Teachers you still hate to this day

Trying to think of anyone I actively hated. Probably a gym coach or two but once I stopped having to do P.E. after tenth grade that was less of a worry.

I read that in the voice of Gayle Gordon, and also in the voice of Lucille Ball. I'm not sure which way is funnier to me.

Presented her with some story about cats, littered with spelling mistakes, but cut me some slack I was eight...

"Well Anna, Mrs Smith told me you were very bright, but frankly I think you're a bit of a drip."

I was eight! In a class with the school year above me! And no explanation of how I was wrong. I was just wrong. and stupid.

I hope the fucking bint self-googles.

* Tenth grade. Music class again - a different teacher this time, one who actually tried to tell me that rock'n'roll had no backbeat. "There's no accent on the two and four, what are you talking about?" I didn't take her seriously for the rest of the year.

I find music teachers in general to be insufferable twats.

(1) Told me I had no ability in English, and wrote poorly. (I'm working toward my PhD in English, I support myself as an occasional writer).

(2) Sent me to the office for 'passing commentary' on a televised reworking of Oedipus Rex. Note: 'passing commentary' involved saying "Hot!" when Oedipus's mom came onscreen... ONCE.

(3) After I got in a fight w. Jared W4ss3rm4an, Tom Andrew rolled his eyes and chuckled to himself.

(4) Was so - so - so - odious - Jon Williams and I (with our friends) used to do impressions of him, gradually remonikering him from TA to TB to Total Bastard to The Bastard. We'd do impressions of him with an index finger curled over our lip to imitate his neatly-trimmed, sand-colored mustache. IIRC correctly, he shaved oddly, and looked a little like a more-caucasian Hitler.

FUCK TOM ANDREW!

We'd do impressions of him with an index finger curled over our lip to imitate his neatly-trimmed, sand-colored mustache.
CLASSIC!

Mr Brown, simpleton design technology teacher who one can only assume is currently having hardened criminals slash away at his face with broken iron bars thanks to his "comfortable" manner amongst 13 year old schoolgirls. Used to think you couldn't be listening if you were holding a pen.

Later that year, he insisted I had to attend private tuition sessions with him to make up for classes I'd missed while on a 3 month student exchange. No *way* was I going to spend time alone with him, so I went straight to the guidance office. Luckily for me, they either knew of his dubious reputation or didn't think it sounded on, and I was exempted by the principal himself.

He's probably dead now.

http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg http://www.fun-shop.com/images/14wigs/212470.jpg

Anyway I protested and wouldn't sit down and he was trying to empty the rest of the exam hall, he freaked out and asked if I wanted to talk to the headmaster, and was quite surprised when I said yes I did, I wanted to complain to him about one of his staff.

The discussion went on for hours, with the headmaster, and I refused to apologise for saying Mr GERRY DELANEY (Hi you wizened deflated old cunt) had such an obvious distaste for young people that he shouldn't be a teacher.

Eventually when it transpired I had stayed longer than the allotted detention time arguing, they let me go. The headmaster came up to me the next day with a "sometimes the teacher is not always right, but misunderstandings occur and nobody wanted to cast aspersions on your character" etc etc.

So I guess I won as such but god that guy was a fucking dick. How many teachers are there out there who just point blank shouldn't be doing the job?

I guess all this is provokation but anyway one day he left the room to get something from the staff room and he'd left loads of figures on the board, like marking schemes. It was 15, then 17, then 19, one below the other adding up to 51 and then next to it a few different numbers then a few others next to that and a total again.

So I got up from my desk at the front and changed all the numbers which were being added to different ones. Anyway he came back in and the whole class is practically convulsing with laughter already and he thinks someone is doing something or there's some joke and cos he wants to be one of the boys he's pretending to laugh along.

So eventually he gets back to work and he starts adding them up and he's like, "so your total is 51, that's 13 plus 25 plus 32, erm...................hang on........" and the longest fucking silence ensued. He was just stuck staring at the board and I reckon everyone in the room has never laughed so hard in their lives and he's still like "what's so funny, shut up guys I'm trying to work this out".

-- Ronan--January 18th, 2003.

Seriously, though, if there was a thread about what other students we hated in high school, I could go the fuck off.

I think she also made me use one of those fucking stupid plastic slide-on triangles to "correct" the way I held my pencil - I'm right-handed, but I hold the thing like a leftie, and my penmanship is spot-on gorgeous (when I want it to), but I guess form trumps function, you crotchety arthritic bag of piss. (This might've been in a different elementary grade, though, so I'll just offer a fuck y'all to Grades 1 through 6 and be done w/ it.)

OH GOD LET'S NOT GO TO STUDENTS - mine would be a litany of Nerd Revenge type shit (except w/out the revenge).

