There was the 4th grade teacher who I asked if I could have more work because the work we had was boring & wasn’t challenging. Rather than give me harder work, her nickname for me became “Our Little Genius” as she berated me for the rest of the year.
I called her Mrs Petro-nazi. Godwin be Damned.
I got dropped from a High Track course in 5th grade for forgetting my homework. ONCE. I complained bitterly, no result. When that teacher died of a brain tumor less than a year later, I tried to revisit the issue, but to no avail. I was told that it was “inappropriate” and that I was “heartless”. :dubious:
In 6th grade, I had a teacher promise prizes to the best player of jeopardy in her class that year. I won, one on one. Then it became the entire class vs my score. Then it became the entire grade vs my score. Then the teacher lost interest and I never got any prize.
“I’ll take Lying Bitches for 500, Alex.”
6th grade was so interesting, its hard to single her out though. There was the singing teacher whose spread we found in a dirty magazine. There was the Health teacher named Ron who took a leave of absense and 6 months later visited the school to say ‘hi’ as Janice. And his replacement who had one eye that roaed around the room like Mad Eye Moody. “I can see you over there, Mr O’Connor!!!” I still remember the day we were all held after school because no one would rat out who landed a paper airplane in her hair w/o her seeing it.
Then there was the husband-wife duo from HS. She was a seething nasty and vidictive piece of work who’d wear high choke collars and berate hard work just for fun. He was a blithering idiot who explained advanced algebra with a monotone drawl so boring that even a Texas Saint would have shot him dead. I complained, but all I got was a good talking to from Dr. Thumb. I believe that it was then that I decided that all authority must be questioned and whenever possible, rattled.
I had some teachers who weren’t that good. But mostly I didn’t even realize it at the time. But then there was the 5th grade. This woman was downright evil. She once gave a huge 100 question history test, and no one in the class passed. She once marked a paper wrong and when I pointed it out she claimed I wrote in the answer later. You had to use a fountain pen in her class. Use a pencil or ballpoint pen and your work got marked with a zero. No student could escape her special attention. She would find a way to go after any weakness, and make sure to embarass you in front of the whole class. I now realize the real measure of how bad she was. I can think of things I learned in every grade in elementary school, except 5th grade. If was all busy work without meaning.
One of my worst teachers wishes she’d been Nadia Comanecci. She’s to Ms. Comanecci what the average 3yo with a metal xylophone is to Johan Sebastian Bach, but she landed a job as PhysEd teacher and proceeded to become the Most Hated Teacher in several provinces. She’s the most infamous person I can say I know well; much better than I’d like to, in fact.
Actually, that’s a slur on good gym teachers. I promise they exist, the current gym teacher at our old HS is one (former classmate of mine, hyperactive; unlike Hellbitch, he’s conscious of people’s limitations and good at working with kids and teens).
Mr. Oaks, third grade. This was the late 80s, so colorful, friendly elementary classrooms with grouped desks and all of that were in vogue. But not with Mr. Oaks. He put our desks in straight rows. There were no group activities. Lessons consisted of him droning on while showing overhead projections with a minimum of illustration. I remember him complaining about how “kids don’t learn the alphabet these days. They learn the song, but they don’t know the alphabet.”
Obviously a tenure case. I was transferred to another class after winter break, thank og.
Gym teachers who can’t teach teach vocubulary. As in the 9th grade gym teacher who confused the words exotic and erotic. She literally looked horrifed when a few us of read our homework definitions out loud.
7th grade, honors math, don’t remember his name but I do remember the conversation.
I would only turn in the homework I finished in class, every class was the same. come in, equation on the board, he would talk about how to solve it (most days I was already working on the homework portion before he even started talking) then it was 50 or 100 problems all the same equation…
he asked me why I wasn’t doing my homework?
ME: Because its boring and I already know it.
Him: do you really think you are learning anything in this class without doing the homework?
Me: I have the highest test scores in the class, the lowest I have gotten is a 97% how can you even ask that question?
I ended up being put back in basic math, which was the same shit only it was the stuff we had been working on at the beginning of the year. Destroyed every shred of interest I had in math.
I have three. And they’re all named “Coach” Somebody.
