This honor is reserved for the unforgettable Sister Mary Aquinus. She was a real knee slapper.
An arm, shoulder, hand, wrist, and head slapper as well.
Ouch, it hurts just recalling that pale faced giant, with her swinging rosary beads, and tiny Charles Manson eyes.
It’s a toss up between my 6th grade math teacher Mr. Thompson, or my high school World History teacher, Mrs. Pruitt
Mr. Thompson was a balding old man who always wore a jacket of some sort, and kept the thermostat set at 80. Even during the summer. When other teachers had the air on, or the windows open, his room was like a sauna. His room also always smelled of garlic in one form or another. He made us show our work on everything, regardless of if we could do it in our head or not. That wasn’t the worst part though.
He would constantly stare at the female students, and was always touching them. It was really creepy, and none of the other teachers, or the parents of these girls, would believe us. On more than one occasion he’d come up behind a female student, and stand close enough that when she turned her head when he called on her, her face would brush across his crotch.
He’d also sit at his desk a lot, with just one hand under it. We could never prove it, but the way he’d move while sitting there gave us all the idea that he was jerking off. I was so glad to pass 6th grade just to get away from him.
As far as I know he still works there.
Now for Mrs. Pruitt. This woman couldn’t stand teenagers. She said so herself the first day of class. She’d scream at the students. When the other teachers let us sit wherever we wanted, she gave us assigned seats. We weren’t allowed to do anything in her class but work. She always spoke in the same monotone voice.
Our work was the same each week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday was read section whatever of the chapter we was on. Then we had to copy the questions at the end of the section, and answer those questions. Each answer had to contain at least a full paragraph, even ones such as What years did WW1 and WW2 cover? Thursday was a 2 page review sheet of the chapter, which had to be copied, then each question answered with a full paragraph. Friday was a test on the chapter, and again each answer had to contain a paragraph, and it always ended with an essay question.
If you talked in her class, except to answer her question, it was an instant detention. Doing something other than your work was detention, even if you had finished the work. If you finished, you had to sit there with your hands crossed on the desk and face forward. You couldn’t do work from other classes, couldn’t do the next day’s history work, read, etc.
If you brought anything to her class she decided you shouldn’t have, it was confiscated, and your parents had to come get it. I once had a Stephen King book from the local library, and my mom had to come get it because the teacher felt I shouldn’t be reading such a book. (I was in 10th grade, and had been reading King since 5th.)
She also liked to keep her room at 80F, and she’d drown herself in perfume. It was horrid.
I went to an all girls’ convent secondary school. I never got slapped or beaten by a nun. And nor did I ever hear of anyone in my school who did.
We had a weirdo nun for biology for the Leaving Cert - exams you take when you’re 18, so anyone who wants to can translate that into their local vernacular. She took great care in personally showing everyone where their pubic bone was during the anatomy section of the course. First with her hand on you, then with your hand on you, while she adjusted it. Ick. I heard she had used to follow that up wth your hand on her pubic bone, but she had stopped that by the time I took that class.
This would have been in the early eighties. She only retired from teaching last year and apparently she took early retirement. So she can’t be much more than ten years older than me. The bloody weirdo.
One thing that I heard about her, that struck fear into the heart of all of us was that one day she did the pubic bone crap and said “Ah, yes. I can feel your sanitary towel, <name of girl>. Well done. It is in the correct position”
Whether she ever actually did that, for real, I don’t know because it wasn’t in my class. What I do know is that if you ask anyone who went to my school, they’ll tell you that same story. Might be an urban legend. Might be true.
My experience of nun abuse was early in the 1960s in Los Angeles, and I believe that a law suit, which ended this kind of punishment, came at a later date, but I can’t remember when.
Also from what I do remember, most of the nuns at my school did not hit the children. Only this one in particular seemed over the top (with rulers and slapping), and like the wierdo nun you described, she will always be a yukky memory.