Classmates you still hate to this day

My other German teacher Mr. Cunn1ngh@m was a bit of a prick too but now I think he was cool. D00d defected into East Germany

I received A's in every class I ever took in high school until this f*ckhead became too ill to teach and had a student teach the class. Nobody paid attention as she was a joke. He had the nerve to give me a D, cost me being valedictorian and almost caused me to not graduate. I was allowed to graduate with the class not counting.

He died within a few months of the episode. I would have been happier about his passing, but frankly I was just mystified and hurt by the whole experience and really wanted to ask him why he did it and why he chose to pick on me. Perhaps he was bitter from his impending death or had some misguided desire to leave me with a "lesson". I guess I'll never know.

My high school biology teacher was almost as bad, though. She had the idea (maybe rightly so) that students weren't really learning as much as they were completing assignments. To rectify this, she just stopped giving us crucial details and made instructions for labs more vague. You see, students will seek out the information and somehow apply it, even when it's not in the textbook and the teacher answers all questions by smiling and laughing. She also sent more people to the principal's office during high school than any other teacher.

This man was just an incomprehensible douchebag and I left his class ten minutes in, every single day, without fail, if I even showed up. I got an A in the course, because he WAS A TOTAL DOUCHEBAG who like gave extra credit to anyone who liberally referenced shamanism (you didn't have to be correct, or even explain what shamanism is).

And this woman who is quoted first in this article is the biggest bitch I have ever had to deal with in my life. She tried to get me failed out of the journalism department, fired one of my favorite teachers, and basically destroyed our newspaper. She lost her job as advisor and was remade into "spokesperson" for the college (her husband is the dean so you can't just fire the stupid cunt) after causing a huge problem during a sexual harrassment situation--she was hiding things to protect the dude involved, who was guilty as hell. She never wore a bra, though she should've, and thought of herself as being very, very, very sexy, and had no problem saying this, in class, regularly. Despite the fact that this wasn't even true. And that if it was true, there'd be no need to say it.

(the man quoted in the above article, OTOH, is an awesome teacher who I liked a lot and in a really weird twist of fate, was the manager of the store where my parents met, back in the 70s. How the world brings people back together etc etc)

The headmaster at the time, Paul Sheahan, deserves some derision as on multiple occasions when I wished to see him to complain about the aforementioned incidents, he was out playing golf! During school hours! The guy just didn't give a fuck.

Mr McCole was a terrible English teacher that I had in year 11 (and also the school vice-principal, I think). He'd been there for 50 years or something, having attended the school, gotten his Dip. Ed. and went on to teach there. I imagine that it was because of the hugely limited scope of his life experience that he was such an ignorant buffoon. He once took an amazingly formulaic and mediocre essay I wrote and read it out to the class as an example of the "perfect essay". He then started to give me C's for writing of a similar standard, because he thought I could do better. (How's that for mixed messages?) He also once insisted that "sarcasm is the most biting, clever form of witticism". Honestly. He didn't even know what it meant at all. He just thought "sarcasm" meant "really witty". He was completely unable to handle criticism of any kind, and I just couldn't stop correcting his ridiculous mistakes, so he pretty much despised me by the end of the year (which I was perfectly fine with).

Mr Richards was a maths teacher of mine, also in year 11. It was an accellerated class, we were doing year 12 coursework, so the class was full of maths nerds. Because I did not appear to be a nerd, this teacher would constantly pick on me as if I was the stupidest person in the room. When he'd filled up a whiteboard with stuff, he'd say "have you got all this Andrew?" and when I said "yes of course" he'd say "oh good well we can all move along then!" He did this routinely for about half a semester, when I finally exploded and yelled at him "Would you stop doing that please!? It makes it pretty fucking difficult for me to learn with you constantly insinuating that I'm some sort of idiot." He completely backed off and shrunk away after that, which was nice of him, but he still continued to believe he was hilarious.

He was a civics teacher. When I missed his class for school-sponsored activities like Academic Games or an engineering internship, he would demand that I come in an hour before school to make up quizzes and such. Then he wouldn't show up. Then he would say he couldn't pass me because I hadn't done the work. I had to have the principal intervene, which of course didn't make our relationship any better--he was also my baseball coach.

I heard that he was later fired for inappropriate behaviour with female students.

I still want to track him down and beat the shit out of him (even though he must be in his sixties by now).

senior AP government teacher - didn't like me because I argued in class and contradicted her, wouldn't clear me to graduate until the very last second (w/ a 71 for the semester even though my non-makework scores were A's), mailed her a copy of my AP score with the 5 highlighted

both sixth-grade teachers - my year at a private Christian school, one gave me detention because we were reading A Christmas Carol in class and I was so into it I didn't notice that she'd moved on and was asking me a question, the other spent a lot of time talking about how evil the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons were for no reason.

