Worst Teachers You've Had

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Most teachers I had were favorable, but some were bad.

Not all teachers can be the best teachers ever. In any spectrum, there has to be some people on the bottom.

One of my least favorite teachers was a highly esteemed elderly scientist (with a doctorate in physics) who worked on 21 military projects in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States. While he was one of the smartest people I ever met, he was a bad teacher. He spoke in a thick accent which few people could understand. No one, and literally no one, in the class understood the material he was teaching. Mainly because of his failure to articulate it in terms that a young person an understand. All students feigned knowledge since his tests were open textbook. He tolerated plagiarism, and ignored me numerous times when I told him that most of the students were simply copying and pasting from Wikipedia for their essays.

Who was your worst teacher?

My high school English teacher. Her classes felt like boot camp to me. I was always melting down because I couldn't grasp what the heck I was supposed to do in any given situation, and she seemed to pick on me mercilessly. I think she probably thought I was lazy, but I wasn't really. I came to hate that class. I hated school anyway, but that one was my nightmare.

I had one lecturer at university for classical roman archaeology who was the worst. He was this 70+yr old fat man. He wore these baggy grey pants held up with old suspenders. Randomly he would scratch his balls( and really go for it, usually 2 handed). He talked in a thick old man who forget his dentures accent and he would always go on wild tangents about some movie he saw 30years ago. Gah.

I've been pretty lucky, almost all my teachers and professors were excellent.

The ones who were not good, I blame the curriculum for it rather than themselves. These were the teachers and professors who were given no freedom to explore interesting topics, no incentive to try doing so, and actively forced into a pace set by people who had obviously never dealt with the needs of a classroom full of people.

It ranged from little things, like a teacher not showing interest in the subject, to major things like a professor who felt guilty about the poor quality of teaching materials but could do nothing about them.

That said, I did have a chemistry teacher who was so bad at explaining things that the only people who passed his class were the ones who ignored everything he said and only listened to the textbook.

Mr Threadgill, my R.E teacher. He was racist, abusive and gross (he would reveal his belly and burp loudly, to which my friend responded "You're a f***ing skank, you know that? ). Once he slammed my fingers in a filing cabinet, spilled his boiling hot tea on me, and said to a class "all down syndromes should be shot". When he was fired after so many complaints, that was one of the greatest moments of my life. Good riddance to the b******

Mr Clinton, my Maths teacher. He wasn't horrible at all, just completely useless at keeping our class under control. It pushed him so much he yelled "I am p*ssed off with all of you!!" and stormed out of the classroom. He quit teaching our class, and came back to teaching once we had left school.

Many, many of my French / Spanish teachers, who's names I can't remember.

I had a pervert fat f**k of a teacher (Ironically named Sexton) who used to bully me when I was a kid. He once made me eat 2 month old sandwiches from the bottom of my bag. I walk up to his car and flip him of now every time I see the f****r.

I also had a narcissistic b***h of a teacher for LCVP, one of those ill-defined business type subjects. We had to do projects, and 90% of the marks went for punctuation and layout. She would give us a template, we'd copy it, then she would eat the head of my for having such a bad layout. I got the last laugh; after one and a half years in the class, and being one week from finishing my project, I told her that I was transferring class because she kept telling me I was going to fail; she threw a hissy and I walked out laughing.

I got a 75 in my new class (with only five months out of a five year education in it), which was five higher than the max you can get in the other class

My first third grade teacher (I changed schools in the middle of the year). I mostly remember her yelling at me a lot. The last day that I was in her class, I tripped and knocked over some books (they were set up like dominos) and she screamed at me, call me destructive, and made me stand with my face pressed into the corner until the office called over the intercom for me to check out.

My sixth grade math teacher used to yell at me for not doing my homework and embarrassed me in front of the class when I would get bad grades on the tests. I was at a Magnet school at the time and while I was doing well in my other classes, I did very poorly in math. I was not ready for algebra. Anyway, despite how she treated me, I liked the teacher. I would watch her interact pleasantly with the other students and decided that she was a nice person. I assumed that I deserved whatever she said to me. Around the middle of that year, my mother asked me if I ever asked questions in the class when I did not understand, and I replied "no.". She wanted to know why not, and I said that I found the teacher intimidating and did not particularly like to ask questions (I decided not to tell her the reason behind that). So, my mom called up to the school and told the teacher what I'd say, assuming that it would help. Get the teacher to ask me if I understood to prompt me to ask questions. Her attempt backfired, and from the next day until the end of the year, the teacher made fun of me every day to my entire class and told them how my "mommy had to call [her] because [I was] sooooo intimidated. The class found that hilarious and friend's that I had previously made would not speak to me anymore.