Mrs. Kane, 11th grade history teacher.
Forget that American History is one of the most dry, boring subject matters on Earth (and I’m a lover of history!), she was just an unhappy, bitter, mean woman.
She made it clear very early on in the semester who her favorites in the class were. If you were one of those lucky individuals, she joked around with you, threw you softball questions, and very leniently graded your exams. My best friend at the time sat in front of me. He was one of her favorites. We called her “Beast Kane.”
If you weren’t amongst the above group, 2:00 every afternoon was hell. She openly mocked, ridiculed, and shamed certain students in class (I was one of them). She had no interest in helping you survive the course, as it seems she already decided who would do well and who wouldn’t on the first day. I once asked if I could be excused to the bathroom so I could blow my nose. She declined permission. With severe allergies and a dripping nose, I tore out a sheet of paper from my notebook and used it as a tissue. She immediately went off on me and made me stand outside in the hallway for “disrupting the class.”
I’ve extremely seldom ever wished violence upon a person. She was one of the rare ones.
My ~10th grade computer teacher who knew less about computers about me and sent me to the principals office when I corrected her one too many times.
My Algebra II teacher, sort of like Milton from Office Space. And when I failed Algebra II, who did they give me but him again.
In 8th grade? I’m surprised he didn’t get beat up by a group of troublemakers.
Most of my teachers were either wonderful or unmemorable. The one exception was my US History teacher, eleventh grade.
She often didn’t come to class. We’d go to class, find a note saying we should go to the library and write outlines on our (deadly boring) history textbook. Of course we never did – we just hung out in the library and talked instead. I made a lot of good friends in that class 
The rumor was that she didn’t come to class because she was drunk, or possibly because she didn’t want to wake up early (somehow, the later classes saw a lot more of her than the earlier classes).
It became pretty clear that she only read the first page of whatever assignment we turned in (and possibly not even that). One of my friends tested this by putting drivel in the subsequent pages. Got an A.
She told our class that the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs were the same thing.
This is just plain weirdness rather than incompetence: she decided she didn’t like my name, so she called me by a different one. She would actually start saying my real name, stop in the middle, and say the different one. (Friends from that class still, almost twenty years later, call me by the name she gave me.)
We didn’t hate her, or even dislike her; we were more bemused by her behavior than anything else. She eventually left to get married. I have no idea why she wasn’t kicked out before that.
8th grade gym geacher, Mr. Theodore. We always had to do these ridiculous stretches that even at the time (1983) seemed worthless. For example, we’d all stand, elbows out, fists clenched in front of our chests, and pull our elbows out away from our bodies while he’d say “One! Two! Three! Four! Keep! Your elbows! Up!” Or “Shoot the cannon,” Where we’d stand, then crouch, then kick our legs out behind us, then back to crouching, then stand up. 
But the worst part: He used to stand right next to the showers with an odd little smile on his face (the only time he ever smiled) and throw us our towels so we had to jump to catch them. When he got bused and fired a few years later, we were all shocked…b/c it was for selling weed.
Miss Foster, 11th grade health teacher, made us silently read the textbook every day while she sat in the front filing her nails. Every so often she’d give us a cloze test with questions like, “Smoking also causes ", or, "_ leads to ____________, ___________, and ___________.” If we answered with what smoking caused, say, as opposed to what it “also caused” according to the phrasing in the book, then we were marked wrong.
Mrs. Tarnoff, 8th grade English, simply hated teaching, children, and people in general. She spent most of the class bitching at us, and complaining how hard she had to work, although she gave us mostly Scantron tests and even had a TA to run them through the machine. She was finally fired, I heard later, when she used the forbidden N-word to refer to a (presumably black) student.
Mr. Weiss 10th grade social studies. I hated him. He relentlessly kissed up to the popular kids while making those of us not quite as socially adept feel even worse. I later heard he dropped dead of a heart attack shortly after retirement. I grinned. Teachers should not play favorites so openly. He made me feel like an idiot in my best subject. He was merciless in his critiques of students and would discuss their faults with other students.
