oh, I forgot the sophmore math teacher who was decent enough in daily work, but for some weird reason, decided to give our midterm final as essay questions. ex: “What did we learn in chapter 5. Give examples” Now, I was decent enough math student, I could do the work, but to remember what chapter we learned which in wasn’t in me at all, and apparently anyone else either because a lot of kids failed that test.
Then there was the choir teacher. Mixed grade class, so my sister was in the same class as me. Every single song we did was religious, in a public school. Then, one time near the end of class, another girl jumped my sister (who had done nothing at the time), sat on her and started to beat on her. The teacher stood outside the classroom door and absolutely refused to turn around and do anything to stop it or even call anyone. Sis ended up being the one expelled >_< while the other girl got away with it, rumor has it because she was special ed (nothing obvious, maybe a learning disability, at that time all kids with learning disabilities were separated except electives) and they’d lose funding for expelling her.
And a couple gym teachers. One tried to make my sister run laps with a badly sprained ankle she was wearing a very obvious splint for. Another, the football coach, oversaw the weight lifting elective class I took for fun (not for a slough class!) He basically ignored all the girls, and they one by one dropped out until I was the only girl left, and focused on his precious football players. I figured things out on my own, but was left with no spotters on equipment. I was pretty proud that I was able to increase my limits so much, but with no direction, I could have hurt myself pretty badly.
I think I’ve shared my sex ed story here before, but here it goes.
In 10th grade Catholic school biology ( or science, whatever they called it then, no idea, don’t care.) we were learning about how babbies are made.
We got a slide show of parts. SLIDESHOW. Taught by a teacher in her mid 20’s who was clearly uneducated and embarrassed.
So, at 8 or 9 am in the morning, we are getting a slideshow goodness of charcoal drawings of what the naughty bits look like. It’s difficult enough waking up as a teenager, but drawings that were worse and more meh than what any girl could get out of a box of tampons was saying something.
“This is the VAAG nee A.” Muttering muttering muttering. it looks like a Rorschack blotch and nothing like anything I’ve ever seen in a handheld mirror, but what do I know? We kids all look at each other. The boys on one side of the class room look over to the girls with a WTF and we whisper quietly, " I’m pretty sure it’s not pronounced that way."
“CLASS PAY ATTENTION.” She rambles on and we try to get clarification from anyone else, but her, in class, to no avail.
Several blotchy slides later we get to THE MALE ANATOMY. (Cue Jaws Theme) In half up, charcoal drawing goodness. Yes, we could recognize what THAT was and naturally it was HYSTERICAL to all of us.
“This is the PEN-is.” mumble, mumble, mumble.
It is the girls turn to look over to the boys with a WTF look where we got instant clarification from every boy, " that’s not how its pronounced." When you have three of the class stoners tell you the teacher is wrong, you know the teacher is wrong, man.
Me, the shy kid who barely said five words a day, is sitting the back of the class and said to a boy who is up a few desks from me, a little too loudly, “Hey! It’s like Dennis the Pen-is.”
Hilarity ensued. Why Dennis didn’t stab me on the spot, I don’t know, but he probably still has that nickname out there and I am profoundly not sorry at all. It is one of my few cherished moments of high school.
The next slide was a fully erect Pen-is and the teacher was so embarrassed she stopped the class. We were too busy making Pen-is jokes. And that was the end of our sex ed class.
I’ve shared this story with all my adult friends and now VAAGneeA and PENis have made into our vocabulary.
I never learned where the pen-is went in until a boy told me later on. I had an idea but didn’t realize it was active in there. I just thought it *rested *
We did get to have the fun of total brainwashing about abortion and watched an abortion film and how it scars the mother and other nonsense. And how every kind of birth control is bad for the woman and we just all have shitloads of babbies. At least that was my translation of it. I was branded a blacksheep by my sheepy friends for not drinking the kool aid.
Had a martial arts teacher for about a day whose idea of instruction was beating up on his new students. I was new to his style, but not to martial arts. After watching him smack around a couple pudgy guys who, clearly, had no idea how to defend themselves, I wrote him off as a grubby little sadist. I free sparred with him for a few minutes and immediately realized he had nothing to teach me. Packed my practice stuff up,left, and never came back.
