A teacher can really make or break the way you absorb information. Not all teachers are great, but most aren't terrible. However, every once in awhile you get that teacher who just really has their entire life set out to ruin yours. These are their stories...
u/LimitedInterest asked Reddit:
Who was your worst teacher?
Here are the answers. Students, beware, you're in for a scare...
No Care, Inc.
College professor who didn't respond to any questions and just gave a final grade. It was an online class without lecture too. Unlike other professors who would post mini lectures or videos or whatever, it was a very "here's the book, do your entire marketing campaign on this."
One student called and messaged him nine times to get her grade from our midterm (something none of the rest of us got). He finally sent her an email with nothing but a bunch of white space and a one letter reply of her grade.
He gave me a B for the course. He gave the chronic C student that I tutored an A.
I'm pretty sure he just randomly assigned grades.
It was an awful experience overall.
Mrs. Damn-her
Mrs. Danner in the third grade.
She was a terrible teacher in general. She talked about her migraines constantly instead of teaching and explained how chocolate and Taco Bell triggered her migraines and explosive diarrhea and told us that anyone who drinks diet soda would immediately get cancer even if they drank it because they have diabetes and can't drink regular soda.
She picked on different students, was vaguely racist, and loved to have loud, patronizing conversations with her teacher friend next door about students in her class as a passive aggressive way to get on to students.
She was particularly mean to me because she wasn't from what would be considered a "good" family in the area but married well. In her new social circle, she wound up rubbing elbows with my grandmother, who absolutely despised Mrs. Danner and was not shy about making that fact known. So when she saw my last name on the first day of class, she decided to get her revenge.
It all culminated in one incident in which I had an altercation with a boy outside of school hours and not at a school event. On the Monday following the event Mrs Danner and her teacher friend pulled me into the hallway and said things like "Looks like the Pandersons aren't as wonderful as they pretend" and "how ashamed your grandmother must be" and other things that turned poor, sensitive Dan Panderson into a mess.
I went home and my tears turned my mother into a bear ready to attack. The following day, my mother put on her best suit, donned her pearls, and pulled her hair into an elegant chignon and stomped her high heeled feet into that school at 3pm and stepped into the classroom. Mrs Danner said "Hello [Mom First Name]" my mother said, "Oh, you may call me Mrs. Last Name, my friends use my first name" and then laid the most gloriously condescending smack down on that b*tch that the world has ever heard.
Eventually the principal came down and Mama said "well, I've said my piece. Mrs. Danner will finish the year being much nicer to Dan or I will be forced to have a meeting with my cousin (the school board president) and see how he feels about renewing her contract." Mama flounced out leaving shattered remains in her wake and it was honestly amazing.
Mama, being a grade A b*tch, proceeded to sign up to make all the baked goods for class and only made chocolate because Mrs. Danner can't have chocolate.
God, I miss my mom. And f*ck you Pat Danner!
Sadism
My 6th grade teacher. He loved to pick on kids and make them the butt of his jokes. Unfortunately, I was his target for an entire year. He would always single me out. He always made me do humiliating things in front of the class. Sometimes, if I put an answer that he deemed dumb on an assignment, he would read my answers in front of the class. He would show the class my poor handwriting and ask them if he should mark the answers wrong just because he couldn't read the answer. Having an entire class laugh at you day after day can wear you down. Unfortunately, when your teacher makes fun of you in front of the class, it spills over into the playground. Kids think they have immunity to make fun of you however they want. 6th grade was not a fun year.
I sometimes look back and wonder how sadistic a person must be to purposely humiliate a little kid.
Sigh
Ms. Collins. She remarried, so her last name is something else now, but she was awful. Had her in high school for a couple of different classes, and she only cared about popular girls and baseball players- that's it. If you were anything but a popular girl or a baseball player, she wouldn't give you the time of day.
She was hateful, sarcastic, lazy, and entitled- but the popular girls and baseball players loved her because they knew they'd get away with murder with her. She had assigned seating, and she even made it obvious with her seating arrangements.
She was more worried about who was dating who, who slept with who, who wants to fight who, and other teenage gossip instead of actually teaching.
Deutsche Grenzkontrolle
I'll never forget Herr Taylor in college German. This dude was a f*cking riot, let me tell you.
When I first took the class, I heard rumors that he was a bit off but I didn't know any specifics so I had a fairly clean-slate when it came to my experience as one of his students. He always wore a suit and was constantly sweating even though it was normally temperatures in the room and he was not overweight. Most days I had this class, he ended 20 min early because he had to "lie down because of his migraines." I also saw him quite a bit out of class. As any college student, I frequented to local grocery store liquor section and I saw him there just about every time I went. After weeks of seeing him behave erratically in class and witnessing his weekly cart fills of wine, I connected the dots that he was likely an alcoholic.
About a month in to the class, things started getting nuts. He would go on these long rants that were completely unrelated to the course and we would just sit there in silence as he talked about being a hippy in San Fransisco in the 60s and having sex with some random "free spirit" on Jim Morrison's grave. He once went on a 20 min tirade about Catholics and how religion has completely destroyed the fabric of academia and will be the end of civilized society as we know it. When he saw that we were just sitting in silence (very awkwardly), he'd just smile and say "you guys are just too young to understand."
