"Skip the idiot steps" Bad Teacher stories.

[Baitball Blogger]

I had a professor in college who was long overdue for retirement. He was a favorite of the school so there wasn't much anyone can do about it. He taught Accounting, which was not a special strength of mine--and this was a Liberal Arts College that required you to work outside your comfort zone. So, what I remember was how he followed a strict classroom lecture. When he used math examples, the answers must have been memorized because he would start them out and then say, "And then we skip the idiot steps," and write the answer down on the bottom.

Anyone else have a bad teacher story to tell?

[ScreamingMeemie]

1. I was the youngest of 3 children.

One of my brothers was an all-A, pain in the butt, teacher's pet type. The other? A class clown. Because I looked more like class clown brother, my high school years were filled with teachers who thought I was a troublemaker, before even getting to know me. I had one teacher actually hold me after class and say,"No Paulsen ever gets better than a B in my class--I don't care how great the work is, I don't care if you know more than I do... You can thank your brother for that, or I suggest you drop my class." He was a cross-country coach that my brother ran afoul of when he refused to go to a "cross-country camp." (the "camp" was basically doing cleanup work in and around the teacher's cottage up North).

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Coach teachers are the absolute worst!

They turn out to be such power bullies.

[ScreamingMeemie]

3. This guy was. And he had that face...

The kind you wanted to punch. And I am a peace-y person. My son has a couple of coaches as teachers this year and it's been a rough year. Unfortunately, over half the teachers in Texas high schools are coaches.

[dr.strangelove]

30. My "coach teacher" was not, he was the best teacher I ever had

My history teacher was also the wrestling coach and an assistant (strength/conditioning) on the football team. He looked like a typical jock, but was he ever different than the stereotype. He was a "reader" and always passed great books onto his students. He loved US history, especially the pre-colonial through revolutionary period. He fostered such a love of history in me that I double-majored in college because I filled all of my electives with history classes. When I wrote my final paper (we needed a research project to get our BA in history) he sent me about a dozen books to read on my topic and even sent me notes of some things to be sure I considered. He also made us all go to the NY Public Library to learn how to do research and use primary sources. He was a classy guy. Once I went to law school we fell out of touch, but some years later in a great stroke of luck I started to work in the same firm where his wife was a partner. They both were great teachers. She helped me as a young lawyer become the attorney I am today. This let me re-connect with him and as adults, we are facebook friends and have political and historical conversations all the time.

[pipi_k]

4. I have a few but

will only share two of them...

My HS Psychology teacher. We learned very little psychology in her class, which mostly consisted of her telling us stories about her family. One of them involved a nephew she found particularly annoying, and whom she appeared to enjoy mentally abusing. Yes, she told us stories about some of the things she did. Like it was all...OK. Sometimes the world of psychology is populated by some very damaged individuals. Anyway, the other part of our "classes" involved her giving us those word search puzzles to do while she sat at her desk doing whatever it was she did. I swear this is true. We didn't even have a book for her class.


Then there was my 8th grade English teacher, who perhaps wasn't so much BAD as just clueless during an age when things like family violence weren't so readily addressed as now.

My dad was an alcoholic. He and my mom fought all the time. One year, in a fit of rage, he tore down the entire Christmas tree and ripped the phone out of the wall. He broke my mom's jaw with a beer bottle. At my 11th or 12th birthday party (a small affair held when dad was at work) my mom appeared with purple finger marks on her neck where dad had tried to strangle her a day or two before.

I had trouble sleeping. I was afraid to leave the house, thinking they would kill each other. Naturally, my grades suffered. It was hard to care about conjugating verbs when my parents were intent on murdering each other. So one marking period when I was failing miserably, she called me out in front of the entire class...told me I should "shape up or ship out". I wanted to die.

What hurt was this...I was not a disruptive kid. Not a behavior problem. Very shy and quiet. Was she too busy, or too clueless, to figure out that something was terribly wrong?

I wish she had bothered to find out.

[Baitball Blogger]

5. What you went through.

I'm so sorry.

Teachers can make a difference. I had two that turned my life around, and it takes so little of their time.

[pipi_k]

10. Thank you, and...

I'm really glad you were lucky enough to get a couple of the good ones who had a clue/cared/found the time.

