Your Worst Teacher

In my high school the math teachers were good but freaky, the English teachers couldn't control their classes . . . and the social studies teachers were coaches.

Mr. (John) Lukacs was not only my Civics teacher in ninth grade, he was also the junior varsity baseball coach and I was his best player. Also he was . . . florid . . . and wore an obvious wig. After I missed a test because I was doing a scholastic games thing, he made me come in an hour before school, then failed to show up and refused to let me take the test. I had to appeal to the principal, who pretty frankly told me that some of my teachers were stupid assholes.

After I graduated, he was fired for *something* involving a female student. And now, iirc, he's dead. Which is good. fuck you Mr. Lukasss

8th grade US history, can't remember his name, he was a super-right wing guy who had retired as a cop and decided to become a teacher. Said all kinds of offensive shit about women voting, had a some weird flashback when a wasp got in the temporary building where we had class, trapped it and then cut it up with a knife.

Was also dumb as a board and got basic facts wrong, would flip out if corrected.

I had an English teacher who had been so traumatized by a movie she never went to see one again and told us about this constantly. I finally learned it was Midnight Express. What a dummy.

When I hit my harassers, she made me feel like it was my fault. I remember being called an overachiever but joke’s on her, I never was then and I’m sure not now!

This thread unsettles me.

aww

Calculus teacher in community college. Stephen Miller looking bastard. Really into talking about how he does martial arts. Seemed to be periodically trying out his stand up routine during lectures?? Patronizing and intimidating too. Great guy.

lol if he’s reading this, he did have opinions on music!

xxxp tbf in my term at a canadian university, my american prof was easily the worst

later, when i worked in bookstores, i would immediately return his books to the publisher

My worst teacher was my 7th grade teacher in an elementary school set up as K-8, not a middle school or a jr. high. This meant his class spent almost the entire day under his supervision. He hardly knew how to teach anything at all and got zero respect from his students, including me... who liked school and whose parents were both public school teachers!

The worst thing he ever did to me was one day when the class was restless and trying to get rowdy. He started lecturing us about what bad unruly students we were, then out of the blue he said, "why can't you all be like [Aimless]? He's always so well behaved and he never causes any problems." As the youngest kid in my grade and a socially struggling 12 year old among mostly 13 year olds I had to spend the next week furiously mending fences with all my classmates, hoping to wash the stink of his public approval off me.

Fuck you, Mr. Sullivan. He did me dirt like no other teacher before or since.

Mr Frasier, 9th grade summer school History teacher.

One of the worst summers as a teen. He wasn't a full time teacher. He was a sub that they entrusted to teach a class in summer school.

He had no clue about History. I was only in the class cos the theatre summer stock program filled up (stfu). (I also had gotten ny first ever D in a semester in high school and I spent three months lying to my mother about it, including telling her I dropped my report card in the toilet.)

Half the days, he put on movies related to History or politics (sort of - one day we watched Tommy Boy). We didn't learn anything. We didn't do assignments. Half of each class was trying to prevent students from beating each other's asses cos he had no sense of discipline.

Two days in, a nerdy kid got his ass beat in the room by one of the alpha males. Not only did he intervene five minutes too late (the other kids did more to stop the alpha from ripping him apart). The kid had been defending himself against harassment, the cool kids took the alpha's side, so naive Fraser bought that as the narrative, ensuring that kid got suspended (the alpha got to stay in class).

I got my share of abuse, things like people saying I won Gold at the Special Olympics, one of the girls writing me an obvious fake love letter but lamenting that I was already taken because I was "gay with Brian" (my friend, also in class). But I avoided the worst by just keeping my mouth shut.

Frasier eventually got narced by a student for us not learning anything (actually the rumor was the nerd who got beat up told his mother, which is why he was getting harassed).

He would tell us to help bail him out when staff came by, and would pretend to be in the midst of teaching, would ask us questions (softball) and pray we got it right.

Conflicts began getting out of hand. One student took offense to something Frasier said (don't remember what), but instead of trying to handle it like a professional and apologize, he handled it poorly, and she left the room crying, then spent the next 20 minutes lobbying the class to ask if what he said was really that bad (they all sided with her).

One day he got so upset at the noise and disruption he said "If you're wise, cover your ears", getting ready to dramatically slam a textbook on the desk to startle us. He lost his nerve halfway through and it barely made a sound, and everyone started laughing and he went into a 5 minute whine fest about how he wasn't a bad guy and we weren't being nice.

Some days we played Jeopardy. Oh, cool, History Jeopardy? At first...then the kids took over and it became Jeopardy about...music, random assed shit. One category was LITERALLY "Nicaragua" and the answers to every question were words that rhymed with Nicaragua, delivered by the student-host's friends in a Beavis voice (it was 1995).

Oh...and somehow, unbeknownst to him, the students were outside playing what I can only call The Seizure Game. The setup was - you would be in a crouch up against the wall, and five kids would run at you fast and push hard on your chest for five seconds, not letting you hit the ground, then let go, where supposedly you'd have a temporary "seizure" and black out, snapping to without memory seconds later while everyone watched.