My 6th grade band teacher stole my clarinet (A brand new Buffet...expensive). He was fired shortly thereafter for selling alcohol to students, but I never got my clarinet back nor did I receive any compensation.

My 7th grade science teacher used to be very sarcastic to her students. She often insulted me with what I took for complements (other students had to tell me that she was being sarcastic). One day I was in class, done with my work ahead of schedule as per usual, and started working on a story that I had been writing for most of that year. She came over to me, smiled, and asked me what I was writing. I took the smile as an invitation, so I launched into this explanation of my story. I was excited that someone was interested...or so it seemed. She smiled again and said "You're writing a story?" and I said yes and went back into my monologue as she lifted up a few pages. I assumed that she wanted to read it so I said "That isn't the beginning. Let me find page 1 for you.", as she ripped it into two pieces and tossed it in the trash can. I just sat there in stunned silence while the rest of the class blew up and students started saying things like "That was screwed up!" and "she was finished with her work. she does that every day!". The teacher just told them to shut up and that her class was not writing class, it was science and she only wanted science to be worked on in her class. I got out of my seat to retrieve the papers from the trash and she said "if you get it I will send you to the office.". I grabbed it anyway and tried to staple it back together. She yelled for me to go sit in the principal's office fore defiance and I said "You had no right to do that. It wasn't yours." and then I left. I ended up getting detention.

My 5th grade homeroom teacher was some grouchy old lady. She'd always make sarcastic remarks at students, and she seemed grumpy all the time. I honestly thought she just didn't know how to be nice.

My chemistry teacher from high school seemed inept at his job. He wasn't mean or anything - actually, he was very nice to me - he just didn't explain things very well. I honestly have no idea how I managed to pass that class. I suppose he just liked me.

One of my spanish teachers from high school wasn't very good at her job, either. She didn't speak english very well, and couldn't seem to control the class.

This year, I have a really insane crazy old woman. She's good at explaining things, but she gives me a headache because she talks so loud. Her test questions are often opinionated, we do a lot of meaningless coloring and stupid artsy stuff, and I have 3 essays to write right now just for her one class. I don't hate her, but she is definitely my least favorite teacher this year.

Last year, I had a terrible teacher for algebra 2. She mostly graded us on our ability to fill in the blanks in her ret*d note taking system. I can't learn by watching her do examples all day, I need to try it for myself before I can understand it. I ended up barely passing the class, but only because I made a 98% on my final exam. According to her, if I didn't listen to her, I must not have learned at all, right?

Also last year I had an as*hole for an English teacher. He graded us on class participation and forced us to read out loud in class. He always made us do busywork, to prove the quote "high school is where young people go to watch old people work" is wrong, and yes he did specifically state that on the first day of that class. He was so bad I ended up in danger of failing, and as a result the counselor decided to switch me to a different class.

In my freshman year of high school, I had all bad teachers. The worst was perhaps my English teacher. She could not grasp the concept that I do not have the time to spend at least 2-3 hours per night working on just one class. Needless to say, I ended up failing and once again was switched to a different class (thank god).

I was also doing awful in geometry that year. I actually sort of liked my teacher, but one thing really pissed me off, he never let me finish my tests. I can't help the fact that I'm slow, but I'm not stupid. I knew the answers, but how can you pass when you can only do 3 quarters of the test at best? I have no idea how I did pass that class.

For biology that same year I had a really old teacher. The subject was boring anyway and I had a hard time making myself care. She should really think about retiring soon, many of the best teachers I've had were the younger ones who had just finished going through the system. Once again, I barely passed that class.

And just think, that's only from high school. I had bad teachers long before that too.

Quote:

Let me find page 1 for you.", as she ripped it into two pieces and tossed it in the trash can. I just sat there in stunned silence while the rest of the class blew up and students started saying things like "That was screwed up!" and "she was finished with her work. she does that every day!". The teacher just told them to shut up and that her class was not writing class, it was science and she only wanted science to be worked on in her class. I got out of my seat to retrieve the papers from the trash and she said "if you get it I will send you to the office.". I grabbed it anyway and tried to staple it back together. She yelled for me to go sit in the principal's office fore defiance and I said "You had no right to do that. It wasn't yours." and then I left. I ended up getting detention.