And umm, the all but dozen teachers I ever had that I actually liked.

He entered me for the wrong A-level (in the last 6 weeks of the course I had to paint on all the sculpture I had done and pass it off as "painting and drawing"), told me repeatedly from the first week, before handing in any work, that I would be getting a D (I got an A at gcse and my A-level work seemed good enough for the school when they wanted to show off what their art students could do), by the end of the course everything was so messed up for all sorts of reasons (that he was mainly responsible for) for that I finished the final exam in half a day, having done an entire one sheet of a2 for prep work the night before the exam. With my coursework being in the wrong category aswell, what I entered wasn't even worth an N, but I couldn't be arsed with any of it by then. Surprise surprise, he doesn't look at any of it and I end up with a D (much higher than it was worth).

There was a physics teacher I had for GCSE too, who I didn't hate exactly, not until I realised he would be responsible for me failing physics. I once had to explain to him why Neptune and Pluto weren't going to crash into one another as he claimed. He kept pointing at some solar system diagrams, talking as if I was stupid and showing me where the orbits cross. Trying to teach a physics teacher that the solar system is in fact 3 dimensional was much more difficult than you'd think. There was a test question he had the wrong answer for that involved getting the solar system diagrams out too, we had to name the nearest planet to Earth. In the news at the time there was something about either Mars or Venus being visible in the sky, making that one the most likely to be nearest. There was another planetary debate that followed, about how they don't all go around the sun in a straight line like in the picture, and that the planet he was claiming to be closest could be the other side of the sun at the moment whereas the one I claimed to be closest was near enough for us to be able to see it. Oh, and there was the time I asked him if he was sure he meant the 15th century, and not the 17th, which resulted in him writing out all the centuries on the board, "The 0 hundreds were the first century, the 1 hundreds were the second century", and so on. Being a slow writer this took him about 10 minutes. I know I was probably the dislikable smartarse of the class for correcting him all the time, but it got to the point where everyone else just wanted to pass this subject and loved any chance anyone got to point out he was an idiot.

Obviously that doesn't sound very horrific, and it wasn't, but it was irritating. This wasn't the hip cool teacher you wanted to hang out with for an hour -- in a building of windowless grey stone set into the side of a hill so that every floor was both a ground floor and a basement and the only kids who got any sun for six hours were the ones who had gym class that day, assuming it was spring and they had an outdoor unit -- this was like spending that hour with someone annoying enough and droning enough that after a few minutes on an elevator with them, they'd still be someone whose card you flipped to in the anecdote rolodex when the subject of annoying people came up ten years down the stretch.

And it's not like she was easygoing: she had my best friend suspended for tossing a piece of paper into the trash can without getting up and walking to it, and the hassle over that (he was suspended again for complaining to the principal that the suspension was bullshit) was probably the first straw on the camelback of his dropping out.

It was a small school; she was the only 7th grade science teacher.

Our final, which was all but a smidge of our grade, was multiple choice and "open book" (you could consult your textbook to decide which answer to pick), and after "preliminary grades" (she marked which ones were right or wrong), we could correct our answers -- you could train a dog to ace this test. Since the grades were so good, the school board -- for years on end, because there were complaints made against her when my foster brother, eight grades ahead of me, was in her class -- failed to override her tenure, which they needed a sizable majority (maybe unanimity) to do. She finally resigned -- the year after my class.

There was a minor irritation, too, when I was in "readiness" -- a sort of pre-first grade -- which was taught that year by a 6th grade teacher who switched jobs with the previous readiness teacher on a bet over whose job was harder. She had no idea how to handle small children; I have a vivid memory of frantically trying to help a friend of mine find his gloves because she'd taken the rest of the class out to the busses, turned out the lights, and left us in the classroom, and told him he wasn't allowed to leave until he found all of his things, had them on, and had his jacket zipped.

I had an art teacher in year 11 and 12, who was a devout Christian. On its own I'd no problems with that - at the time I was a churchgoer anyway - but she had this bizarre habit of imposing her morals on the class's art content. This meant a great painting my best friend did of the devil in a dance with a young girl around a globe shape (yr classic struggle with concience gothy teen girl kind of thing) "went missing" until after school ended, because she didn't approve of its content (!??!) She shoved it hidden in a cupboard so it couldnt get marked!

The same cow also let us all complete our year 12 major artworks, which we have from Feb til July to complete to then send to Sydney to be marked, and only once we'd all FINISHED did she decide to give us all a bitter lecture about how pathetic this years crop was and how disappointed she was in all of us.

To be honest she was right, but FFS YOU ARE A TEACHER, YOU DONT DO THAT SHIT.

That woman, Jenny George, went on to be the head of a major union in NSW. Amusing.

