Most hated/weirdest/idiotic teachers

Then I changed to a school where we all learned about conservation and wrote plays and did skipping games and were allowed to bring roller skates to school and went for walks on the beach to find greenstone!

She was made worse because the previous year I had been taught by the schools most popular teacher, Mr Kiely!

Mr Salt. Taught German, acted like he was from the Nazi inquisition. If you forgot your exercise/text book, you weren't allowed to write it up later/share or borrow one, you had to go up to see him at the start and apologise, and would get detention for not doing so if he spotted you doing the latter. Fantastically strict regimented classes. Spoke in a very disconcerting quiet soft but v. v. fast and accurate disturbing tone, wandered around the room rhythmically without looking where he was going (often backwards), wore v. tight trousers, Dave Bowie eyes, and visibly not focused.

We eventually realised that he had little scripts in his head and could be made to recite them against his will, even if he'd said them the lesson before. We discovered a few subject areas he knew apart from German, the language (Mainly Germans, their efficiency, and Germans, their culture and history), and you could waste whole lessons this way with careful prompting.

His equally evil cohort Pat Pearce (For the benifit of Google: Patrick Pearce) who regularly rubbed his pupil's hair and made us play rugby in driving wind and freezing rain so that the boy off games was the only one with hands warm enough to do up our shirt buttons.

And Mr Butcher, Physics, who entertained us in the last lesson of term with tales of how great his invention the atom bomb was, and how many "darkies" he accidentally killed when he worked down the mines in South Africa.

But I'm sure they all loved their mums.

another one used to invite all the 3rd form boys over to his house & take naked pictures of them, when it got out he committed suicide w/ his head in a gas oven. i was pleased, i hated him.

1. Mrs Nygaard, first grade. Nasty bitch with a shellacked bun who had also taught my mother. For example, if you were having the shit regularly beaten out of you by hostile classmates, and complained, she'd put you in purdah for 'telling'. I'll never know why she did that; it could have caused major damage to someone going through much worse damage than a bit of bullying. The year before I'd had a kindergarten teacher who made a great effort to help me, as I'd come to school fresh from a variety of cancer treatments, was frail, needed to go off for chemotherapy and radiation treatments and was reading at the level of kids twice my age. She even got me published. I may have been slightly spoilt by all the attention but it probably helped my recovery immeasurably to be treated so well (and she still asks about me when she runs into my mum shopping).

2. Miss Hooley, fifth grade. It was a combination class; half of us were in sixth grade. Unlike everyone else, we had no desks, rather cubbyholes where the contents were dumped on the floor if 'untidy'. She wore girdles, which I discovered when stuck behind her in a conga line, and was heiress to a northern Minnesota supermmarket fortune. She would bully me in class and made me feel so stupid I thought I would be left back a year, and I went on a bit of a hygiene strike. I also pulled stunts such as running as a Republican candidate in our class' mock elections, and having no good answers to policy questions, just like REAL Republicans." So why do I get an F and they get elected, hmmm?' My standardised test scores (off the meter) at least alerted people to the problem and I was much happier the next year. I refused to speak to her after the year ended.

3. Eighth grade maths teacher Mr Boyington. Very crazy, would point at you like Donald Sutherland post-Bodysnatch and bellow 'Warning!' if you didn't behave. Three of these bought you extra homework, as if any of the Warned did their assignments anyway. I was not the target, thankfully, but the idiot was so easy to rile that we learnt little math due to the issuance of much Warnings.

4. Mrs Storm, ninth grade English. Made howler mistakes when we were doing the Odyssey which I corrected. She didn't fuck with me but would holler 'this is MY TIME!' when things got rambunctious.

5. Mrs Mooney, 11th grade English. Now, if your uncle's friend had just offered YOU a book deal, you got A-pluses in all your elective Humanities subjects (journalism, World Literature, Theatre Arts, Cinema, blah blah) and you were skating around the edge of the Minneapolis artypunk scene, would you look kindly on being given C's by some patronising prannet who all the other teachers had informed you was on tranquilisers? You have to be really shit as an educator for the STAFF to take against you in conversation with a student. I felt like Someone Was Jealous and was pretty focussed on getting A's as I was plotting my escape (noble cause) rather than being a big swot. The one- two punch of telling her she was doomed to teach a syllabus until her eventual early retirement on mental health grounds when my book APPEARED on that syllabus and going 'Oh! My grandmother told me about what happened at the Commodore Hotel back then!' when I spotted the family namecheck in the Great Gatsby (party scene, natch) scored major smartarse points with fellow students and the woman eventually backed down. Aced the final. Eat my dust, baby.