Not a teacher I had–my junior year chemistry teacher told us this:
You know how you put a small amount of pure sodium in water and the resulting reaction fizzes and it’s cool? The teacher before the current one did that with potassium. Which would’ve been fine, if she’d put it under the hood. Which she didn’t. She ended up burning a kid’s face with the resulting reaction.
…And then she tried to cover it up. :eek:
Teacher who was telling us this said “needless to say, she doesn’t work here anymore.”
I took an upper-division undergraduate course in premodern Japanese Literature, taught by a visiting professor. Her home university required students to speak Classical Japanese fluently before enrolling in Japanese Lit., mine allowed anyone to take it regardless of language skills.
This meant that half of the class didn’t speak a word of Japanese, and since there weren’t any English translations for about 70% of the material the professor had intended to cover, this meant that her entire class plan was pretty much hosed on day 1.
She decided the easiest solution was to teach the class as planned, and pretend as if the students who didn’t speak Japanese did. Most lectures went as follows:
Professor: puts scan of the original Japanese text on the projector Mr. A, could you read sentence 1?
Mr. A (who reads Classical Japanese) : reads sentence in Japanese
Professor: Good. Now could you translate that, please?
Mr. A: does so
Professor: Excellent. Mrs. B, could you please read the next sentence?
Mrs. B: I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese…
Professor: Try anyway.
Mrs. B: Umm, but I can’t read a word of that…
Professor: TRY!!! What does the first word mean?
Mrs. B: I really don’t speak…
Professor: TRY!!!
Mrs. B (starts randomly throwing out words): Umm, house?
Professor: No, try again!
Mrs. B: Butterfly?
Professor: No! Try harder!
Every single day went like this- we’d read sentences aloud until we got to someone who didn’t speak Japanese, at which point the rest of the 50-minute lecture would consist of the unlucky student guessing random meanings for a kanji one word at a time, with the professor screaming at them to try harder after each wrong guess.
That was the worst, but the professor did have some other pretty weird tics- she used to assign us insanely involved assignments that weren’t on the syllabus (“Mr. X, spent the rest of today and tomorrow writing and illustrating a 30-page humorous comic in the style of kokkeibon accurate to standards of the 1630s and be prepared to present it to us on thursday”), and when we presented them she would inevitably spend the entire period ripping into our work and telling us why we had to try harder or she would fail us all.
That was the worst of it- we dealt with increasingly hostile threats in the form of “Do X or I’ll fail you,” in spite of our syllabus specifying that the course was 10% participation, 90% final exam.
I found out a few semesters later from the department head that he’d had to assign another faculty member to anonymously grade our final exam- apparently our original professor had given us all failing grades.
I wasn’t one of the kids who got to see it, except from a distance as other kids were stuffing it into a locker, but if I had to pick a famous person who that teacher kinda-sorta-halfway looked like?
…maybe a little like…Vanessa Marcil? If she ever had shorter shoulder-length jet-black hair. And sang…
I’m going to shame myself as a liar now. In print. Because Magazine be Damned, she was one Hell of a teacher.
Nobody just phoned it in. Ever. You really wanted to try your best. She worked with groups, she worked with us one-on-one. She would explain why we were losing our range, that our voices were just changing. And she’d work with us as we got through it. If we met our goals & made her happy (she had a phenomenal musical ear) she’d play popular records for the rest of the class.
Every student needs one teacher like her to inspire them to try harder and to be more. Sure she was beautiful outside. But inside, she was more so. And when she left, it was our loss.
Mine was Ms. D. (I have to put ‘Ms.’ because she was so dumb that somebody decided they couldn’t deal with her anymore).
She was our 8th grade A/P science teacher. She told us stuff like the sun revolved around the earth, that gravity was relative to your position on the earth (higher at the poles) and other nonsense. Teaching a bunch of “supposedly” smarter than average kids, this generally brought lots of discussion leading to nothing being taught at all.
The biggest one was the day she tried to teach us how to use the bunsen burners. We had to follow her instructions step-by-step. Identify all the parts. Check. Plug in all the parts. Check. Turn on the gas. Check. Then she went around the room with her lighter to each station, one by one, checking each station to make sure that everything was okay before she lit each individual burner, because we obviously were too young to be trusted with any source of fire.