Have you ever had contact with them since?

I think so many of us never realize how one kind act can totally change someone's life.

[Baitball Blogger]

14. Never did.

I never reached that level of awareness until much later in life, unfortunately.

[csziggy]

6. An English teacher that complained that I read too many books

Fifth grade only one book was assigned as a reading project for the year, Caddie Woodlawn. Perfectly good book, but I read the whole thing the first week of school. We had reading once a week. The teacher would assign a certain number of pages to read and at the end of the hour give a test on those pages.

Each week I would re-read the assigned pages - it took me less than ten minutes. Then I would pull out a library book and read that. Each week I would get a perfect score on the test so it wasn't until a month or so into the school year that the teacher realized that I wasn't reading the assigned pages out of the assigned book.

She asked why I wasn't reading the book - I told I had read it. She asked why didn't I re-read it, I told her I had. She didn't believe me, even though I could answer any question she had about the book. For some reason it offended her that I was able to read more than one book at a time and still get her tests completely perfectly. She sent me to the principal's office for talking back to her when I repeated that I HAD read the assigned book, and that I HAD read the assigned pages that day.

I took my assigned book and my library book to the office with me. The principal knew my family and knew me since he saw us in the public library every Saturday. He knew the librarian had already given me access to the Young Adult section since I had read every book in the Children's section of the library. He sent me back to class with a note for the teacher to come to his office.

I don't know what happened between the teacher and the principal. The rest of the school year I was allowed to read whatever I wanted as long as I did not let the other students know I was reading other books. She'd stop by my desk and make a note of which book I was reading - and seemed astounded that it was a different one every week. I never told her that I averaged reading 3-4 books a week at that age.

Oh - she managed to find at least one mistake on every test that year. I ended up with a B in her class even though I knew I should have gotten an A.

[pipi_k]

11. Wow, that really sucks!

Like you, I was also a voracious reader from way back (still am now, although my concentration is no longer good enough to read more than one book at a time).

I hope this teacher didn't ruin the joy of reading for you.

If there's anything I have to thank my parents for, it's that my dad, even though he was an alcoholic, loved to read, and he and mom indulged my love of reading however they could.

[csziggy]

12. Nothing could ruin the joy of reading for me

The worst part about my recovery from my surgeries last year was the between the drugs and the physical therapy I just did not have the energy to read.

Libraries have never been able to supply all the information I wanted and with the small branch libraries, they don't really carry as wide a range or as many books as I'd like. I can't afford to buy as many books as I'd like, and since I hate giving up books once bought, I don't have the room to store them - even though we built a library into the new house!

I still read lots of books, but now the internet gives me a wider range of subjects. I find it a good research tool and if I need additional info, I can quickly find where I have to go to get it.

[Baitball Blogger]

15. Today, that teacher would have been canned.

I have my theory about teachers who expect you to meet their low expectations. It's the same about just anyone who expects you not to be bright enough by their standards.

I once took a required refresher courser, driver's license test in Zellwood, which back when, was strictly farm country. The test was basic sign reading. I had friends who lived out there and figured I would take it on a school break. Well, I recognized one of the test takers. She was a young blonde girl who was about my age who had come by the house to visit. She didn't recognize me. Well, she flunked and she became all hysterical. Her family had to console her. I felt bad for her and tried to explain how to read the signs.

Then it was my turn to receive my test scores and I went up to the guy behind the desk. He looked at me with a look of wonder, like he was in awe that I had passed. I'm latina so I'm guessing that my perfect score was a shock to his system.

[csziggy]

20. Teachers' expectation do affect how they handle students

My oldest sister was a genius, top grades all the way through in every subject, ended up being valedictorian of her class and won every math, science and language award they gave. Second oldest sister nearly the same, but did not put as much emphasis on academics and was very active socially.

I came along and was very introverted and quiet. Teachers that had my older sisters often resented the family history - one male math teacher who didn't think girls needed to take advanced math was particularly hard on me because of my oldest sister doing better than any student he ever had. He was happy that I didn't care enough to work at math, since that justified his beliefs.