Also, he was ludicrously strict and prone to violent (and illogical) fits of temper when he would shout at someone for answering back and THEN shout "Come on! Haven't you got anything to say for yourself?"

Plus he looked like Cliff Richard

Though, in fairness, he did once shout at a boy called Brendon O'Prey claiming he had "the personality of a snail"

My bestest teacher was probably Miss Flanagan because she was foxy.

(just realised it sounds like everyone at my school was Irish - not true but there was enormous amount of Irish teachers espesh because it was a Catholic school)

I could go on about some of the prize-winners I encountered at law school. But law school is such a miserable experience that I think I will spare everyone those stories.

Everything went fine for a while. My colleagues really liked the books, my friend bought an ice cream with my money every day, and even my teacher made the class create their own "Mr. Men" books.

After a week or two of this manufactured goodwill, I walk into school one day and I notice my friend in tears and my teacher SHRIEKING at me because giving money to my friend was an ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE, CROOKED THING and I needed to punished for it. I cried and cried and cried. But nobody -- not my friends, not my parents, not my teacher -- could give me a coherent explanation as to what exactly I did wrong. It pretty much set the tone for much of my relationships with superiors as a kid. I was a stereotypical "good kid" who avoided being "bad" at all costs and when I did do something wrong, I was often punished in a way that was way out of proportion for my crime, possibly because I was to made an example of, and also possibly because punishment would give me ample opportunity for me to make a crying, pants-wetting, mopey spectacle out of myself.

This little incident cemented in my mind something I had already begun to learn from several years of school and day camp -- authority was often venal, completely arbitrary, and rarely burdened with the responsibility to explain itself. No wonder I'm a liberal.

I suppose my mom could've complained to the principal or something about the teacher's unfair treatment, but she later explained to me that year after year of humiliating parent-teacher conferences about my two hellion brothers had pretty much sapped her willingness to fight.

Several weeks later, my teacher likened me to a member of the mafia, something which in more identity-obsessed times like ours would no doubt get her in a whole shitload of trouble. (Note my Italian last name. Thank you.)

Another incident I can recall involved Mrs. Dowd, who to punish me for saying that I had "the most educational lunchbox" out of anybody's, forced me to look at the big mole on her face.

Then there was "Mrs. Masters" (I was never sure if that was her real name) who ran the school's "gifted program" (generally considered a joke by those in it). Another arbitrary disciplinarian and champeen yeller, she so sapped all the joy out of my education that even my school's principal complained to my ma that she was a crappy influence in my life. I refused to take "advanced classes" well into high school because of my bad experiences here.

Then there was a certain high school French teacher who managed to completely destroy the goodwill I felt for her the morning I found her in an empty classroom, dragging her nose across a small pocket mirror. A few weeks later I won a "best mask" contest in her class for something I made in maybe ten minutes and put no thought to whatsoever. The prize was a vinyl LP of my choosing. I said I wanted Elvis Costello's Blood and Chocolate. She came another one of my classes, and pulled me outside to read off a whole list of Elvis Costello albums she found at the Roosevelt Field Sam Goody. When she got to Trust, she gave me this creepy wink that still makes me moan with the willies.

Then there were the two high school librarians who were as absolutely useless as could be. They taught nothing, had no authority, and essentially did nothing in their day-to-day activities apart from complaining about the wretched little brats they lorded over. I think more kids (even the "good kids") stole books from the library than checked them out, just to spite those two.

Gym teachers: dud. Gym class: dud, an embarrassing relic of progressive education programmes long past.

I had some absolutely wonderful teachers, the kind they made television shows about, but that's another thread.

Lesson: DON'T FUCK WITH TADEUSZ! :-)

;-p

I can barely remember my teachers actually. they did not make a lot of impression

Mr. Penny was a dyed in the wool psychopath. He would shout about "Going into the Red, and into the Black!" (and repeat it 10 times in a row -- he would nearly everything he said a few times), the Japanese in World War II, or any weird subject that had nothing to do with teaching shop. One class, he made us all lie on the floor for 15 minutes so we would be prepared "in case of an air raid". You would just never know when he would start up yelling at you for some random event.

The year after that, a woman was found dead with her throat slashed in the field right outside the school shop. Mr. Penny just happened to find the body (at 4 am, I might add -- what was he doing at the school that early?). That year, he left the school.

I've had teachers that were petty, spiteful, etc., but Mr. Penny was the only one who I was ever actually terrified of.