Only one kid had what appeared might have been a short blackout for five seconds, but it was really mostly just a ruse. One of the cool kids would be wall-guy, and after five to ten seconds of fake blackout, he'd have a fake Billy Madison freakout where he'd run around yelling gibberish and slapping at people. It lost its luster cos everyone knew he was a bullshitter. Frasier never had any clue it was happening.

One day the students asked if one of the other students could rap for us one afternoon. Inexplicably, that was the one thing he didn't allow, which was lame cos it woulda been more entertaining than what we were doing (sleeping and watching movies). Dude could actually rap too, it wasn't ironic rap.

By the last week of class, Frasier had finally pissed off the alpha dog, who shouted that he couldn't stand him. Then after Frasier once again failed to handle it, he got up and menacingly began circling the teacher.

At this point, alpha's best friend no longer found it funny, because like everybody else in class (except Frasier), he knew that alpha had previously been expelled from his previous school for beating the shit out of a teacher.

In a moment that really represented the first moment of respect I ever had for the alpha's friend (Kenny), he got between the two, and actually kept them at a distance and tried to walk alpha away so he could calm him down. Frasier would have been in a hospital had he not done that, probably. Amd alpha woulda been expelled again. Sadly alpha never returned to class, he left and peaced out.

The last day, we played Playstation and basketball. I got an A in the class, how I earned it, idk. Frasier liked me, even had me explaining the finer points of the plot of Tommy Boy to him.

My brother, behind me one grade, took the same summer school History class, with (inexplicably) Frasier, who was allowed back. He said his class was exactly the same, though less fights

had a some weird flashback when a wasp got in the temporary building where we had class, trapped it and then cut it up with a knife.

Jfc

Far and away the weirdest thing that I witnessed in school.

Honorable mention to AP Macroeconomics with Mr. Robison, who did almost no actual teaching but made us watch documentaries about entrepreneurs in class every week. Coming fall semester of senior year though I wasn't mad at the blowoff A.

Mr Mckendrick, the high school art teacher who had a puppet in form of a horribly racist caricature called Abdul, which he admitted he had been told not to use but "we were a cool class"

when I broke my arm and missed a month of school I came back to his class to find we were doing clay modelling, which I couldn't do with a cast on my arm, so he gave me... a colouring in sheet.

"We were a cool class" obviously meant we were 100% made of white students

not my own teachers but I also worked for a few years with two women who were training to be primary teachers who told me that they believed that there were certain jobs that only men can do, like police or fire fighters, and jobs that only women can do like teachers and nurses

When we first arrived in America, incredibly culture shocked and not really understanding anything about American culture, or religion, my parents sent my brother and me to something called a 'Christian Colonial School' which was run by a couple of Christian Scientists.

My mother was a fairly new convert to Christianity and didn't really understand that it came in forms that were not as gently intellectual as the Church of England. My father was an atheist and a computer scientist, so they took the name literally, and thought, I guess, this was a good compromise?

The 'colonial' aspect meant that they used textbooks from the 1800s. They taught pre-Darwin Creationism. (They also taught a lot of truly bizarre things about race, too, and also sex, which goes without saying.) When my brother and I (I was about 9 and super into dinosaurs, my brother was about 11 and was going through an atheist phase) objected to this, they started a round of routine physical abuse aimed at 'curing' us of our disbelief. Publicly caning one's hand with a paddle or a ruler in front of the class, that sort of thing, slowly escalating as our recalcitrance grew. Like, we came out of the British school system, which was notorious for corporal punishment, but I have to say that a teacher never physically laid a hand on me, until we got to the States, with these 'Christians'. I am fortunate that memory has simply blotted out most of it, the only memory that persists was being locked in a closet, and unable to get out. (I never told my mother - because corporal punishment was pretty standard at home, why shouldn't it be at school? - until years later and she was horrified.)

It wasn't until my brother finally refused point blank to do one of the assignments - a paper on some extreme Christian missionary type - that my mother actually looked into what we were being taught - and I remember one of her more worldly (ha!) monk friends explaining to us, in a cemetery in Boston, what Christian Scientists really were, and what they believed - and we were immediately yanked out of that school the next Monday.

After that, I was sent to a Catholic school - where routine bullying and humiliation by sadistic Catholic nuns (and actual literal theft of the first novel I ever wrote, which hurt worse than the rest for some reason?) honestly felt like a walk in the park after being beaten and locked in a closet. Life is strange!

I went to a weird catholic comprehensive school where reject teachers from the real catholic schools ended up, so there were a lot.

* Mr A*****, who had returned from being the PE teacher to become the English teacher, despite having none of the required skills or knowledge of the subject

* Mr S*****, a CDT teacher with a Hitler moustache, who threw me out of the GCSE after I had been off sick for two months, as I would "lower his grades" and I just had to sit at the back of another classroom in those lessons.

* Mrs T*****, our first year form tutor, who was so openly horrified and disgusted by children that she would have what looked like a nervous breakdown just having us there and we would all go to voluntary mass to get away from her.

but the prize goes to

* Mr C*****, for locking us in the converted shed we were using as an overflow classroom, showing us pictures of abortions and telling us the babies would suffer in limbo for eternity, bringing in his friend who told us about forcibly converting people in hospices, then finally assaulting one of my friends in class for talking back, getting immediately fired, then burning down the shed that night (no evidence it was him TBH but it's a hell of a coincidence if it wasn't)