This was followed up by the same woman telling me that she'd "do everything in her power to make sure I never make it to college" after I idly mentioned that if I was going to have to take double phys. ed classes to graduate on time, I might as well go earn my GED instead.

some years later, though, i saw her on a daily show news segment about a group of retired senior citizens going to atlantic city to gamble. it made me feel good knowing that a significant chunk of the country was laughing at her. fucking cunt.

I had more good teachers than bad ones. Some who made a huge impact on me that I have been thinking a lot about lately - they were the reason I yam whats I yam.

Start a new thread.

However, three years into the profession and I'm coming up with a long list of students I loathe.

Time left for Sam in the hell, I mean "profession", known as teaching: 36 days.

(My cameo on ILx is proof that I have freelance work once again.)

Otherwise, shout-outs to Mr Hoare, my German teacher, who for two years gave us random magazine/newspaper extracts and asked us to translate them while he went off and bummed around in his office. He also had psychotic episodes. I still thought he was kind of cool in a mental way.

Then there was the French teacher with the ludicrous toupee who (rumour has it) kept a stash of Tahitian kiddie porn in his desk. He was a vile vile man, and acted like a pedophile in class, so I believe that rumour. Liked to give the kids 'pet names'. Creeeepy.

he's a lot bigger now and even the biggest assholes in this biggest of all of my asshole classes seemed intimidated when he showed up two weeks ago. But luckily, one day after he came back, he was put into permanent in-school suspension awaiting a hearing to send him to the district's alternative school. *phew* I was actually afraid when I saw his enrollment form in my box.

The difference between last year, when I had significant health problems, and this year, when I've got my shit together is amazing.

I CAN RIT GUD.

I just hope the copious notes I've kept up with in my blog can coalesce into a book which will embarrass the shitty school district I teach for. The bastards will regret making my life hell.

If it makes you any happier. I'm gonna go 'COMBAT TEACHING' at some inner-city dive when I move to Seattle or Philly or NYC in the next few years with my girlfriend (US Citizen, me Aussie), so it's all going to be suit, ties, conferences and free laptops.

ah, shit.

xpost

ahah, gotcha. I did get a free laptop from my school. but that really hasn't made up for my car windows being shot out while parked in front of the school, being physically threatened and sexually harrassed by students, etc, etc.

Now if it had been an iBook. . .

i can't think of any high school teacher i hate to this day -- i really hated the computer literacy teacher but one of my classmates developed such a wicked imitation of her she became an object of humor instead of rage. which is much more pleasant. laughing about something ten years later seems to be so much more acceptable than still wishing death on someone.

The latter was the head football coach and I had him for honors junior english. I think he thought I had developed a bit too much of esteem for acadmemic abilities (probably had) and that the rest of the faculty adored me too much b/c he seemed determined to take me down a peg. Most of this stays in the foggy background of my mind as I had bigger fish to fry that year. He softened towards me in the spring semester after I wrote a paper describing how I ran away from my alcoholic mother's home, taking my little brother with me. He came to me during lunch and asked, "Was that story you wrote true?" I told him it was and he said nothing else. Like I said his issues with me were the least of my worries at the time so I can't really say I hated him.

As a teacher though, I've become so much more forgiving. It's such a difficult job and we are all such fallable human beings. True, some people simply should not be in the profession and I suppose the mark of good character is being able to recognize that and exit. But I also feel that behind every horrible teacher story there's a just a tragic human story and I forgive. Every student I've had who has hated me (and I'm quite comfortable saying they are outnumbered by those who have loved me) should live a week in my shoes and I have no doubt their minds would be changed.

I had a history teacher in HS who was a wonderful historian, had travelled a lot, seen loads of ancient places, had slides of it, great knowledge etc.. but he was a terrible teacher when it came to discipline. I'll never forget seeing another class he had, where half the kids were running out of the classroom laughing, mid class, with him chasing them bellowing COME BACK HERE YOU LOT!

Some poor woman here recently was fired for supposed incompetance, because they had security cams in the labs, and the principal used this to have her fired for being crap. I dont know if I like that precendent! We just had to put up with our bad teech's.

ah, yooof....

This is not something that is effectively taught during teacher training. Perhaps it can't be. I think this reality of the job catches new teachers so off-guard that it alone can explain the dangerous turnover the profession has in the US.

At this point this job has killed me. It has almost completely destroyed my soul. And it's a shame b/c I've wanted to teach since I was five years old. My last day is March 25th.

I figure in the meantime if there's any lasting knowledge I can leave my students with (besides the difference between a verb and a noun) is that 1. you have to be responsible for yourself or you're shit out of luck and 2. everybody makes mistakes. It's how they deal with them that separates the wheat from the chaff.