*name slightly changed, due to the whole criminal aspect

High school had some great ones. Mr. Litsey was the English teacher who'd been there since the '60s and let us use his stereo at lunch. We brought in the Frankie Goes To Hollywood tape for him to hear the latest thing and he went flying out of the room during the 'come!' bit in Relax, thought it was gross. I did most of my work in seconds and trusted him enough to allow him to read my manuscripts; apparently I wrote like Updike, no bad thing.

The other one was Pete Peterson, who ran the media: that's cinema classes, theatre department, radio and TV station plus Man Most Likely To Assign Siddhartha. Pete had an interesting sideline doing voiceovers for film strips. His cinema stuff was fantastic and he allowed me to talk him into showing The Ruling Class, which was (and probably still is) my favourite film ever. He had film memorabilia dating back to the '20s, shelves of Sight and Sound and Cahiers du Cinema, and owned most of the prints of stuff he showed. You could, as a 14-year-old, sit there for ages after school talking to this guy about Douglas Sirk and Argento and auteur theory. His most famous ex-students are the Coen brothers (I interviewed him for the Guardian when Fargo came out).

Our Gifted and Talented counselor, Joel Anderson, was cool too. His wife owned a gallery in the Warehouse District, he had tweeds and a handlebar mustache and was a bit like Joel Grey. He was the most enthusiastic lobbier of Good Colleges on our behalf, and we were VERY loyal to him despite his nerdiness and desire to be hip. When he retired about three years back we bought him a surprise balloon ride.

I'm also happy about my journalism teacher, my Physics teacher and most of the Social Studies crew. The journalism teacher was young and foxy but all the others were in their 50s and were happily married liberal types with senses of humour and nice enough people not to have discipline problems. The psych teacher, Dick "Call me Dick!" Koch assigned my table to go out together to see Pee-Wee's Big Adventure because we were so hyper.

Another thing: each year the teachers who were not tenured would be laid off (only to be reinstated for the new year) and the names were made semi-public. That was shit for them but they'd tell us how the system worked and we'd commiserate with them, lobby for the ones we liked, and march up to people we knew on the board and tell them how to spend the money. Students were very forthright and generally we were encouraged to stand up for ourselves and behave like adults.

disturbing:

http://www.viatalaserviciu.ro/view_video.php?viewkey=c886e9247542e06ebb70

Couldn't watch that after a while, guy needs to be battered round the face with his fucking ruler by someone his own size, jesus

http://i.imgur.com/lL2J0.jpg

^^ otm

Not pleased with the existence of this thread.

^sounds like my most hated/weirdest/idiotic teachers

;)

Funny, but not as funny as those new DfE ads that say "You could be head of department in charge of hundreds of people" before revealing LOL it's a department in a school and those 'hundreds of people' are kids intent on stealing anything that isn't nailed down and vandalising anything that is.

You'd better let your parents know they'll be getting a call at home tonight, Matt P.

How did I miss that article above? Must not have been reading that day. I re-connected with my schoolmates on Facebook...the one we remember most was the nutso gym teacher who showed up one day with a shaved head (this was in the seventies when most teachers had shaggy hair). Then he gave us this long lecture on his new weird neo-pagan spiritual transformation (in a Catholic school!) instead of the usual gym class.

He was fired a week or two later. A few years after that, the rumors of dalliances with pre-teens surfaced.

Ms. Merucci - Drama/Creative Writing/English

Spent the first half hour of each class taking attendance, grilling us on where students not in class might be. Complained about the level of sex and violence in the DiCaprio film version of Romeo & Juliet. Had us read The Pelican Brief. Once let a student spend an entire class showing his brother's vacation video (all of which seemed to consist of blurry footage of a group of guys drunk and sleeping in a hotel room), just because. Once called me at home mid-summer to ask if I'd returned a text book. Once stormed out of the classroom crying because a student had removed the bulb from the overhead projector when she wasn't looking and tossed it out the window, later sending in the geography teacher to yell at us.

Amazingly she's still teaching, and her Ratemyteachers Profile has some unsurpising anecdotes: http://www.ratemyteachers.com/martha-merucci/39955-t

Over on the I Love Marking board they have a "Most hated/weirdest/idiotic pupils" thrread and YOU'RE ALL ON IT!!

― mark s, Saturday, November 3, 2001 6:00 PM (10 years ago)

lol

I never had a good English teacher. Mr. Grimmitt was the worst, but also kind of the best. He was just terribly incompetent. He'd try to do some lecturing periodically, which was him just pontificating about whatever struck his fancy, and he'd end every sentence with, "You see?" He looked so hopeless and distant behind the podium, peppering us all with "you see?" as we stared blankly.