You handled that very well

Third Grade was a psycho and Fifth Grade was a real piece of work (but honestly my personality just aggravated the crap out of her and we can blame AS because it was all those traits that she hated about me)... but I have to say the worst teacher I ever had was for an easy A gen ed called Writing Essentials.

She brought in the "church bulletins" mass-forwarded email with all the "unintentional spelling errors" that apparently make it all so funny. So we had to sit through three pages of that. Then she made us write out eulogies, and with my thanatophobia I could not do that. I tried explaining that to her but she really wasn't getting it, so I left the room until that part of the class exercise was done. Everyone in the classroom understood but her. Then she kept flirting with my husband - who was just officially a friend at that time, but we were secretly dating (there were other girls in the class that liked him and I didn't want to be hated for weeks until the class was done!) - and when we made it publicly known that we were together, she really gave me a lot of attitude. Finally, she gave me a 'B'. Then she quit. It took three more semesters to get that stupid grade changed to an 4.0 and that was because the Dept Director kept blowing me off for trying to challenge a "B" grade. The Department Director finally did the research to learn that I'd been discounted an entire grade because of the eulogy exercise and that's why I was awarded the "A" to restore my properly earned GPA.

If it hadn't been the class where I met my husband, it would be counted as my worst school experience. As it is, she just counts as my worst teacher.

My ninth grade English teacher had to be one of the worst, if not the worst, I've ever had.

He was a year-long replacement for the real English teacher who had been suspended three weeks or so into the semester after a girl in one of his classes filed a complaint about him harassing her or something. The complaint turned out to be false (all of us students knew he'd never do something like that to begin with) but instead of losing face and admitting the student lied, and have to apologize to the teacher and pay him his salary, the school just left him on suspension for the rest of the year. He resigned before coming back the next year. I don't know what happened to him after that.

Anyway, with that little story out of the way, on to the pathetic replacement they got for him that year.

The guy knew virtually nothing about English or how to teach the class. He went entirely by the textbook, and didn't seem to give a rat's ass worth of interest in the material, or whether a student needed help with something. Gave us ridiculous writing assignments and projects, and even verged on treating us like we were still in middle school or even elementary. Always spoke in a near-monotone, too. A nasally monotone, at that. I spent most of that class writing scenes for stories or drawing in my notebook, or listening to music; sometimes I even did both at the same time. And I still managed to pass that class, too.

I got my first really bad teacher in Australia in 5th grade, one of thise tight-lipped older women that completely fit the stereotype of the strict teacher, nothing more needs to be said on her

Fast-forwarding to Denmark, 6th grade. In English, we had this teacher who would only condone students speaking with a British accent, which was kind of hard for me because I had settled in quite nicely with an Aussie accent somewhat reminicent of the Croc Dundee type, so she'd yell at me for not speaking proper English... Also she'd go completely mental if even a single curse word was uttered in her presence.

7th grade: Most of the teachers were switched out at this point, and I got another one of those tight-lipped strict wenches again, this time for math. At first she went mental every time she saw someone chew gum. This, however, seemed to be something she only did with her new students. We were later told by older students, that we could each buy a pack of gum and mak sure EVERYONE was chewing merrily during her classes
Also, one of the New Year traditions in town apart from felling the school's flagpole, was to blow up her mailbox

Fast forwarding to college, due to a new reform, we had to have social sciences as a mandatory subject, which would usually entail political and ethical discussions as it did when I had it in 9th grade, however, this was very different.. The guy we had for this, was easily the worst teacher I have ever had... Now, be warned as I will write a lot about him.

He was this balding man in a sweater (that was possibly knitted by his wife) that reeked of sweat and morning breath and always looked like he was on the brink of exploding with pure rage. He'd start off his lessons by marking the attendance list, a process that was usually slower than evolution itself and afterwards he'd start his lesson, which usually consisted of him doing all the talking. No room for questions or discussions at all. Not having a laptop with games along for his lessons was very much akin to brainwashing. Sometimes he'd stop his endless rants about why, among other things, the EU is awesome etc. etc. and fill up the blackboard with text that we were supposed to write down ( i was one of the few who bothered, and I even noted down his rants as well... I doubted this guy from day 1 ).