The first one, Coach Bailey, taught health. He was a born-again Christian who wasn’t shy about explaining his worldview. I believe he taught health because he couldn’t coach football full-time, so they gave him a completely worthless class. (Most of it was “drugs are bad, m’kay” and “If you have sex, you deserve what you get. Oh, and AIDS is God’s punishment for gays for their unnatural and immoral behavior.” As I said, completely worthless.) I got my A for the semester and got the hell out of there.
The second, Coach Propes, taught pre-algebra. He was just an idiot. I got my A and got the hell out of there, but not before I grew to hate math so much that I skipped it my sophomore year and had to take Algebra I as a junior.
The third, Coach Hardison, taught Algebra I. He’d work an example or two on the overhead and leave us to our homework. Of course I didn’t get it and when I asked for help, he said, “Just do it the way I showed you.” And then went back to diagramming football plays. I didn’t get an A in this one; I failed it and had to re-take it as a senior, along with geometry. (Which I did like and was fairly good at. A good teacher makes a big difference.)
Those last two are why I’ve resisted math classes since. It’s not because I’m not capable of learning it, and it’s not that I’m not interested in it. I just had shitty teachers who couldn’t teach their way out of a wet paper bag. Can you tell I went to high school in Texas?
I wouldn’t have been surprised if you had said North Carolina. My math education after 8th grade was an absolute joke. I was part of an “accelerated” group that was taught Pre-Algebra in 7th grade, then Algebra I in 8th grade. I had the same teacher for both classes; she was outstanding. Ninth grade would have been Algebra II; I have no memory of that class.
At this point, the school stopped offering separate classes for the “advanced” group; we were placed in mixed classes, often with older students who were taking the class for the second or third time. Tenth was Geometry…our teacher had a sort of nervous breakdown mid-year due to what would now be considered outright bullying by a group of seniors. She knew which students in the class were truly interested in the material, and taught directly to them. I think she left at the end of that year.
Eleventh was “Advanced Math” (which was called Trigonometry back in the day). The teacher was a very nice, reasonably intelligent lady. We often saw her with her family at the local pool; during a conversation with my mother, she freely admitted that she taught at a level that would ensure the lowest-performing students in the class would pass. I left her class with absolutely no concept of how useful things such as the cosine, sine, and tangent could be…this would not be remedied until college, when my Physics I professor realized why I was struggling with his class and gave me a crash course in Trig.
Twelfth grade was Calculus, which was taught by one of the worst teachers I have ever encountered. It was also an AP course. This guy was the girls’ basketball coach; he had no math education background beyond some “refresher” course he had to take. He bragged that he never removed the shrink wrap from the textbook for the course. He was barely capable of even teaching the material from the book. After numerous conferences, my parents were concerned enough to hire a kid from the local college as a tutor so that I would at least stand a chance on the AP test. Thanks to his help, I breezed through the homework in this class…which managed to piss off the teacher, since I was able to discuss concepts he didn’t understand. This teacher was very, very fond of the girls; he was especially lenient with the ones who dressed in revealing clothes (which I actually did on several occasions just to observe the difference in treatment). No one scored higher than a 1 on the AP test; most of us wrote essays on various topics because the questions were so far beyond anything that was presented in class.
Most of my college physics professors had no idea how to teach. They’d show up and start deriving formulas on the chalkboard with barely any explanation of the context and without discussing or showing any kind of relevant applications at all. There was practically no interaction between them and the students (and these were small classes). It was pretty obvious that they were perturbed at having to leave their offices or their labs to stoop to teaching undergraduates.
The worst was this ancient guy who taught the 300 level Mechanics courses. He was apparently writing a textbook. Every class, he would hand us photocopies of pages from his book, and then put transparency copies of the same pages on the overhead projector and read them, word-for-word, to us. That was it–an hour of him reading his unpublished textbook to us three times a week.
I use those guys as a reminder of how NOT to teach.
I had a horrid college accounting professor. First, he firmly believed that all bookkeepers were or should be girls. Not women, girls. And all accountants were or should be men. This was a once-a-week class, which met for 3 hours on Wednesday night. And he was pissed that he was missing Charlie’s Angels each week. At any rate, he’d tell us to read chapter X and do the odd numbered exercises. Next week, he’d read out the answer key for the exercises, and tell us to read chapter X+1, and do the even numbered exercises. Notice that there was no actual TEACHING during class. Apparently the text book was so great that he didn’t need to teach at all. Heaven help the male student who had a question, but at least a male student would get answered. Female students would be subjected to a withering glare, and told that he was not sure that our feeble female brains were up to the task of accounting, on account of girls can’t do math. That was the first class that I ever withdrew from…and the head of accounting gave me static about it. I told him to send a female ringer in on this guy’s next semester.