I only have probationary certification. Due to illness, administrators giving unfair reviews that I only found out after the fact could have been appealed and overturned by my union and my inability to afford 3 more graduate hours I've yet to attain "permanent" certification. You can only teach on a probationary certificate for three years in Texas within your entire lifetime. This is my third year. Time's up.

I don't believe in private schools so if I wanted to try teaching again I'd have to move out of Texas and start over. And for what it's worth I only ever wanted to teach in "tough" inner-city schools. Well, like I told our Kangol-wearing athletic director (and my surrogate father) last week, I sure as hell got what I was looking for with this school.

After I've taken some time to recover and worked some "soft" jobs like graphic design again I think I'd like to go back to school to become a licensend therapist and work with teenagers. But just one at a time. And no teaching them how to be good writers. I'm done with grammar and shit. ;)

i have a whole 'nother level of hatred for this man (scroll down to the last news item) (i had him for a semester as a gym teacher)

There was one of my grade school P.E. coaches, who never EVER helped out ANYONE when it came to actually learning how to play sports, not even so much as a hint or suggestion as to how to hold the ball, when the majority of us were pretty green to the whole subject of sports-playing. She spent hours upon hours testing us on rules, regulations, technical terms, etc., but not a single moment demonstrating what a "dribble" or a "throw" was supposed to look like (and we were, like, five years old). She really made it difficult for me to like physical activity for the whole of my existence.

Then there was my very creepy and slightly lecherous seventh grade social studies teacher, who was VERY TMI in regards to his origins (this was a GROWN MAN telling a class full of twelve-year-olds how he was the product of an affair and how could this rigid German colonel resist a busty Austrian maid anyway? [I am not making that up]) and who not-quite-subtly flirted with every single one of us females in that class. Yech. (This guy looked about 38, was rotund and balding and wore thick glasses.)

Then there was my geometry teacher, who chose not to teach us anything since she thought that honors = "I can take another break" and just left us with an example from the book on the board and a list of problems to solve before the end of class. That class dragged down all of our GPAs because we were struggling so hard to try to make sense of geometry on our own that some of our other courses were left by the wayside, especially biology, which was taught by a very capable individual but, by God, you need the proper amount of attention to be paid toward biology and without it, you're pretty much lost.

All of the above I will be willing to forget in the future (even the seventh grade teacher, because hey, it was a SHARED misery). The one I will never ever forgive or forget as long as I live is this one teacher I had in high school chemistry class, who BLATANTLY played favorites in class; if you were one of her darlings, she would be GOLD to you, but if you weren't in that exclusive list, she was more than able to make your life in her classroom a living hell, and even though I experienced some of that favoritism, I still felt it highly unfair and inappropriate and I will never be able to forgive her for doing that, for taking away others' rights to be treated decently and with respect in class when these others weren't doing anything to deserve the callousness she was exhibiting toward them. The funny thing is that she was supposed to be a NUN, a woman who was following a higher calling and who was, as a result, supposed to live under a higher moral code than most. She sure didn't act very Christ-centered in my eyes.

Thanks to Dubya and his "no child left behind act" I literally have my lesson plans dictated to me from the district. I teach test prep, not English. Last year I made the mistake of reading a novel with my seventh graders instead of doing test drills everyday. The principal walked in and asked "what are you doing?" We were all sitting with copies of "Where the Red Fern Grows" open in front of our faces so I thought, you know, it was pretty obvious. He proceeded to bawl me out, in front of the kids, for having the audicity to read a book when we had a state standarized test coming up in a few months.

This week I assigned my eighth graders to memorize either "I Have a Dream" or the "Gettysburg Address" b/c fuck it, it's Black History month and I still remember the speeches and Shakespeare solilquies I had to memorize in school. It's nowhere in our mandated curriculum but fuck 'em. What are they going to do? Fire me? hahaha

Remember, I'm basically a socialist. The best schools in Assassination City are private: two secular and one very elite girls' Catholic. It's the height of unfairness to me that some children should be given a better education and more opportunites in life just b/c their parents make more money. For me, that schism (sp?) is at the root of all that's wrong with America.

The world of education will lose a little more of its luster when you get out of it.

Also -- I get you completely now. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. The PRIVATE "private" schools do seem to nourish this gigantic schism (yeah, that's the correct spelling, and good word choice too!) in educational quality.

We had to share textbooks in my school classes sometimes. Our clases were mega crowded. Our facilities were shit. We had nowhere good to hang out in winter except outside. No indoors rec shelters at all (no dining hall etc). No computers.

(And yeah, Dallas is pretty well known for having this major socioeconomic inequality. Well, maybe not to the point where it's a claim to fame or anything, but, yeah, I couldn't name a single Catholic school in Dallas that would be similar to any I attended, for example. And I'm sure a high school akin to the one I graduated from, a centrally-located magnet Catholic HS which included students from all over the city, from those girls whose families took regular skiing vacations in the winter to those girls whose families struggled to pay the electrical bill, would not be found in Assassination City.)

