Your worst teacher

In My Humble Opinion
101

Mr. Goff. 9th/10th/11th grade history.

It seems that folks have described numerous teachers who played favorites and enjoyed being the big dog in the classroom. Goff is the alpha male of all those teachers.

I got crossways with him on something during 9th grade history. After that, I was marked on his permanent shitlist. I was shy and insecure, and was being bullied by the other kids (private school, and I came “from the wrong side of the tracks”). He joined in on the bullying with incredible relish. There wasn’t a class day that went by that I didn’t get called an imcompetent screwup or worse.

I came to hate history with a passion because of that evil son of a bitch. I took great delight when I was in another school for my senior year and heard that he had been fired halfway through the year because he got caught shagging one of the other teachers in his office.

When I had to take history in college, it was horrible. All I could think of was Mr. Goff, and I was actually nervous enough to be trembling when I walked into Mr. Barnes’s class. I wasn’t when I walked out. He rekindled a love of learning in me and taught me that history isn’t just names, dates and places; it’s the story of humanity. He and Goff were exact opposite ends of the spectrum of what a teacher can do with and for a student.

102

Tenure can be a great thing or a curse. If you know you can’t be fired no matter what you do, you get lectures like this: - YouTube You don’t need to be an engineer to understand this lecture.

103

When did we get this crackbrain idea that phy ed was supposed to be good for kids’ health and self-regard? In my day, it was meant to do 2 things: impose rank by competitive ability and teach us to follow orders even when it hurt. It was perfect preparation for a world of draftee militaries and assembly line speedups.

104

In elementary school, there was a third grade teacher who had a school-wide reputation as being evil. I don’t remember a whole lot of specifics, other than that she grumbled and yelled a lot, clearly hated children, and threw a desk as a kid in my brother’s class.

A couple years ago, one of my Facebook friends from elementary school found out she committed suicide and sent a mass message to our classmates to tell us. What ensued was the most awkward conversation you can imagine – we all wanted to express our condolences at our death, but we really didn’t have a single good memory of her.

105

I tend to remember the good teachers more than the bad. But my least favorite was Mrs. Torres, homeroom and French teacher who disliked both my brother and sister (8 and 5 years older than me) and by the time I got to her class was apparently convinced I was going to be more bad news and treated me accordingly.

To be fair, she pretty much disliked everyone and was a petty tyrant, known to her fond charges as “Torres the Bull”.

106

My worst teacher was in grad school. The course was theory of boolean algebras, or something of the sort. He came in the first day with a book that had appeared recently on the subject, written by Paul Halmos who was famous as an expositor (also a fine mathematician) and the guy–who will remain nameless–said that Halmos was a much expositor than he and he sat down and started reading from the book. After a week or so of this, a delegation went to see him and we said we would all drop the course unless he let us give all the lectures. “Fine”, he said and that is what we did. Lazy bastard!

But that was not the worst. At some point, I proved a neat little theorem. He wanted me to write it up and send it to a journal. I spoke to my thesis advisor who advised against it. He said it was probably not new and, in any case, too inconsequential. The professor got angry and said that anything could be published somewhere. To prove his case, he showed a paper of his that he had published “somewhere”. It was some utterly obvious trivia. What he did next startled me. He wrote up my result and, without telling me, put my name on it and sent it off the Bulletin of the Amer. Math. Soc. It happened that at the time, the editor in chief was Paul Halmos and the paper bounced back (to me of course) almost by return mail. The result was known, as my advisor had suspected. I forgot about it until about ten years later when I accidentally discovered it in a journal, this time under his name.

107

With apologies to the good teachers in the world …

If you can you do, if you can’t you teach. Also, teaching was seen as something for single women to do in the absence of marriage for many many years. In many areas all one needed was any sort of a degree - HS jocks who got scholarships for athletics frequently ended up teaching phys ed because they were not good enough for an actual sporting career - one of the social studies teachers at my brothers school was mainly the football coach. Other than telling his students which chapters to read at home, he frequently showed films of the other school in the area playing football so he could see their formations and plays :dubious::rolleyes:

I got put into a catholic kindergarden when we got back to the US because I had been in a catholic day care and my mother and I loved it. In the US they would alternately tie my left hand behind my back or hit it to force me to write with my right hand. I would also get verbally abused because my handwriting sucked ass. It took getting a metacarpal broken to get removed from the school. In my parents defense, nobody really noticed because my Mom was hospitalized with pneumonia for 3 months and I was a pretty shy and retiring little girl and didn’t complain until my hand was the size of a baseball and purpling. Next run in with a bad teacher was in 4th grade - we changed towns and the math teacher started punishing me for refusing to do any work in class. [In many schools in the US the first month or so of school is all review from the previous year.] The issue was that in the new school, they had learned multiplication, division and fractions in third grade. In the old school they learned it in the 4th grade, so I had never even been exposed to it, let alone forgotten how to do it.:rolleyes: It was bad enough that it turned me off of math for years. We found me a good private school. Next problem was when the school I had been going to closed, so I was back in public school again - the math teacher broke his leg over the summer, so the head of the department took over his class. Mr Barrett was easily distracted and the guys in class found out he would blather on and on about physics [his normal thing] instead of what we were supposed to be doing. Almost every kid in that class flunked that year and ended up in summer school. That was the only class I have ever flunked in my life.:mad: Also that year I got accused of plagerising both a poem and a story for english class. Unfortunately I have a bad habit of writing without needing to do interminible versions.:rolleyes: So I ended up challenging her but forcing her to give me a subject for a short story and I would write the entire thing in front of her and the principal. It got entered into Oberlin’s [1970s] HS level fiction contest and taking a third. The $25 was sweet sweet revenge because she had to hand it out to me in front of the whole school at assembly :stuck_out_tongue:

Moot point now, but I vowed to NEVER put a kid of mine into a public school even if I had to prostitute myself.

108

I am an engineer and I don’t understand it

109

It was 1962, Miss Scott, a middle aged spinster of United Empire Loyalist stock in a southern Ontario town who played favorites against immigrant children. One day she called me forward to the front of the class whereupon she wound up and slapped me across my 11 year old face with a force that far exceeded anything I ever felt from my peers in school yard fights… I may have suffered a concussion for all I know.

The hatred in her eyes towards me then and her general contemptuous attitude towards me while clearly favouring others resulted in a school year of hell that I’ll never forget or ever forgive.

Miss Scott, if you are still alive, GO TO HELL!!!

110

I took a women’s studies course in college. (Pause, then laugh.) The instructor was all She-Wymyn Hear Me ROAR I hate MEN and my Vagina is teh AWESUM Like a NINJA ! 11 one.

I hated her. She hated me. I still think Women’s Studies is the stupidest thing ever. She was so horrible that I had to re-take the friggin class. She gave me a D because I wasn’t liberal enough. No, really - my ‘responses’ to the readings that we did 2x a week were always graded with notes like, “You’re not thinking this through enough” or outright disagreements with my ideas.

It didn’t help that she was a lesbian. I hated the term ‘Femi-Nazi’ up until that point. I thought the class would be interesting (though I took it because I needed another elective) but I had no idea it would be torture.

<shudder>

There was a polisci professor that also taught a Women in Politics course. She touched on most of the same topics but was actually an academic about it. I loved her.

111

I had a teacher that called me an idiot a few times, which I was particularly sensitive to because of my learning problems. There was another kid in the class that got it worse than I. She would call him “idiot” or “dummy” all the time. My dad went to a teacher/parent conference and said to her that he never wanted to hear that she had called me that again. If you knew my father, you would know that it was unlike him to do something like that. He was mad.

This teacher also was very sexist. She would say things about the male students that she would not have gotten away with if it was directed at females. She would always talk about how females were better/smarter than males.

112

I think I was the worst teacher ever for several students.

I was a Graduate Assistant (not a Teaching Assistant, I was supposed to help with grading, preparing slides and such, I was an MBA student, not a doctoral candidate) assigned to a professor who was denied tenure and was leaving to go to another school at the end of the semester. After a couple of sessions he asks me to cover a class for him. I had never taught before and I knew nothing about Commcercial Bank Management (I had my undergraduate degree overseas, our banking system was nothing like the US one). Okay, one class, I thought. How much damage could I do.

He never showed up again, except to administer the mid-term and final. I guess I should have complained to the department or something, but by the time I realized what was happening (his excuses got weaker and weaker and then just stopped) I was eight weeks from graduating myself and in no mood to rock the boat. I just took the transparencies to class, read them out aloud without editorializing. The students stopped asking questions when they realized I hadn’t even read the chapter I was presenting.

I am amazed that none of the students complained. But they were all graduating seniors, and I suppose they just wanted the easy A or B, and to get out of there.

Oh yeah, this was not some tin pot little school. It is consistently ranked in the top 50 national universities. And many programs are in the top 10.

