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What’s that got to do with being a PhysEd teacher who actually teaches rather than one who abuses students verbally and physically and who tests for things she has not taught?
And PhysEd was supposed to be good for kid’s health (dunnow about self-regard) since before the Romans taught Latin to all their neighbors.
The first day of freshman Calculus at university my professor walked onto the stage and addressed the packed lecture hall, “My name is Professor A and I haven’t had to teach freshman calculus in 17 years.”
Throughout the rest of the semester he proved in every way possible why he was so rarely called upon to teach an intro level course. He skipped steps that seemed obvious to him but were not apparent to us. He refused to answer questions. He was as uninterested as could be in our learning.
I once had a French teacher who spoke Spanish. I learned enough to write “This exam makes me shite” in French on the back of the final exam.
Maybe that’s why I passed the course.
For some reason the good teachers stand out in my memory. The uninspired/cranky ones, much less so.
We had a fifth grade homeroom and French teacher, Miss Torres, a little dictator who had me, my siblings and apparently the vast majority of her students on her shit list. One of her nicknames was “Torres the Bull” (for you zodiac fans).
My worst wasn’t even a teacher but the school nurse in 3rd grade. I fell off the teeter-totter during morning recess and we had two kids on each side and the other girl landed on my arm.
I went to the nurse and she was convinced I was just malingering. She sent me back to class and before lunch my teacher sent me back to her. She refused to call my parents and made me sit in a chair in front of the principals office the rest of the day.
At dismissal time she decided she needed to speak to my parents, wouldn’t let me get on the bus and kept me there another hour until she reached my mother and she arrived to pick me up. She then outright lied to my mother, telling her I was lying to get out of a test and that they shouldn’t pay any attention to me complaining about the pain.
The next morning when I was still complaining they finally took me to the hospital where I ended up in a cast from above the elbow to my fingertips and my parents got a lecture about paying attention and that delay in medical attention could have required surgery.
After my parents got through with her she hated me and I was terrified of getting sick at school for the next 3 years. Apparently it was all my fault that her reputation was ruined and I somehow fooled the doctor and the xray machine just to spite her.
My worst teacher in high school was my favorite. He was a part time English teacher, part time used car salesman and it was criminally easy to get him off topic. I was a pretty good student but I hated the whole “figure out what Shakespeare meant when he wrote” curriculum. As a result I took great joy in distracting him. A comment about McDonalds was good for a half period rant on why his kids preferred a takeout burger to his lovingly created backyard BBQ’d burgers. Someone in class getting a new car was good for a full period distraction although usually over a couple of days. A car issue could get you 20 mins or so. My grades in his class were not stellar but adequate and I enjoyed the year a lot more than I would have trying to attribute modern attitudes to a poor guy who just wanted to entertain people and get paid for it.
Mrs. Can’t-Remember-Her-Name
12th grade probability and statistics. For those who don’t know, this is the math course where you forget everything you’ve BEEN learning, and learn new stuff.
What made her bad, was not any overt bad actions - but her total apathy for OUR total apathy. At one point, I picked my head up to find all but 5 students (in a class of 30) sleeping, heads down. She was proceeding as normal, without even mentioning it. Guess you can’t fault her, but she could have at least said something…like “Hey kids, wake up or get out of class”?
Grade 1 - Mrs. Robinson
This bint stole from me all year. I brought in a variety of cool sciencey-type toys throughout the year. Admittedly, against the rules, but just a 5 year old kid exploring his world…
x-ray glasses from a cereal box…confiscated.
microscope from a christmas present…confiscated.
cool little magnets…confiscated.
See, I think if it had been returned at the end of the year, I wouldn’t be upset. But I think she just kept them and gave them to her own kids. Also, this is the teacher who sent me to the principal’s office every single day. Literally. If I so much as spoke, principals office. If I gave an indication that I was bored reading the 1st grade books (because I had to put down my copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to read “Spot Runs Fast”), principals office. If I laughed too loud, principal’s office.
I actually got to know the principal better than the teacher, and he helped me with my classwork.
Rant Mode: Engaged!
Nearly all of my teachers were wonderful. There were two that had no business teaching anything or even being near children.
3rd Grade: Mrs Allard, the Witch. She made it her job to make my life miserable, and she succeeded magnificently. It got to the point where I tried getting to stay home sick from school daily. She openly poked fun at me every chance she got. She never stopped the other kids from doing so (I never had bullying problems until her class, which then persisted through high-school graduation).