Teachers that had not had my older sisters didn't seem to expect much from me. Some were surprised because I would be impassive during class - often they thought I was not taking in anything. Most of the time I was lazy - academics tended to bore me, but tests were usually easy for me. So long as I could keep my head down, do the required work, and maintain a B average I was satisfied.

Part of that motivation was that I sold my soul to get a horse. My parents threatened my with dire consequences if I got into any kind of trouble at school - they would sell the horse that I had begged for all my life. It was a good way to keep me from getting into drugs or being the troublemaker I had plenty of talent to be.

All I wanted to do was get out in the open and ride my horse. The teachers just didn't get that. It also confounded the teachers that I had a wide range of interests and was frustrated that I could not get the information to correlate the different parts of the knowledge I gathered.

My senior year the guidance counselor called me in when the SAT scores came out. I had the highest scores in my class. My grade point average just barely put me in the top ten percent, so it was a shock to her and to most of the teachers. The counselor thought I'd been deliberately hiding something from her and the teachers. All they had to do was care enough to find out what I cared about and engaged me.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. My list of bad teachers (more from higher education than from K-12)

Seventh grade history teacher who could not control the class. Granted, we were seventh graders, but no one else had any trouble.

Ninth grade social studies teacher who assigned us chapters to read in class while he sat up front reading Sports Illustrated or Argosy. If we finished the chapter early, he told us to read it again.

Graduate school: One of the world's experts in his field (not my major area, thank goodness). His lectures included an encyclopedia's worth of information every session. In one year, I filled two full-sized notebooks. At one point, I couldn't follow one of his examples and asked about it. He immediately assigned me to research it myself and write a three-page paper about it due in three days. Then he admonished the rest of the class not to tell me the answer if they happened to know. I never asked another question, nor did anyone else.

Again, graduate school: My major professor was writing a book. Our Monday afternoon (4:00-6:00 PM) seminars consisted of his reading his latest chapter aloud to us and asking us for comments. We all had a horrible time keeping awake. After a few weeks, I took to bringing a large thermos of coffee and some paper cups. At 5:00 PM, just as everyone was about to collapse onto the table in front of them, I would take out the thermos and pass coffee around.

Continuing education class: I decided to review my math as background for technical translation. The college algebra instructor was young and inexperienced. He didn't work the problems beforehand, so he often got stumped in class. He didn't do any monitoring of the class to see if people were understanding what was going on (about half of them weren't). He didn't administer a placement test, so a large portion of the students were no way ready for college algebra, since they couldn't even do regular high school algebra. I've always considered myself a math dunce, but I was answering my fellow students' questions.

Continuing education class: I decided to take an intermediate language class (not Japanese) at a state university in Oregon. The course was "supervised" by an American professor but actually taught by two native speaking graduate students who had no idea whatsoever how to teach a language. Their notion of teaching was to talk about the vocabulary lists in English. There were three of us adult students in the class, and we went to complain to the supervising professor and tell him that his TA's needed training. He blew us off, saying that grad students didn't have time to take training. It was clear that he didn't like being the supervisor of intermediate language and did as little as possible. We stuck it out, though, because it was the second semester second year.

The following year, I registered for third year, since this professor wasn't in charge. The class met three days a week, and the syllabus said that we would cover one lesson a week. However, the new professor also a native speaker, spent the first day talking about the vocabulary list, the second day having us translate some reading passages aloud (going down the rows--a real no-no in language teaching, because it encourages students to ignore the instructor when it's not their turn), and the third day giving us a chapter test. I quit after the first month.

This last example was most disappointing, since some of the other language programs at that university were exemplary.

[Baitball Blogger]

16. You refreshed my memory on a few.

A graduate student was allowed to teach a class of over eighty students. He taught from his own book and nobody ever understood the material. Then, the class session right before the test, when we expected to get a refresher course, he was hysterically showing us examples of material we never covered. It turns out that the test was a standardized exam and he had not covered much of the material. I think I got a C in the exam--my first one, and I just lost it. All the Business Majors went up to him to plead for higher grades and got it. I was too slow to figure it out because of my code of conduct. I think that was a Micro-economics class.