Bastard.
Halfway through freshman year, our awesome English teacher had a grievance with the union and retired. He was replaced by Dr. Sharp, who, despite her PhD, couldn’t teach at all, and hated all kids except the seniors.
This came to a head during our Shakespeare unit. First off, she couldn’t pronounce any of the names in Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio was Merkoosho, Capulet was Caplet, and Tybalt was Tae-Bo, just like the exercise video. So that was excruciating enough. Then we got to the final project. I made Juliet’s diary, writing it all myself using calligraphy and parchment paper. It took ages, and I was really proud of it. My friend did a paper doll of Juliet that had one moving part–the “oh, happy dagger!” hand so she could stab herself repeatedly. Dr. Sharp stood in front of the class with that puppet for five minutes playing with it and giggling. He got an A+, I got a B.
The final exam on that unit was ridiculous. She gave us a handout, two pages typed, single-spaced. Told us to memorize it. It contained stream-of-consciousness trivia such as “The Globe theater had three doors” and “Shakespeare was buried in an ornate marble tomb.” The final was fill in the blank: The Globe Theater had _______ doors. Shakespeare was buried in an ________ ________ tomb. For the latter, one of my friends put “elaborate marble.” She gave him no credit for that answer.
That’s be Mr. Floyd, my pre-algebra and algebra teacher. I hated him in pre-algebra and my guidance councilor promised I wouldn’t have him for algebra. When I learned that I was having him, I went home and cried. My parents tried to get me switched to another class, but as department head of Math, he was allowed to prevent that.
So, algebra. He decided that we didn’t need a math book that year. Oh, there were plenty available, he just thought that giving us worksheets would be better. There wasn’t much instruction on said worksheets, and he didn’t make up for it in class, either. This is how class went every single day: We’d take out our homework, and then go over problems that people got wrong. Since no one had any idea what they hell we were supposed to be doing, this would take up 3/4ths of the class. Then he’d teach for the last 15 minutes of class, which didn’t leave any time to ask questions. Since no one had any idea what the hell they were supposed to be doing, we’d get most of the problems wrong when we did our homework, so the next day…rinse, wash, repeat for 185 days.
Several students begged him to slow down since so many of us were lost, and he said that it wasn’t fair to the kids who were doing well (who??) to be held back by the others.
When I got to Algebra II our teacher, a woman who happened to hate him, flat-out told us the first class that if we did poorly we shouldn’t feel bad about ourselves because we weren’t given any of the necessary foundation to do well in her class. She was right, I got a D-.
As for Mr. Floyd, he left my high school and was recently arrested for stealing calculators from students and selling them on eBay. Hell of a guy.
My second-grade teacher (circa early 1950s) is undoubtedly rotting in hell. Yes, she’s dead.
This teacher was the stereotypical “school marm” out of the history books. Also a stereotypical “spinster.” She was painfully thin, and her hands were more like talons. She wore the same exact outfit every day: a starched long-sleeve white blouse and a straight ankle-length black skirt. She wore clunky high-top black shoes that were closed by some kind of hooks. Her hair was in little tight curls, held in place by a hair net. She wore plain wire-rim glasses and no makeup or jewelry whatsoever. And nobody ever remembered having seen her smiling.
She always carried a wooden yardstick, to rap loudly on someone’s desk or knuckles. If anyone misbehaved they had to stand in the cloak room, which had no light or ventilation, for the rest of the day. And a kid had to finish his morning assignments before eating lunch. I was a very careful and meticulous worker, especially with anything artistic, so I never got to eat lunch until the bus ride home. You also didn’t get bathroom privileges until your work was done. Yes, I remember peeing or pooping in my pants a few times, not that I was the only one. Of course the punishment was to spend the rest of the day in the cloakroom. This meant that everyone’s outerwear often smelled like shit. On the bus ride home, it was often easy to tell who was in her class.