Once, we were assigned some newspaper cutouts on some political happenings and debates, and he asked us to close our laptops unless using it for notetaking, so as one of the few, I chose to use the laptop (apart from two or three others, the rest chose to write by hand, usually because they had some game running or something). At the end, when we were to discuss some aspects of the cutouts we were given, he ordered all laptops closed. I objected to this by asking how in hell we were supposed to read our notes when the screen is closed.
About .45 of a femtosecond later, he stood in front of me with a bright red face, screaming into my face to close my laptop. I stood up and calmly said no to him, he then closed my laptop and took it, me still standing calmly in place and saying: "you will give me back my laptop, I have done nothing wrong".
He stood there with my laptop under his arm, literally shaking with rage and looked at me for a while, I repeated my phrase. His answer was to take me by my arm and drag me to the principal's/dean's office, where I explained what happened with the teacher outside. I was given back my laptop and things went back to normal afterwards

Shortly before the first year exam, I found out that he had quite a bad reputation behind him, with his classes having a consistent high rate of low grades. This turned out to be true with my class as well, as more than half of the class got failing grades in his subject. He's apparently gotten fired afterwards, as he's nowhere to be seen on the college's online teacher roster.

Then there was this other guy, that we had for communications and IT... The subject was really about layout, doing websites and some elements of marketing. This one time, we were given three hours to make a website in any application we wished in order to demonstrate and discuss some layout methods. Most of us used FrontPage (we were given some intro on FrontPage in previous lessons), but one of my classmates (who did a lot of website making in his free time) decided to write up the whole shebang in raw HTML and CSS, using nothing but Notepad. It was easily the most beautiful website of them all. BUT the teacher decided to give him a failing grade.... for the simple reason that the website was too dark (it was mostly white text on black background with nice, ornamental borders and the like... it would have been quite fitting for gourmet restaurant or the like)

The latest batch of bad teachers was when I got into my first computer education. The education was for IT support and repair with the option to extend the education to server administration and other jobs. Thing is... All but one teacher had actually not had any education whatsoever within the IT field... they would usually pass as generic PC hobbyists or the like (The last guy was a true hacker, and looked astonishingly similar to Kevin Mitnick )First teacher came from Iran and had an accent so thick, you would need a diamond cutter to cut through it... only a few could understand some of what he said. Second teacher was fairly knowledeable... just not with IT
Third teacher was a guy that could do some C++, other than that, he was a knowitall... at least until I improved on one of his assignments (which was basically to type in code from a paper), which was a small simulator for logic gates... other than that, he dabbled in Visual Basic (gah )
Fourth teacher was fairly competent in the field, at least until you showed him the innards of a server... plus, he once handed out papers taken from the Danish wikipedia article on hard drives... which in fact was, and still is, mostly written by yours sincerely

My 7th grade advanced math teacher.
She was from heck, I'm convinced.
First of all, we had this detention-like thing called Par.
You got par if you were tardy or didn't do your homework or something disruptive....for most teachers.
This teacher decided to give me Par for not having a red pen...every day. (pretty much).
It get's worse.....
I was at a REALLY bad stage of life then, I was suicidal/depressed.
Most people could tell that, seeing as I wore my bangs in front of my eyes.
But what they couldn't tell was that I was that way because of autism/ADD.
When I acted ADD (spaced out while paying attention, doodled the entire time, didn't look at the screen)....my teacher just thought I was a rebellious teenager.
"Look at the board" (5 seconds later) "look at the board" (3 seconds later) "LOOK at the board" (5 seconds later) "LOOK at the BOARD!! !"
It continued like this for a while.
Then, one day, it all came down to the climax.
I didn't like the front, it was lame, and I didn't want to sit there.
I might have said something about sitting there.
Then, she TOTALLY FLIPPED OUT.
She started screaming at me, like hands on my desk, face 2 inches away from mine, top of her lungs, spit flying.
As soon as I was going to fight back, the bell rang and I GOT OUT and dropped the class.
So yeah, she was pretty evil.

My Algebra 2 teacher in high school. He was actually a long term substitute but man was he terrible. He would come to class and put up notes all and then say: "Oh wait no...wait a minute...AHHH JEEZ. Sorry guys I've been showing you the wrong thing." Then he would come in the next day...and the process would repeat.

He also made it a habit of constantly yelling at people for no reason and sending people out of the class. There was a petition to get him fired for awhile but I guess they didn't have anybody to replace him. I guess he wasn't all that bad because he knew he sucked and let everybody work together on the final exam.