This dude also LOVED squirrels. We would sometimes have class out in the quad because he'd rather talk about the senseless bombing of Dresden during WW2 and how it destroyed a ton of art under one of the shade trees. He would constantly get distracted if one wandered by and immediately yell out "oh my, look at that one! It's so pudgy and cute!" He once even claimed he saw a squirrel that looked EXACTLY like John Lennon. I wish I was making this up. Also, if you drew a squirrel on your quiz, you were given extra points. Not that this class was hard because he handed out the quizzes on Monday and collected them on Fridays each week. Never got below a 102 on any of them.
In the end, I felt bad for him. He always talked about loves lost and how great it was to be a hippie in the 60s. I didn't learn shit about German that semester but I guess I got a taste of what radical hippies were like back in the day. It was a wild ride.
Paid Suspension
Mrs. Hazlet had her in 5th grade and she was extremely rude to most of the class. I was bullied a lot during elementary school and I would always come to the teacher and my parents for help. She would never do anything about it at all and would sometimes just get me in trouble for asking her about it.
So one day I get beat up by some kids outside because they were trying to take a kickball that I brought from home. So I was covered in dirt and extremely upset and she comes over to them. I thought that this was finally when she would just them for something. Nope. She screams in my face and tells me to not tell my parents about this.
Went home and told my dad about it and he talks to the principal about the situation and is furious. She was removed for a week in class and we had a sub. She came back and never paid much attention to me after that.
Take Allergies Seriously
Ms. Morales, we had a girl with a bunch of health issues and allergies in our class, including latex, and one day she chose to let her favorite student hold a birthday party in our class with latex balloons everywhere. Girl, who was in a wheelchair, gets to class and immediately has breathing problems and starts breaking out. She asked the teacher if she could go to the nurse, and this b*tch had the audacity to say "just tough it out until next period, I'm not letting you go to the nurse yet" luckily, our TA saw the girl and convinced Ms. Morales to let her go, but the girl wheeled to the nurse (which was at the other side of the school) by herself because the teacher wouldn't let anyone else go. Girl got an epipen shot and was ok, but it still pisses me off 4 years later.
Vengeance
I'll call her Mrs. R from here on out. She was one of my teachers in eighth grade.
A little background info: I was bullied horrendously growing up. In middle school, there was a kid named C who was the ringleader of bullies. He was the worst one.
Well, in Mrs. R's class, she stepped out for a second and C decided that was the perfect time to chase me with a pair of scissors in an attempt to cut my hair. I grew tired of it, stood up, and screamed my head off. Mrs. R comes in and I thought he was going to get in trouble.
Three days later, my mom and I get called into the principal's office. Mrs. R had sent a disciplinary report to the principal requesting I get suspended from school for disrupting her class and the special education class next door. My mom threatened to press charges against the school and C for assaulting me. My nana, who decided to see how bad things were for herself, tagged along and popped off asking if Mrs. R was sleeping with C's dad because in what universe is allowing someone to attack another child not disruptive.
From that point on, Mrs. R tried daily to fail me on her class and get me either suspended or expelled. We had homework? Mine would go straight to the garbage can and a note would get sent home claiming I never turned it in. Tests? Didn't matter how well I did, I'd always fail. Group projects? Everyone else in my group would get A's and I'd get a C- because "I didn't do any of the work." Even though I was the only one who did the work on one project. And C? She allowed him to be as brutal to me as he wanted.
I barely passed her class with a C at the end of the year. I bawled like a damn baby.
Near Failing
Had a teacher in my first semester of college in an Intro to Linux class that was pretty terrible at teaching us anything about Linux for a few reasons.
- She had not used Linux in over 10 years.
- She had been assigned this class 2 days before classes started because the original teacher got caught sleeping with a student a few weeks prior
- She barely spoke english
Her lectures consisted of her going through the powerpoints that the previous teacher had set up for the last semester, reading some of them word for word, and just flipping through the rest wordlessly. Then she'd have us do an activity from the workbook and would be of no help to anyone who got stuck.
Me and a few of the other students who had a VERY basic understanding of linux ended up organizing study groups and basically the class had to self teach in order for us to pass.
Racism Is Fun, Kids
9th grade English teacher. She sincerely believed that I didn't speak English. I don't know where she got this idea, other than I am Spanish-English bilingual?
The first time she took attendance, Day 1, she asked, "Oh, minorfall27! I heard you speak Spanish! Do...you...speak...English...?"
She would noticeably slow down to talk to me, and made comments (several times) about my not understanding something because, "English is my second language." (My English is better than my Spanish nowadays, they were probably about even back then.)
Meanwhile, at least 3-4 students would copy my homework.
It's fine for a teacher to do these things if the student does need the extra help, if their English is indeed weaker than their native language, but that just wasn't the case for me.
Old Wounds
A male math teacher at my school was very similar to this. It was obvious he hadn't exactly been popular when he was in high school, so he remedied this by trying to get in with the popular kids as an adult. Senior year, he cut the band kids out of the pep rally completely so that the cheerleaders could have a longer show, and then promptly got in a Twitter fight with a member of the color guard over it. He got s--- from administration.
Avert The Eyes
Gunnar, gym teacher. Old white dude with a grey fro. He wore very short shorts and sometimes his testicles fell out.
Edit: Bonus Gunnar: I was never good in class, lazy kid. So final year he sat me down and said "Well, /u/Mr-Rubber-Cot. Last year you barely got a passing grade and this year you somehow performed even worse. What kind of grade do you think you deserve?" I shrugged and said "It doesn't matter."
Then graduation day comes and I got a BETTER grade than the year before! Still think he must have mixed up the papers, wonder if he failed someone else by accident.