Giving credit where it’s due, most of my teachers were good, some were excellent. But like most students, I had a handful of bad ones. Most of those weren’t noteworthy - the typing teacher taught me a useful skill, even if she sipped vodka all day ( and I’d have done the same if faced with teaching middle school all day,) I managed to pass second year algebra and senior economics even though the instructors were horrible, the physics professor with the impenetrable accent is now just a funny story to trot out. But one lousy teacher stands out: my ninth grade health and PE “teacher.” To set the scene, this was 1983. AIDS had been described by this time, and its method of transmission was known, but there was a lot of hysteria and misinformation floating around. Mrs. M told a class of high school students that AIDS was a food-transmitted disease. Several of my classmates and I argued with her - we read the papers and watched the news, and knew she was wrong, but she insisted she was absolutely correct. After I realized that she wasn’t going to budge from her position, I raised my hand and asked where she’d been eating. I’ll never forget the moment of shocked “Did she really say that” silence that hit the classroom, followed by gales of laughter. The guy sitting in front of me literally fell on the floor, crying with laughter.
Postscript: I actually went to the local health department and got literature from the (horrified) nurse to take to Mrs. M, because (a) I’m a huge nerd like that and (b) when I’m right, I’m right, dangit! (Not my most attractive trait.) Stupid bint still wouldn’t accept that she was wrong. I’m still pissed that she was passing such misinformation to teenagers!
Ugh, yes. I dreaded classes with the professor who wrote his own textbook. If you didn’t understand how he explained something you were hosed, since the book said exactly the same things that he said in class. Fortunately he was a tolerably good teacher. He would have been fine if he’d used a different textbook. I’m not a teacher, but I hereby solemnly swear that I will never teach a class using a textbook that I’ve written, no matter how good it is. Students have got to have access to more than one explanation of the stuff they’re studying.
My 6th & 7th grade homeroom & science teacher, Mrs. O. had no sense of humor and decided that anything she overheard her students talking about but that she didn’t understand (missed context, etc.) must be a lie. She actually called my mother to complain about me saying that Boy George and Darth Vader were at my house – at my Halloween party – because she was eavesdropping and didn’t hear the context.
11th grade trigonometry teacher, Mr. Murano, had never taught before, had no credentials to teach math (private Christian school, anybody could teach anything, no state oversight :O) and didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and he was teaching from someone else’s notes. There were only 12 of us in the class and we were all lost. He gave one kid a detention for “disrespect” for reading his textbook instead of “paying attention” when the kid was understand another of Murano’s nonsensical explanations of some trigonometric concept. In order for me to merely pass the class I had to get outside tutoring, because I was lost as Hansel & Gretel in the woods.
Finally one day Murano snapped because we were all confused and no one could answer his questions and started screaming and threw a book over our heads at the wall. The daughter of the school board president was in the class, and she said, “that’s it, I’m done,” stood up and walked out, so we all followed her, went to the principal and told him that none of us would be attending that class ever again so long as Murano was teaching. The vice principal took over and gave us a pop quiz on his first day and decided that we were all so lost he would start over from the beginning of the book – that was in February though, so we’d lost more than half of year of solid education. Because of Murano’s ineptitude, I had C’s in both marking periods he taught, but got a B then an A from the VP, but nonetheless, those C’s meant that I was prohibited from taking Calculus as a senior. Thanks a lot, Murano!
Lastly, my current Sociology professor. I’m taking this class online, so the primary means of interacting with the professor is via email. I sent him an email with an important question about the paper which is 1/4th of our grade. That was 11 days ago. I sent another 6 days ago. I still have not received a reply. I’ve contacted his department head and the dean’s office and no one seems concerned that this jackass is MIA. I’m thinking that if he’s not dead, in the hospital or jail, then he ought to be fired, at this point. 11 days without responding to student email in an online class is unconscionable.
There were a lot of criminally bad teachers in my public-school career, but a double-whammy stands out: Mrs. Carnes, and Mr. Resnick.