All the while the room was filling up with gas.
Poor Wendy got the worst of it all. She had turned just about three shades of blue before Ms. D got to her station, and when she did, Wendy was just about ready to pass out from breathing in all the gas. As Ms. D lit her burner, there was a loud KABOOM and a huge flash as the gas ignited. Poor Wendy lost most of her eyebrows and some of her bangs in the process. After the initial shock was over, we all had a good laugh (that is, all except for Poor Wendy).
I heard (after the reunion) that Ms. D. was soon asked to leave the position, but only after not a few years later.
That was the design of the “thesis advisory” for the graduate course in translation I took.
Compare:
undergrad, ChemE. School has an “open doors policy” so students can pretty much drop by with questions any time a teacher is in and not in class. In return, students begin conversations by asking “is this a good time” and pool resources; by the time we went to the teachers with a question it meant the 80-student class hadn’t been able to solve it. Can take as long as you need to do your “project”; instructions on the formal parts are clearly posted in school literature, you’d had access to them before even entering the school.
We were told “research must be original, if it’s not original it’s not research.”
I did my “project” long distance, so when I needed to ask questions I called my advisor and set up an appointment. Went in, we went over my questions, next time I called him it was to say “I’m done and I’ll be there next week, so I’ll bring a proof for you to check.” “OK.”
He checked my proof with me there, asked a couple of questions, mentioned a couple of items he liked, asked what was I planning to show on my presentation, approved the plan and said to print my five. I printed five copies of the project report, got them hardbound as per instructions, delivered four to the school, defended my work in front of my advisor and two other professors.
Grad. Catching a professor was more difficult than getting a job as an astronaut; most didn’t have posted hours; even if they did, they might not be in. We had three months to do our project.
We spent the previous three months being told “nobody is expecting you to perform original work”. We still didn’t have clear information on acceptable subjects or on formatting by the time finals were done.
My advisor was on vacation for the three months; she came back two days before the work was due. Her review consisted of checking formatting: she didn’t examine the content at all. No possibility of defending my work.
That whole graduate course was… amazingly bad. I didn’t feel like I was back in college, I felt like I was back in sixth grade, and I told the school so when they asked for our opinion (don’t ask for my opinion if you’re not interested in hearing it).
There was the male Grade 7 teacher who, when after one of our gym classes us girls were horsing around and being loud in the changeroom, burst through the door and stood there yelling at us while most of the girls were in various states of undress.
I don’t know if anybody ever complained or if he got reprimanded. I just remember my large-busted friends sitting in their bras looking shocked and trying to cover up.
I’m terrified to see my name…
Probably the advanced-level biology class teacher who was a total perv over big-chested girl students. He’d try to always stand right over the shoulder of any girl who had any hint of a gap/V in her top if she had a halfway decent chest (on the pretense of checking their work or seeing if they had questions), and would stare at their chests when they walked around, etc.
We never complained, either; we just kind of assumed this was accepted by the administration and wasn’t disallowed. When girls with any kind of dip in their top (for instance, the cheerleaders sometimes had to wear their uniform in school, and the tops had a V-neck) had to ask a question, if they were feeling bold they’d hold a folder up over their front or put their hand right on top of any view down the shirt, and he’d be obviously peeved. There was even a rumor that he couldn’t be within 300 feet of his wife’s daughter from her first marriage, who was a student a year older than I was at the time.
We even had a nickname for him (not used around him or other adults) incorporating his first name, something along the lines of “Rapin’ Rick.”
I’ve had two. I think otherwise, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had more than my share of some very, very good teachers over the years.
#1
As a sophomore in high school, I was afflicted with a new African American English teacher who was borderline racist. This being central Jersey, it was a very diverse school. My teacher identified, helped and associated more with the African-American students all along, and she was very much into African culture (I still to this day distinctly remember a bulletin board of antique tribal mask replicas, with an index card of notes on each), but it really never bothered me. That is until we received an essay assignment, based around Martin Luther King Day. The assignment was really geared towards being able to think critically around a topic and constructing a proper “5 paragraph” essay: beginning, 3 well-developed thoughts, conclusion, but it was ultimately more of an opinion piece than having a “right” or “wrong” answer. The topic was “If he were alive today, what do you think Martin Luther King would think about the state the country?”