I took the Macro-economics class in another school. The class was much bigger and more impersonal, but the teacher was superb. I got an "A." I actually received a letter from the teacher offering to help me in my future endeavors. I was really slow to pick up on my opportunities because my dad insisted that we grow up self-reliant. Unfortunately, it must have been a phase he was going through because my youngest sister was not raised in the same manner.

[baldguy]

8. I had a stats prof in college who couldn't do simple math.

Last edited Mon Feb 18, 2013, 04:55 PM - Edit history (1)

She'd put a column of ten numbers up on the board, and add it up 3 or 4 times & get a different answer each time - without getting it correct.

Meanwhile, I had a different class (IBM Assembler prog) where I learned how to do hex arithmetic in my head. Decimal was easy.

[Initech]

9. I had a high school algebra teacher who had some insane grading policies.

And when I was in his class I fought with him regularly on his BS. His philosophy was that the heading of your paper was more important than the problems you worked on. And the date had to be in a specific format. You had to have some things on the left side and some things on the right side. And if you deviated from the format at all (for instance the most inane requirement was that you had to have last name, first name) and if you forgot to say, put the comma between your first name and last name, he'd mark the whole paper wrong without even reading it. If you put the date in the wrong format (like Feb. 18, 2013 instead of 2/18/13) he'd mark the whole paper wrong. It was pretty much the math class from hell.

[raccoon]

17. Sixth grade old man teacher who was a pedophile and liked to embarrass students.

7th grade history teacher who liked to bully students.

Dipstick geography teacher in college who liked to mess up your GPA if you had good grades.

OTOH, an outstanding HS history teacher, also male, with a great sense of humor and gift for teaching.

[KamaAina]

18. High school math teacher who was always crushing on my mom.

(the school was directly across the street from us)

And always had dirt under his fingernails. Ewwwwww.

[kurtzapril4]

19. My third grade teacher

Mrs. Anderson, was really rude to me. She asked me where I was from. I said "Kentucky." She said "It figures." I was out for recess one day, and I was playing with the run-off from a large pile of snow...making little dams, etc. I got a teeny bit of mud on one shoe. She said "Only pigs play in mud." I think my mother went to the principal on that one. What a bitch she was.

Later, at College of Dupage, I had an accounting teacher who announced "Please don't bother coming to me for help outside of class time. I'm too busy." I dropped the class.

[noamnety]

21. My daughter had some bad ones.

One was an incompetent social studies teacher who gave her class a map to color that didn't acknowledge little things like the soviet union no longer existing as one entity. I told him at a parent conference that wasn't okay; that I understood if his materials were out of date but he had a responsibility to at least mention the map wasn't current, and that he could use it as an opportunity to discuss shifting political boundaries. He got defensive - and then switched to trying to sell me real estate which was his side job.

She also had a guidance counselor who asked what she wanted to do. She was heavily involved in community youth theater, and wanted to go into the arts. The counselor told her something along the lines of "But you're SMART, why would you want to do that?"

I make a decent living with my art degree and didn't appreciate the implication it's a career for stupid people. I certainly don't want a guidance counselor counseling students out of their interest to go into a career they hate just for the salary. My daughter is now in her 20s and supports herself working full-time in the arts.

Personally, I had great teachers.

[davsand]

22. Not my bad teacher, but my daughter's...

Her 6th grade English teacher was a real POS. That awful woman actually told my daughter--in class, and during the discussion,"You have to stop using big words. Nobody understands you. You need to speak English." My comment (one of them anyway...) was the teacher was an ignorant f***ing cow that needed to be forcibly retired. The Principal was not amused, however, I was less than enthusiastic about anybody telling my daughter to "dumb it down."

Have I mentioned that my daughter received the President's Award for Educational Excellence her 8th Grade year? She's now in high school, and is still an honor student in advanced academic classes as well as being an active Thespian and JV Captain of the Academic Bowl team.

WTF kind of teacher would ever dream of saying that to any kid?





Laura

[Baitball Blogger]

23. Obviously someone who thought you were suppose to hide your brilliance

in order to fit in.

It's a terrible lesson that many learn in school. How to dummy up in order to have friends.

I had a friend whose athletic kid tested high on a math proficiency test. He refused to go into the gifted class because he didn't want to be viewed as too smart.