(Trayce, I am in total agreement with you. And we would've been similarly deprived were it not for the fact that the computers we had were donated to us by a lovely corporate benefactor, and it took the school a decade to raise the funds to build and open the gym we had.)

Still...

Oh, and nearly forgot to shriek this out -- SAM, YOU'RE BACK!! *huge hug*

Some private schools are pretty ace. Mine is most certainly not-elite, very low fees, taking in troubled kids. It's lutheran, but they are very laidback about it. Nuts about welfare, social justice.

And a lot of the kids have last names like Schloogeldorpschulz and Katzenjammerhoffer.

I sound fawning, but it's totally restored my faith in private education.

Iuth3r c0ll3g3 is the only one in victoria.

...and to her I say, Fuck you, Bitch!

That teacher's now the headmaster of another local school, which was in the news a year or so ago when one of its students stabbed another to death in a school corridor.

I did have plenty of teachers who were just idiots, but not vindictive idiots. Prime example: the French teacher who said "Did anyone watch that TV programme about the Channel Tunnel last night?" (this was the early 90s, when it was being built) "I was amazed that they were digging through the rock! I thought it would have been much easier to dig through the water instead." When we had German exchange students over, she got the chance to use her one phrase of German: "Sprechen Sie Franzoesich?" and was completely baffled and out-of-her-depth when they answered with "Ein bischen" ('a little').

Another good example of idiotry was the Home Economics teacher who insisted to me that dandruff is purely caused by people not washing shampoo out of their hair properly. As I've always been a chronic psoriasis sufferer, I wasn't very amused.

It's not that I didn't have any rubbish teachers (I certainly did, though in general they were outweighed by the good effects of the good one) but that it was all just so long ago that I don't really remember it.

It's weird because I carry lots of grudges in my life for a long time. But a grudge against a teacher just seems so pointless. Out of my life a long time ago, and never looked back.

I guess that's the good thing about going to 14 schools in 12 years. I just viewed bad teachers as something very transitory.

everyone involved in my suspension from high school, 1992: for a fanzine with illicit jokes inside. we did it in resonse to the official sixth form magazine, which included a bunch of racist jokes. i wrote the poems. we all got suspended. it was all very corrupt. the headmaster said, in a record that went on my permanent record, that if the police had seen the fanzine we would have been arrested for indecency. my cousin, a policeman, then sent a reply, also on my permanent record, that this was codswallop, and the police would probably chide the headmaster for wasting their time. i am writing a short story on this whole incident at the moment.

I definitely want to continue studying education and how it can be fixed over here. But that's proven impossible for me to do while I'm in the foxhole so to speak.

off period. heaven. off to enter grades now, made easy by the large number of my students who fail.

a) asking each individual class member what we prayed about. Was finally shut down by a girl who said "Don't you think that's awfully personal?"

b) spending a whole class explaining that an act of charity performed by a Christian was better than that of a non-Christian, "because God is involved".

c) telling me that "I don't have one" was "not an erudite response" to the question "What is your favorite Bible story?"

It was a Catholic high school, so I guess this stuff was par for the course, but I had just parachuted in from another town and really wasn't used to this kind of thing.

J0hns0n - English teacher, wore lemon and pink Pringle tops and had one of those fucking horrible moustaches Jeremy posted. Gave me 51% in a prelim (mock) exam and told me I was wasting his time and mine in his class as I was going backwards and destined to fail. I got an A: so get it right up you you arsehole. INTROSPECTION AND PROCRASTINATION, INTROSPECTION AND PROCRASTINATION, INTROSPECTION AND PROCRASTINATION, INTROSPECTION AND PROCRASTINATION, INTROSPECTION AND PROCRASTINATION. So you read the Bluffers Guide To Hamlet you cnut now WHAT THE FUCK ELSE DO YOU KNOW?

Oh, and I'm old enough to have been belted at school, up until I was 12, so add on all the wankers who belted me for next to nothing and took sadistic pleasure in it.

Hell up until last year kids got whooped here with big wooden paddles on a regular basis.

Was suspended without pay for showing the Nicholas Berg beheading video in his class.

If anyone ever slipped up and called her "Mrs. Clarke", she would scream: "Mrs. Clarke was my mother - and she's dead!" We were 12 and 13 year-old kids. I was a bit of a smart-ass in her class, and made a point of letting her know how easy I thought everything was, but one day she kept me after class, closed the door and really let go. She said several things that an adult "professional" should never say to a child. Her dislike for me was deeply personal. She later tried to screw me over on a major project because I missed a presentation in her class one day. The V.P. overruled her however, since I was away at a school sanctioned debating competition. That didn't make her happy at all, and just made things tougher for me in her class. She was a really sad, and bitter woman (bad divorce), and I learned from other teachers that she wasn't very popular in the staffroom either.