Mrs. Carnes suffered from some mental condition. I’m not joking–in retrospect it’s pretty pathetic. She was our elementary music teacher, and she wore a Bozo-the-clown level of makeup every day, and she had zero classroom management skills, and we were all terribly rude to her, and she shouted at us. When the class got totally out of control, as it often did, she would bang on the piano and sing in a loud voice something like, “I AM NOT HAP-PY WITH THIS CLASS-ROOM O NO I AM NOT!” and we’d temporarily quiet down, just at the weirdness of it all. She instilled a loathing of music in all of us.
The music room was attached to the gym, where we had a succession of PE teachers of varying quality–some awesome, some not so much. Mr. Resnick was in the latter category. I think he’d just come out of the military, and he expected military discipline out of us children. It didn’t really work. His punishment for us was to have us line up in straight lines and spend the entire PE period doing staring ahead silently, and screaming at us when we inevitably failed to do so.
My clearest memory is of one day when Mr. Resnick had us lined up, staring at the gym wall, bored out of our skulls. Our boredom was broken by the muffled sound of someone banging on the piano and shouting, “I AM NOT HAP-PY WITH THIS CLASS-ROOM O NO I AM NOT!” and in our shared misery with the other class we all broke apart, much to Mr. Resnick’s fury.
Most of them were ok but had their bad moments, like the Early Childhood teacher who tried to tell us that an uncircumsised penis was “smooth like a handle on a wooden spoon” and that circumsision involved rolling the forskin back to form the ridge of the glans O_o(she got reprimanded for that one and appologized), or the 3rd grade teacher that yelled at us for using the language “breaking up” when same sex friends fought because it sounded too much like dating terms.
But I did have three I remember as being especially bad.
One, my Senior year English teacher. It was a focus on how to write composition and research papers I believe, I remember going over sentance structure and how to research. She didn’t explain things very well, and had an extreme grudge against me for some reason, always rude to me. It seemed to me she’d grade my papers on subject and not form. What she wrote on my papers would always be criticizing my position and not one word on my form or structure of the paper, so I learned nothing about why I got low grades (when I’d always had straight A’s in English throughout HS, and now was getting C’s or lower) After I complained to a counseler, she called me out in front of the whole class to explain why I was wrong to complain. I dropped the class after that.
Two, HS Orchestra teacher. Had very little patience for anything. I never did learn how to read music. (granted it wasn’t his fault I was a poor student, I had very little talent but I really did want to learn, before I got to him anyway) He’d yell and scream at students until some of them cried. Once we were taking a test in the auditorium, and students at lunch (had a split luch system) who had no idea anyone would be in there, were a little loud outside the doors. Mr. Teacher ran up the aisle, kicked the auditorium doors open and started screaming at the lunch kids! After I left, he eventually was required to take an anger management course to keep his job.
Third, 6th grade teacher. I was a sensitive kid (really, I believe I had fairly severe depression, undiagnosed still today). I didn’t have many friends, and it was a very clique-y school, me being one of the ‘out’ group. When I ended up crying on the playground nearly every day (not showy boo-hooing but crouching at the edge, seriously miserable) this teacher would tell me it was my own fault and to just go play with the other kids. (maybe he was right in a way, but seriously the wrong way to say it. the other kids didn’t want me) Come to think of it, he never did send me to the counseler to find out what the problem was. I doodled a lot in class. He would call me out in class, and tell the other kids to report me when they saw me doodling, pretty much giving them permission to tease me for it. Not the worst teacher ever, but it felt pretty damn bad at the time to me. Like the whole class ganged up on me, and even the teacher was in on it!
Wow. The “worst” in this thread seriously qualify as child abusers.
I feel fortunate that my worst consisted of teachers who just had us read our books (quietly, to ourselves) and then printed up fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice quizzes. At worst, we were treated to a kind of benign neglect.
We had “paddling” as well, but honestly, I’d say almost all (that I received)were deserved.
I had a Biology teacher who taught us that Blacks excelled at sprinting and jumping because they had shorter Achilles tendons.
He also mispronounced a lot of words. Screwed me up for years because he was my only reference for some of the rarer words. Eventually I came to realize why people were looking ar me funny. Maybe he was just working the long troll.