He spent most of his time showing us movies. Some were related to the topic at hand, eg showing us the Moby Dick with Patrick Stewart. Another time he showed a video about Walt Whitman which had someone reading "I Sing The Body Electric" over stop motion of Muybridge-esque photos of naked people running, chopping wood, twirling, etc. I don't think he'd screened this one, and he was sitting at a desk behind the TV and so caught none of the nudity that was shocking so many of my Mormon peers.

He also showed us every episode of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis taped off of Nick at Nite, ending with the Lifetime made for TV reunion movie from the 1990s. I now have an unusually strong knowledge of this show for someone born in 1983. If you walked by his room at lunch, he'd be sitting in one of the student's desks, eating a bowl of cereal and watching Dobie Gillis like a little kid.

It was one of those classes where you could say, "We're having a party today Mr. Grimmitt, Sara brought cookies and punch and we're going to make paper chains the rest of class," and he'd just say, "Ok." I tried taking AP English the next year and I was totally in over my head. I had to drop out after the first week.

The only teachers who obviously disliked me had good reason to, I guess I got lucky.

i actually dremt abt the only teacher i disliked, just this saturday

he informed me i still didn't know how to write -- last time he told me that was in 1970

My "AP" US History teacher, whose name I can't even remember:

I could never quite tell if she was drunk, depressed or both. Frequently had us watch movies, many of which were irrelevant to United States history altogether as well as inappropriate for classroom viewing ("Midnight Express"!), the rest of which were usually either about slavery or the Holocaust (the latter of which is also, arguably, not really US history, although I appreciate the gesture I guess). I mean I think we actually watched something like five different slavery movies and three different holocaust movies. Escape From Sobibor is pretty good btw.

Near the end of the year, at which point we had barely covered any of the textbook, she assigned this "project" which basically consisted of "Cover the 80% of United States History that we have not covered using a posterboard chart and some explanatory text." The way she wanted us to set up the timeline/chart thingy was basically nonsensical and I don't think I ever did it.

my 8th grade social studies teacher used to go off on classroom tirades every few weeks about how we were just a bunch of apathetic fuck-ups who didn't care. once he made the mistake of pounding his fist on his desk for emphasis and broke his hand. sadly, i wasn't there the day he walked out of class 10 minutes after the bell ring to drive to the store to buy more advil.

in fairness, he was a pretty cool teacher most of the time and devoted a whole segment of the class to malcolm x. he also illustrated the segment on nazi germany by showing us 'the wave'!

when my little brother went to the same school a few years later, i was there with him for some school event, and ran into aforementioned teacher in the hallway. 'hey, mr. driscoll!' i said. 'remember me?' 'yeah, i remember you!' he snapped, and stormed off.

lol

9th grade Pacific Northwest History teacher:

Short balding nerd with a black cop moustache, always wore a white button-down shirt and a striped tie. Hated me. Once caught me drawing a picture of a naked lady in class (just boobs really). Showed it to everybody, angrily calling me a "pervert" and a "deviant" and made me spend the rest of the class sitting in the corner. Accused me of plagiarizing my final paper and threatened to fail me as a consequence, just because he couldn't believe I was capable of writing something half-decent. My parents had to go to war with the administration over it, and he finally, grudgingly gave the paper a C-. It was fucking great.

11th grade "Bible as Literature" professor:

Smart, decent and funny man who was unfortunately an evangelical Christian and used the class as a seminar for the similarly devoted. He was also some kind of an off-campus Christian youth group leader, and his class often felt like an offshoot of this, with a great deal of time spent planning church events, camping trips, mini golf games, picnics, sleepovers and so forth. You were sort of expected to participate. Wish I'd know all this going in, as I was the only atheist in the class (the only non-fundamentalist Christian, for that matter). Spent a lot of time trying to debate accusations that I was an immoral monster without conscience or values, responsible for the decline of western civilization and such. Kind of fun, but exhausting and alienating.

Classic stories...not fun when they happen, but great to tell later.

Also had a music teacher who was really cool, but a bit of a hippy and too lenient...and you know some kids don't respect a pushover. This one girl got in a fight with him and she escaped bell choir practice via a stained glass window...which was on the second floor. She used the fire escape outside said window.

Hilarious to watch the slightly chunky very nice long-haired teacher climb out a stained glass window after her! Why he didn't use a normal exit to catch her I don't know.