2) Elementary school Vice Principal - Mr. Mapstone

If teachers had still been allowed to hit students, he would have been the guy beating the shit out of kids, with a hard-on. 20 years after the fact, I have yet to come across another "adult", who enjoyed scaring little children as much as this fuckwit did. To make matters worse, he was missing parts of 2 fingers on one hand, and would make a point of rapping them on his desk whenever you were sent down to his office. Another favourite trick of his was to slam down a big binder on his desk and tell you that it contained your "permanent record", and that basically you had no chance of getting into a good high school, university, and really no chance at a decent future at all, because you rubbed snow in some kid's face.

Mrs Sherman...math teacher junior year in high school. Fucking woman never left the 70's, feathered haircut, god awful outfits. Looked like a stank ass porno star. fucking bitch.
-- Big Baby Bingo (cmvenuti200...) (webmail), February 16th, 2005 8:12 AM. (Chris V)

1. High school math teacher who, when asked about the reasoning behind some formula in calculus, said "I don't know, I never really wondered." It was a moment of epiphany: so that's why I always hated math in high school.

2. English teacher who one day sent all the males out of the classroom in order to tell the girls that her husband told her when they married not to wear revealing clothes because "it's distracting to guys, they just can't help themselves, we have to help them by not tempting them." Also considered Jesus Christ Superstar heretical, because "it says NOWHERE in the Bible that Jesus had an affair with Mary Magdelene!" Actually it says it nowhere in the script either, which I think is catchy and theologically insightful :P

I had to delete #3 after I realized that I gave him as much of a hard time as he gave me, and then he quit teaching, so the nice thing to do would not be to tear him apart on a messageboard.

We had a Secret Santa-type gift exchange thing throughout the year. I busted my ass trying to find the most fun and cool stuff I could. For the final exchange I went all out and spent days making a funny and very elaborate fake biographical scrapbook for the kid whose name I had. I put my heart into it and ending up loving it so much that it was hard to give it away. I did, though, and when I gave him the present, Mrs. Williams chewed me out in front of the entire class for not spending any money. My Secret Santa- who turned out to be one of the popular girls- got me a pair of tickets to an amusement park, which would have been nice except she made a point of announcing, in front of everyone, that she had gotten them for free. Mrs. Williams fussed about what a wonderful present that was, and how I should feel lucky.

The entire year was like that...

Seriously, though, if there was a thread about what other students we hated in high school, I could go the fuck off.

-- Riot Gear! (speed.to.roa...), February 16th, 2005.

otm

She never lectured to us on the subject she was supposed to be teaching. Instead, she blathered on about how "people without religion really can't have morals" and "I'm not voting for John Kerry because his wife is a real bitch" and "okay guys today I'm going to talk to you about men who prostitute their one-year-old children because it's a really important issue that you guys have to know about" blah blah blah. She also made cruel cracks about students, trying to be "funny" but really just being a bitch.

This past summer she hosted a backpacking trip across Europe, and a couple of my friends went along (I didn't because I don't feel safe being on the same continent as her). Apparently there was a mix-up where their tour guide had told the students to meet back at a specific location, and the teacher expected them to be somewhere else. So she blew up at all her students for "not meeting back at the bus," then blew up at the tour guide for "challenging her ultimate authority," and fined all the students who were "late" 20 Euros. When they got to the hotel one of my friends started arguing with her (after the other students had gone inside), so she started making fun of his girlfriend (calling her "skanky") and his mom (for crying at the airport). My friend got mad and called her a stupid motherfucker. She slapped him hard across the face and slammed him against the wall with her hands around his neck and started yelling at him, then called his mom to tell her what her son had said (not explaining what provoked him). Later, one of his female friends cried when she found out what happened. The teacher stormed into her room and yelled at her for crying, then called her a "spineless bitch" for not fighting back.

There's more to the story (a bunch of students got stranded without a hotel room in an expensive urban area of Spain) but I don't feel like writing more. The point is, the students reported her to the administration and she resigned. What a bitch.

But someone already did!

I do remember in primary school getting a report from a teacher who I adored that said I talked too much and disrupted the other students, because I was too far ahead of them (not genius level or anything, but I was pretty good at some things), and so I should be sent to a school that had a more disciplined outlook, where I might learn to keep quiet. Excellent reasoning, bucko.

My best teacher, though, was the maths teacher we had up to our inter cert (age 12-15). We finished the maths curriculum one year with about four weeks to spare, so she decided we would enter a competition to complete an environmental project for our school. She suggested we should learn about bees and build a bee garden in the grounds of the school. It was an incredibly smart idea - a single large project that could be worked on by academic types and non-academic types with exactly the same levels of satisfaction. And I got to go on a week-long bee-keeping course, and we won a prize. Sadly we were never allowed to actually build a hive in the school grounds, but it was always nice to see the plants there.