I wrote a mildly scathing piece noting that race relations haven’t improved too much, citing some of the race riots of the 70’s and the then-recent OJ Simpson trial and Rodney King incidents (and more precisely the nonsense surrounding them) as examples that Dr. King’s “dream” hasn’t been realized, etc etc. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong - but it was an opinion paper and supposedly graded on how well you presented your thesis and how well you wrote the paper.
I got a 0.
I was very much a goody-two-shoes in school, A-student, honors tract, lots of extra curricular activities, etc. Getting a 0 was pretty devastating, I’m not sure I’d gotten one at all prior in my career. Then I noticed there was white-out next to the 0. I scratched it off, and saw a 9 that was turned into an 8 and then whited out over. So yeah - my paper started off as a solid A, dropped to a B, then beyond that to failing, and there wasn’t any real justification as to why.
Long story short - my parents went ballistic. It was perhaps the only time my father had to get involved, and he took it all the way up to the principal, trying to figure out why this was scored this way. The teacher wasn’t really able to muster much of a defense at any point, referring to vague statements like “it wasn’t well written” (except it was) and “it wasn’t an opinion piece” (when you start a topic with “what do you think…”, how is that not opinion?). Basically, she didn’t agree with my opinion because I, a white student, was basically saying that Dr. King’s vision hasn’t been realized, and she, a black teach, didn’t agree with that opinion. So I got a 0.
The rest of the year, she was extremely touchy with me. Can’t say I blamed her - and I did tweak her by doing my final research paper of the year on Affirmative Action. The rest of the my class had the occasional problem, but ultimately, while it took another year and half, she was let go. My wife was in her next year’s class, and they had a huge number of issues as well, and the end of that (her 2nd year in this school) she was let go. I’ve always liked to think that the little incident with my paper was the first volley in the battle that got her ass thrown out.
#2
This one’s shorter, I promise.
My senior year in undergrad, finishing off a BS in Comp Sci, I took an elective - “programming for 32 bit Operating systems”. I thought it would be worthwhile, knowing how to program for Windows and the like. Oops.
The professor, the first day of class, whipped out a bunch of slides and started telling us how he was going to teach us how to program in 3 different OS’s - Windows 95, OS/2 Warp and some flavor of Unix. Seems good right?
Except this was 2003… Windows 95 was way out of date (hello 98! hello NT! hello XP!), and I believe OS/2 Warp was all but dead. Was a really in-depth and hard course too, but a joke because most of what we were assigned to do as homework wouldn’t run on the computers we all had - which were mostly running XP. I had find a second machine to install 98 on, just to do the homework right. I think it was only 1 of 2 courses I got a C on my entire college career.
My physics teacher in my junior year of high school. She managed to totally destroy my nascent interest in the subject with her boring, nonsensical, soul-crushing-dry-as-dust lectures.
There was a math teacher in my HS called “Peek-a-boo” Palmer.
Coach Workman, middle school gym. Son of a bitch made me and a friend of mine run laps in front of the class because we were fat. Also used to walk around in extremely short shorts thinking he was gorgeous.
He’s still teaching somewhere in Oklahoma. Still an asshole, I’m sure, and probably still prancing around with his balls barely covered.
Abusive: In 5th or 6th grade, our gym teacher got a bug up his ass about one of the boys in my class, so interrupted another teacher’s class to pull him out into the hallway to scream at him. And scream he did. The walls were foot-thick cinder-block, the doors inch-thick solid oak, and everyone in the room could hear him shrieking. Everyone in the room also heard it when he picked my classmate up and bodily slammed him into the wall too. Including the teacher who was teaching our class, by the way, who deserves his own shitty teacher award for standing there shuffling his feet instead of, oh, calling the cops. Nothing happened to the gym teacher afterward. He continued teaching there for years afterwards, and everyone acted like nothing had happened. This was a private Catholic school, and it was stuff like this that formed my very strong opinions about the ability of the Catholic church to develop people of quality character (frequently referred to as the “Den of Hypocrisy”).