She had this system of “Responsibility Tokens”, where we had an allotment of wooden coins with an R printed on them. Whenever a student had a messy desk, or forgot a homework assignment, or acted up in class, we had to relinquish a coin. If you ran out of coins, you stayed inside for recess until you acquired more coins. (This was the only fair part about her, everyone get a certain same number of coins each week). I remember one time I was running low on coins, so I kept my desk tidy, kept up with my homework, paid attention, etc. She decided to do a clean desk inspection, walked up to me and held out her hand for a coin. She never even bothered to look in my desk. I said “No, I have a clean desk”. She looked inside, told me to stand up and away from the desk. She then proceeded to knock the desk over so all my stuff was on the floor, and then demanded I hand over an R because “Look at this mess you made!” Not wanting to start a fight because she mentally beat defending myself out of me early on, I just relented and gave her the coin, crying because the class bullies were laughing at me.
Over time I started using her tricks against her. She would often call on kids to answer questions about the lesson spontaneously, especially if they looked like they weren’t paying attention. Not to pat myself on the back, but I was a book smart cookie, and could complete the worksheets or whatever she had ahead on her lecturing. I would then appear as if I wasn’t paying attention, get called on, and then snidely give her the correct answer.
I think one of my more outspoken friends eventually came to my defense at some point because one day she just changed. She no longer picked on me and seemed to be rather civil to me. The friend didn’t confront her directly, but I think some parents got involved somehow. Too little to late for me. I hope this woman is burning or rotting in whatever horrible, negative afterlife she believed in.
Then in high school, there was Mr. Fox. He wasn’t a bad guy, he just couldn’t teach math to save his life. Every class was the same: I’m going to tell everyone about my family life while going over the homework I assigned to you as the bell was ringing. Very rarely did he actually teach how to math something out (which those days were thankfully without talk of his kids). My group of friends actually used to joke that we would test better about his life than his math. The whole thing came to a head years later when we had him again for Algebra-2, when his same teaching style suddenly meant most of us couldn’t deal with the more complex formulas and such. He handed us the same test 7 freaking times and getting progressively more pissed as the entire class kept failing it. We survived somehow, passing and such. But goddamn, thankfully he’s retired. (And if Mr. Fox is actually reading this, you aren’t a bad guy.)
Some kind of zombie resurrection code? 
Most of my teachers were pretty good and any of the ones I didn’t like really aren’t worth mentioning. I’ll make a couple of exceptions.
In 7th grade our normal band teacher Mr. T made some kind of deal with the teacher the next town over, Mr. Keys, so Keys taught summer band for our school as well as his. There was no AC and little air flow in the room so it was freaking hot but he had the fan pointed directly at himself so he would be the only one who would benefit from the air circulation. He also sucked down cans of Pepsi the whole time in front of everyone and generally berated us and compared us unfavorably to his normal students. My dad was in the hospital at the time and my mom was spending just about all of her time there, so my sister and I quit showing up to band. I think mom knew something was up but didn’t care because she was the gym teacher in that next town over and would talk about how he would come into her gymnasium and tell her how she’s teaching basketball wrong and how it should actually be taught.
My junior year in college and I took an Interpersonal Communications class. Lovely Linda, as she referred to herself, came in on the first day of class and made us all very aware that we would not get an A in her class and that males were horrible personal communicators and were awful, nasty no-goodses who will get bad grades. This class had over 20 guys and two women in it, one of whom dropped the class after the first week. We started out sitting in a circle so we could all interpersonally communicate, but Lovely Linda didn’t really foster us along very well and eventually moved us all into rows. She then spent the next several weeks berating us for being unable to interpersonally communicate in her class and how she had to put us in rows. She also started a fight with the instructor next door because his video was playing too loudly while we were taking a test (I had a class with him right after hers and he quietly mentioned his disdain for her a few times). She also lived in St. Louis and worked at Eastern Illinois University, so she had a 3 hour commute to work so she only worked Tuesday through Thursday and stayed locally with someone who allegedly wanted to kick her out. I got decent grades on my assignments but I think my final grade was a C- or D because of “participation.” I know a lot of fellow students who went to the dean to protest their grades but I was just glad to be over with it myself. Looking back, I should have protested mine as well, if for no other reason than to be a nuisance to her.
Mrs. Belden, my seventh-grade art teacher, was the worst. Had class favorites. And a snotty attitude about art, making derisive comments about student art subject choices.
One got the feeling she felt stuck in a job teaching art to kids in junior high, and that she felt she deserved better.
I totally missed that this was a zombie - but it’s a worthwhile one at least.
Or, maybe **christianblueeyes **was lamenting the ineffectual teaching of her robot overlord masters…