunately he liked students who ‘took him on’, so I didn’t end up blacklisted. He desperately wanted us to think he was cool.

He was also a creeper. He asked if I wanted to join his assistants - two girls who had no apparent duties other than stroking his ego. I said no and my gut said hell no. The summer after that class, he was arrested for distributing weed to students and sexual abuse of students. I was not surprised. He was wearing a school t-shirt in his mug shot - boy was the school embarrassed! They deserved it for ignoring him for so long.

33

Mr. Bucci for our first half of eighth grade English. He had zero control over quite bright but also quite weird class. He vanished after being out more than he was in and rumor has it he started teaching second grade. After a series of feeble substitutes (Class! Boys! Girls!) we got someone who actually controlled our dual class clowns.

34

I had one in 3rd grade who was clearly in the wrong career-anger management issues IOW. I’ll never forget how she kept picking on me when I made a paper airplane-when the bozo sitting next to me was making one too, and she kept ignoring him and kept harping on me. I deliberately kept doing it, seeing if she would ever notice him doing it as well. Nope-and I got sent to the kindergarten class for my trouble. I make it a definite deliberate point to and bend over backwards to ensure that I treat every single one of my students fairly, thanks to this incident.

35

My worst teacher was incompetent rather than malicious. Mrs. F was my Spanish teacher during my freshman year of high school. She had no idea how to administer a class, often either having us copy vocabulary or simply watch videos in class and almost never actually teaching. If that was the worst of it, it wouldn’t be so bad. The real problem was that she had no administrative skills and no hopes of acquiring any. She couldn’t work the school’s computer grade book software to save her life.

One day, she handed out grade printouts showing that everybody in the class had failed the most recent exam quite badly in spite of having returned the test papers the day before with the lowest grade being in the high 70s. When one boy questioned this, she actually took the test paper with the passing grade from him, put it in a desk drawer and refused to give it back, insisting the grade on the print-out was correct. After this, she stopped letting us keep our returned papers, letting us see our graded papers and then collecting them again. It turned out that she had somehow decided that, because tests made up 35% of out overall grade, she decided this meant that she needed to multiply all test grades by 0.35 before entering them in the software, meaning that even a perfect score would show up as a 35/100 in the system and would thus be factored in as a 35 toward your final grade. (Even stranger, this started halfway through the school year, after she had apparently been able to enter grades properly for two quarters.)

Eventually, my mother scheduled a conference with the teacher and an assistant principle who had been my English teacher for a year during middle school. Mom specifically requested that Mrs. F have all my papers at the conference so they could review the grades on my papers and how they matched with the ones in the computer system. Mrs. F came to the conference with a single graded assignment from the previous quarter and proceeded to spend the first 10 minutes of the conferences searching her classroom for any other graded assignments (and finding none) to the growing stupefaction of both my mother and the principal. I can only assume that the principle had a very, very long talk with Mrs. F, because everyone’s grades somehow magically jumped from failing to passing overnight after that meeting.

36

My sixth grade teacher ridiculed anyone who leaned politically right. This was during the Nixon / Viet Nam era. I was a lefty even then, but she was clearly out of line.

She had a whole thing about Jesus not being hung on a cross, but instead a pole. She went on and on about that detail. No, it had nothing to do with any schooling.

Then she made us write congratulatory letters to her husband for getting her pregnant. My mom hit the ceiling and had her tossed out of the district in about 3 days flat. :slight_smile:

37

“Coach” Jones, my 9th grade history teacher. Fantastic wrestling coach. Incredibly ignorant human being. A typical test question would read:

  1. One of the bleakest moments in are history was ________________.

Ooooh. I just remembered an English Comp teacher I had at a junior college. She and I actually got into an argument about the contraction “won’t”. She thought it stood for “would not”. She insisted that any contraction for “will not” would be “willn’t”.

38

Mrs. Donlin in fifth grade. She was a bitter old hag of a woman and I was a very sensitive, emotional child. Not a good match.

She used to severely limit our bathroom breaks, and everyone was afraid of her. She paddled everyone in the class (including me, more on that in a moment). One day I came back from the bathroom and she started laying into me, yelling at me, until she reduced me to tears. I hadn’t done anything! Then she turned to the class and said, “That, class, is an example of displaced anger.” Never apologized to me for tricking me.

As to the paddling, it was for a minor offense. I was a straight A student except in handwriting, and my parents regularly got notes for this. I didn’t bring home a D paper in handwriting for three days to get signed. I’d never done anything wrong before. I honestly had forgotten. She paddled me, and I never forgot the humiliation.

I’ve had people tell me oh, that was good, because I never did it again. I think paddling is cruel and humiliating, and what’s more, it has a negative affect on children’s affection for school. It didn’t do anything for me but make me hate her - it certainly didn’t make me want to improve my handwriting!

She bitched out a lot of the parents and a lot of them wrote a petition to ask her to be removed. She retired at the end of the year.

39

I’ll have to go with Mrs. Young for high school science, who fondled me. This was back when we didn’t talk about Those Things.

I’ll give a shout out to my kindergarten teacher, who left out the milk cartons for three hours so that the milk was mighty tasty by 11:00 snack time. Plus she hovered over me when someone brought in those disgusting windmill cookies to make sure I ate mine. I was all hey bitch, my mom makes all of our cookies, this stuff is shit. But being five and all, I didn’t saying anything.

40

Grade 10 Auto Mechanics - the teacher took 2 weeks to get my name right and taught absolutely nothing that wasn’t in the textbook. In fact, he didn’t really “teach” at all, just had us regurgitate the textbook. One day we balanced a tire, but no other hands-on work - in an auto mechanics course. I think he was just killing time before retirement. He often fell asleep at his desk with his finger up his nose.

College “Simply Accounting” - the teacher didn’t teach a damn thing to the class, just told you the chapter he wanted you to do and would walk around the class helping individual people. I dropped that class after the first “0” I ever got in my life on a test.

Otherwise I had some pretty good teachers. Thankfully nothing abusive like previous poster’s. Damnnn.