113

As part of my college curriculum, I needed to take thermodynamics. Thermodynamics was taught by an older Swedish gentleman named Mr Blattner. Very early on, I was in his office to ask a question along with several other students, and was waiting patiently for my turn. On the wall was the professor’s college degree, written in incomprehensible Swedish. Jokingly, I turned to another waiting student, and remarked “For all we know, that certifies him as a garbage collector instead of an engineer.” We had a good laugh at that, not knowing what was in store that quarter.

See, this professor was an idiot. Not just incompetent, but fucking stupid. It wasn’t just that he taught from a series of index cards clutched in his hand. It was because whenever he flipped to the next card, he’d stop and stare at it, as if he’d never seen it before and was confused as to its contents. It was because he couldn’t convert units. If the known factors of a problem involved one unit of time, say, seconds, and the solution involved another units, say, hours, he didn’t know what to do. Literally, he couldn’t solve it.

My first clue to this little “problem” of his came shortly after this visit. The professor was doing a problem on the board. The problem had boiled down to:

7.2 kW/hr * t = 1.7 kW

He was trying to solve for t, and was stuck. He fussed for a bit and I finally raised my hand and said, “Excuse me, but if you multiply kilowatts per hour by hours, the hours will cancel out, so t must be in hours.” He looked at me, looked at the board, fidgeted, then said, “No, that’s not it,” erased the board, and went on to another problem. Like in a sitcom, I was still sitting there, hand pointing to the board, mouth open, as I thought, “He can’t be that fucking stupid.”

But he was. He simply could not convert units.

My fondest memory of that class was when he was doing a sample problem on the board in preparation for a test he was giving the next class session. He was working his way through the problem and got stuck. He stared, fussed, then went “Oh well” and erased the board and moved onto another problem. The student behind me said, with his hand raised (proper decorum is essential in a classroom), “Can we do that on a test? Just write, “Oh well,” and still get full credit?”

I don’t know what the professor’s response was – I was too busy eating my fist to stop from laughing out loud.

114

I once had a Spanish teacher that didn’t really speak Spanish. That was fun.

115

That’s funny. :smiley:

116

6th grade. I had this teacher who yelled and cussed at this students all the time. It was like we were intentionally doing something against his wishes when we walked into the room. He kicked trash cans, threw books, and cursed directly at the students.

8th grade. I was in a Montessori private school. We had 2 teachers. One of them would blatantly breastfeed her son WHILE TEACHING THE CLASS. As in, she would be up at the blackboard, talking, and then she would lift up her shirt and expose her breasts for all the students to see (grades 2-8 were in the same class.) The other teacher had a young son who was in day car across the hall, he would run into our classroom naked throwing objects at students in our class. This went on for over a year.

I recently had a networking teacher tell the class that the advantage of having raid 5 is that the drives are hot swappable, even when the computer is running.

117

I’ve had a couple teachers who were real characters. An English instructor in high school who seemed like he should be out of a TV show – a tall thin elderly man with a visible dent in his head, eye patch, missing fingers and walked down the hall swinging his cane in a wicked scythe to clear the student out of his way. He told stories of killing Nazis and breaking the fingers in some guy’s hand for pointing at him in a bar. But he seemed interested in actually teaching us, gave us bizarre yet creative writing assignments, discussed literature with us, etc. He was strange to us and scary to some but he wasn’t “bad”.

Those were the instructors like the Intro to Economics instructor who had only previously taught at a post-grad level and refused to “dumb it down” for those of us just trying to fill a freshman credit requirement. Or a creative writing/speech instructor, a young attractive woman big boobs and big blonde hair who I was originally happy to have as a teacher but who spent most of the semester talking about how former students keep asking her out and how she keeps getting hit on by her students when she’s in the college bars on the weekend. Very little actual education going on but luckily we ere there to keep her ego running large for those four months.

118

I had a college professor fail me because I wouldn’t be friends with her weird son. I had another who would spend hours of his time showing us how not to do math problems (i.e., the professor showed us the mistakes that people made on the type of problem, but never bothered to actually show us how to solve the damn thing.)

Other than that, I don’t remember them. I’m sure I had suck-ass teachers, but grade and high school was 30+ years ago - why would I care now?

119

Awa

120

Well, there was the one Lit. & Film teacher that I had senior year in college. He was well known for showing up drunk, hitting on all the females in the class, bullying everyone in the class (who took his crap. I didn’t so I was one of his “favorites”, I didn’t care he was a jerk).

He spent one entire class session basically BEGGING someone to go say something nice about him to the dean.

It was sad.