[davsand]

25. If "fitting in" means acting dumber than you are I'd rather be a pariah.

Maybe that is part of my problem in life, but I have NEVER understood the idea that you have to function at a lower level just to please the less intelligent. It has always seemed to me that if I was somehow "too intelligent" for the company I was keeping I probably needed to be running with another crowd.

Girls, especially, have been conditioned for a long time to dumb it down so as to not scare off the boys. Also, there's somehow a pressure on women, in general, to defer to others that you perceive to be in power. Must be a flaw in my upbringing, because I was taught a long time ago to just do my own thing and if it bothers anybody they can avert their eyes. You can't lord it over anybody that you have gifts, but you sure aren't doing yourself or anybody else any favors to deny it. When you are gifted in any way you need to celebrate that, and USE those gifts to their highest good. I'll grant you, you have to listen to learn, and nobody can know everything. Much beyond that, however, is something I call bullshit.

I was raised by a kick ass woman, and I have tried very hard to instill those same values in my own daughter. Right now (at 15) she's interested in a career in bio-engineering or medicine. Where she'll end up is any body's guess, but lord help anybody that I find out is telling her she CAN'T do something--because that child has the brains and the ability to do what she pleases. She's what I call a "triple threat" because she's smart and funny, she's kind, and she's beautiful.

Pisses me off that some in the current "education" system don't GET that.



Laura

[Baitball Blogger]

26. I've never seen it in teachers, but that peer pressure to be dumb is very common around

these parts.

Having lived around here for a while, I can understand why. They don't like people who are too smart, because they might challenge the "authoritay" of the inner circles.

[midwest irish]

24. I was accused of plagiarizing one word

Last edited Tue Feb 19, 2013, 01:31 PM - Edit history (1)

I'll never forget it. I used the word "discursive" which was apparently just too advanced for a senior in high school. The teacher began interrogating me in front of the entire class. I said I no longer wanted to have this conversation and I would have my parents write him a letter. He responded with "is that a threat, are you threatening me?" At the end of the day he called my parents and said I threatened him at school....this was right after Columbine. My mother thought I said I was gonna kill him and she refused to believe me when I stated the whole thing was over the use of an innocuous word in a 3 page paper.

One of my friends was in an English class where the assignment was to write a haiku. My friend wrote a Haiku that was, evidently, almost an exact match to a haiku written in 18th century Japan. The teacher had an MA in Japanese and knew of the similar poem, it had not been translated into English. My friend did not know Japanese and did not have the internet to look this up (probably wasnt even on the internet in the late 90's anyway). She lobbied to have him fail the entire class for the year.

[lastlib]

27. My first-grade teacher was an idiot.

She was older than dirt (I don't know how old she really was, but to me she looked fossilized). In first grade, I knew not only the English alphabet, but the Greek alphabet as well. I was reading on at least a sixth-grade level, spelling on an eighth-grade level, doing math on a fifth-grade level, and probably knew more about the planets and the stars than she did. At a parent-teacher conference, this dingbat tells my mother that "he's reading with his peer-group, he's spelling with his peer-group, and doing arithmetic with his peer-group, but he can't color." (!) (BTW, I'm partially red-green color-blind and had enough hand-eye coordination dysfunction that I couldn't stay inside the lines when I colored.) I was basically leaving my class in the dust, and this twit was concerned that I couldn't color--WTH was she doing in the education field? My mother challenged her on what level I was at, and all she could say was "he's keeping up with his age-group."

To this day, my family jokes about how I failed educationally because I couldn't color in first grade!

[Orrex]

28. My high school sprint coach (he taught business math)

Never had him for any classes, but I ran sprints in track, so I dealt with him in that capacity.

I was a pretty fast sprinter and usually placed well in races, but one guy on a visiting team simply blew me off the track.

Afterward the coach sought to console me, I guess, and he said "Don't worry about it. They're faster because of that extra bone in their foot."

I didn't know a great deal about anatomy, but I knew that was bullshit. And it made me intensely uncomfortable, but I didn't feel like I could say or do anything about it.


Weird moment.

[easttexaslefty]

29. 2nd grade

Catholic school. I'm one of several little girls helping grade papers. I make a mistake. Nun tells me I'm to stupid to help.