In one memorable PTA meeting, she told our parents, “I hate all children, especially boys.”
I had a History Professor who was Chinese. He, apparently, was pretty smart, and I read on the internet about some of his great contributions History-wise. However, I couldn’t understand WTH he was saying. I had to drop that class.
As a teacher, I am absolutely appalled when I read crap like this. :eek: Of course it seems to be a common subtext in this thread. I mean, why the fuck are you in the classroom then? There must be hundreds of careers where you would never see a single solitary kid, if you dislike them so much. Likewise with the playing favorites horseshit that is also described numerously and vividly above. WTF? 
We moved so often that I had a lot of teachers. I remember very few of them at all, but my 6th grade math teacher does stand out a little bit.
He was young and I was a favorite of his because I was quiet and a good student and I had boobs.
He had horrible breath and so one day when he got to class, he discovered a bottle of mouthwash on his desk. Someone was trying to give him a hint. After trying and failing to get the person to confess in class, he pulled me out to the hallway and pleaded with me for what felt like hours to tell him who had done it. I didn’t know and wouldn’t have told him anyway. I didn’t like him because he always stared at my boobs. Plus his breath was icky.
Oh, I know that in my case, most of my female teachers went into teaching because that was one of the few career options available to women at the time. A lot of them DID like kids, or they liked the particular subject. But sometimes, they needed to get a job, and being a clerk or even a secretary wasn’t gonna pay the bills.
Mrs. Patterson, first year of alegebra. I don’t know how she got away with it, but she brought her brat to class, not once, every frakking day. She breastfeed it. She played with it. She encouraged other people to play with it. She didn’t teach any frakking alegebra. For months I had fantasies of her cooing to her baby while walking off a cliff (perferably into a pit of spikes). Eventually some parents caught on to the fact that no one was actually learning anything and she was fired. Of course, the class was twice as hard after that making up for all we had missed.
Sister Mary used to teach singing when I was in 1st grade. She had us sit on a ‘bleacher’ style seat. The best singers were arranged along the top & further away from her while the poor singers (like me) were along the bottom – within arm’s reach for a clip over the ear if we didn’t hit the right note. No actual singing instruction or help with how to sing, just do it right or else.
Mrs H. 2nd grade teacher. Had a real thing about spelling and the attitude that if you misspelt a word it was a personal affront to her teaching skills. I would always get my b’s & d’s mixed up (I understand now that can be a sign of a mild form of dyslexia) so I was always on her shit-list. I was one of the kids that got to school early and had to sneak around so she didn’t see me & drag me into class before lessons to do spelling exercises. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend all day in class, getting kept in during morning break & lunch to keep working on my spelling. She used to enjoy telling I would never be a success in life. I assume she’s dead now so the world is a much nicer place
I should say all the damage was undone in 3rd grade when I got an awesome teacher, Mrs T. I went from the bottom of the class to the top & she started a love of books & reading that I still have.
I had a high school maths/science teacher who spent most of the class discussing sport & music with a few of the kids that he liked. When I complained to the year master his response was ”You’ll have to work with people like that when you graduate so you may as well get used to the idea”. :smack:
At tech. college I had a road design and drafting teacher that was so bad that when he walked in on the first day of class, about ½ of the students (those of us that had had him before) just got up & walked out, withdrew from the class, got a refund on our fees & took our chances next term. I know in the time I was there that there were at least three student petitions to get him fired.
He owned a restaurant as a side job and would always leave night classes early to go help run it. Much mirth occurred one night when the head of school showed up at our class looking for him (I was almost finished my course and only needed this class plus one other to finish that year so I bit-the-bullet and kept going). Turns out our teacher had been filling in his time-sheet for the full 3 hour class but regularly leaving at around 7:30pm – class started at 6pm and ended at 9pm. He ‘retired’ at the end of that semester.