She resigned? Why didn't she get fired?

We had a substitute teacher once who got so annoyed when all the kids just got up to leave when the bell rang (all that "I dismiss the class! The bell does not dismiss the class!" rubbish) that she locked them in to the classroom for the whole of their twenty minute break. One of the kids told her dad, who was the head of the local fire department. He arrived down to the school next day, in the fire engine, in full uniform, and gave this teacher a lecture in front of all her colleagues in the staff room.

My god, it's like Todd Flanders all grown up.

I don't know what this means.

Hmm...I admit I'd be entertained if you could provide a news link anywhere (if there is one). But I understand if you'd prefer not to.

the only upside to this was that my family was so infuriated about how my teacher had behaved that for the entire rest of my school career whenever i got bad grades or got in trouble their instant response was "what the hell is wrong with those teachers?"

there are pictures of some of them on the school website, i see. i'm not hotlinking directly, for obvious reasons, but i might nab a couple and post them up here soon. heh.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...) (webmail), August 27th, 2006 1:14 PM. (Ned) (link)

I'm pretty sure there's not one. I got my story straight from the source (i.e. hearsay).

But someone already did!

No, that's classmates you hate. I mean students as in little fuckers I taught.

Guidance/career counselors are the ones that earned the hate, frankly.

corrupt? how?

He was also completely unqualified to be teaching that class. Half the people didn't even bother to take the test because they felt underprepared and didn't want to spend the money/time. I got a 5 on the final exam despite his best efforts. And I got no congratulations from the man for this.

A couple years later, long after graduation, I ran into him randomly. I was wearing an army surplus jacket I had picked up in my pursuit of looking like a miscreant. He asked me if I had joined the army. When I said "no" he remarked that I should have, because I needed to straighten out my life.

I hope to run into him again someday, so I can use some of the choice quips I've come up with since, including "how's your hair loss going?" and "still just an underqualified English teacher, eh?" The man couldn't write his way out of a paper bag.

Kindergarten: I peed my pants on the first day of class because she wouldn't let us leave our seats. She then called my parents and told them I was trying to get attention by doing this! My parents, being idiots, punished me for it.

My fourth grade teacher was so BORING I pulled my baby teeth out for an excuse to leave class for a little while. Refused to let me even take the test to enter the gifted/talented program so I could escape her.

Sixth grade math teacher: used to step on kids' toes with his fucking cowboy boot heel if we put our feet out from under the desk. Was also a belligerent asshole.

Seventh grade reading teacher: a class I didn't need to be in anyway, I'd read fucking Wuthering Heights in fourth grade & was a pretty advanced reader. But I was really into books of trivia/Mysteries of the Unexplained/horror stories collections at the time and brought those to read in class. Mrs. Heier told me to read "longer stuff with actual content," so I brought in novels, etc. She signed my yearbook with "I am glad I could introduce you to the world of chapter books." Fuck her for even thinking she had any influence in that, stupid bitch.

Tenth-grade health teacher: I got this bitch fired for reasons too painful to discuss here. But I will say she passed urban legends of as fact all the time, which pissed me off to no end. When I brought in materials to disprove her, our vicious cycle started.

Eleventh grade economics teacher: We learned no economics from this Ken-doll/Wham-looking football coach, except the one day we played "communist Monopoly" wherein we didn't even play the game, we just divided all the money evenly & quit, WTF. What we did in the class, is he'd put an inane motivational football coach Anthony Robbins-style quote on the board and ask us to write journal responses back. He hated mine until I just wrote other inspirational quotes as responses, which really impressed him.

So, my math teacher - Ms. Zambetti/Mrs. Martin refused to let me take pre-algebra the following year, despite a score on the placement test of 47/50, b/c she didn't think I was mature enough to handle the class. This put me behind in math, leaving bored and subjected to sub-par instruction and classmates.

It sounds like I'm being a bit snobbish here, but the bitch seriously put up a huge mental block for me w/r/t math.

Other than her, there are your normal bitter/stressed/under-qualified teachers to speak of. All of the pain I may have caused them had penance paid for it when I taught for two years. I feel not one iota of guilt for anything I did in a classroom anymore.

I will say, however, that I can point to Ms. Coombs, the music teacher in my middle school, for making the biggest single-handed mistake in my education: I was not allowed to participate in choir in fifth grade and was left with the impression that I simply couldn't sing. And I didn't for years and years, and the whole time silently resented those around me who were able to have this fun that wasn't permitted me. (And, to tell the truth, I still don't sing, really.)