Incompetent: High school sex ed teacher. Too embarrassed by the subject matter to teach it. She couldn’t even force herself to say the word “penis,” and instead resorted to “the bottom part… um… of the man…”
Bully: High school gym teacher, openly mocked and bullied me in class in front of the other students because I wasn’t terribly proficient at the sports she thought were important – not that she could be bothered to teach rules or technique beyond telling us to grab a hockey stick and play. The fact that I was good at sports she didn’t care about, she refused to acknowledge.
I was once also accused of plagiarism by a substitute teacher in grade school, also for writing something that was “too good,” but luckily my regular teacher came back and looked at the papers she’d graded before they were returned to us. My regular teacher had crossed out her accusation and written something to the effect of “Never mind this, I saw you writing this story so I know it’s yours.”
My high-school had a History/Spanish teacher who I had heard wild rumors about for a long time. My older sister told me about strange behavior, horrible personal hygene and … cronic booger eating! Heard similar stuff from other students in my grade who had history class with him.
Now, I had never had this guy as a teacher at that point, and the stories were so unbelievable that I just kinda wrote them off as typical kid B.S.
Until…
… I had to watch some kind of film with a class of his. (The stories always were him about eatin’ boogies during films, standing back by the projecter when all the kids attention was on the screen) I kept a pretty close eye on him to see for myself.
OH MY GOD! HE JUST PICKED A WINNER, HAD SOME DINNER!*** :eek:
It was true! I saw it with my own two eyes. I had a class with him later as a Junior, and never quite trusted him.
This guy was arrested about 15 years later (about 15 years ago now) for “lewd acts with children” or something like that. I wasn’t suprised. Strange dude.
Easy. Ms. Pritchett in 8th grade English class. She was by far the worst, so bad I still have memories of her boring class. She was rude, arrogant, boring and kinda smelt funny. When I finally got out of her class, life in general just got a whole lot better.
Fourth grade: Bessie Heldstab, our public school teacher, spent every arithmetic period screaming at a friend of mine named Barbara, a sweet kid who was just bad at arithmetic. She’d reduce Barbara to tears and then yell at her for crying. I got pneumonia in the spring and had to be hospitalized and it was way better than having to go through arithmetic every day. (I was good at math, but my stomach tied up in knots every day about 1:45 PM because I thought if I made one mistake, I’d be the next person Mrs. Heldstab would torture. )
Fast forward many years. I am in Law School (evening classes) and taking first year Legal Writing. Our professor is a local assistant county DA. The third day of class she laughs at someone for correctly pronouncing the word “precedent” as PRESS UH DENT. “That’s a common mistake,” she says. It’s pronounced “PREZ UH DENT” – that same way as in ‘President Bush.’"
The guy next to me, a senior editor for a local newspaper, has the balls to tell her (gently and politely) that she’s wrong. She gets red in the face, and suggests that he has no idea what he’s talking about–after all, she’s the one who’s an actual lawyer. It’s also pretty clear she’s going to be a vindictive grader, too. She was totally unable to explain any principles of good legal writing either. But she spent a lot of time telling us about how tough she was in the courtroom.
My first paper for her got a C+. Next paper, I carefully dumbed down the argument to something a dull ninth-grader might be able to grasp. I made the adjectives really easy. I made the sentences short. I went for the obvious explanation, even if it was wrong and easily countered. And I got an A.
Oh yeah, we did a hypothetical where a kid in Hawaii is throwing ripe pineapples at the windshields of passing cars, until an enraged motorist grabs his little butt and hauls him down to the police station. She was sure that this was wrong because “Nobody but the parents can tell a child he’s doing something wrong.” She insisted that the pineapples would have been a harmless kid prank until we pointed out that the previous year, in our state, about ten miles from the law school, a baby in a car seat had been killed when some idiot teen tossed a bowling ball off an overpass.
Luckily the law school read the student reviews of this teacher and she wasn’t asked to come back the next year.
“You can’t use ‘and’ at the beginning of a sentence”
“Sure you can. Want to see an example from a book I have been reading?”
“NO. YOU’RE SUSPENDED”
True story. 