posted
I remember an angry, spiteful math teacher of mine in seventh grade was doing problems on the board. I sat in the front seat all alone, and I was a good, attentive, dedicated student. This day I was putting on chapstick (the vaseline kind in a tube, very unmistakeable)... I inherited dry skin and chapped lips from my dad... anyway. She whipped around and started YELLING at me that I should PAY ATTENTION in class instead of DOING MY MAKEUP. Traumatizing for an eleven year old. Other than her, I've never had an awful teacher. I'm pretty sure she hated all girls, she was always yelling at them for clothes and makeup and perfume.
edit: oh, yes I did, my band teacher in elementary school made me hate band (and I fully regret leaving it because of him). He was another one of those eventually-fired teachers (took him throwing a chair at a student to make it happen, though).
I did have a teacher in high school who showed us Animal House. Everyone loved him cause he swore a lot and he used to work for the CIA or FBI or something and had interesting stories that he could only tell us half of. And he loved literature, so it was great learning it with him.
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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My Latin teacher Junior year let us choose our marking period grades as the answer sheet to the final was being passed around the room. I loved her.
The instructor I have now is an Army Sergeant that got busted for smoking pot, and he curses a lot. A lot. And we make fun of a lot of things we probably shouldn't which is why a Navy girl ended up running out of our class crying today. I think she should be fired. The only reason we didn't get in real trouble is that our class leader (the one that made that particularly potent comment) is a Navy Chief and pretty much bulletproof. My class minus the crybaby is cool.
Posts: 1156 | Registered: Jan 2004
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quote:The instructor I have now is an Army Sergeant that got busted for smoking pot, and he curses a lot. A lot. And we make fun of a lot of things we probably shouldn't which is why a Navy girl ended up running out of our class crying today. I think she should be fired. The only reason we didn't get in real trouble is that our class leader (the one that made that particularly potent comment) is a Navy Chief and pretty much bulletproof. My class minus the crybaby is cool.
I have a heinous coworker that was in the military for five years before spending another five years working FOR the military. Posts like this make me understand her a little bit better. I come from working for the BOY SCOUTS for five years. Needless to say our expectations of acceptable human interaction do not always concur.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
That reminds me of a teacher in high school. Our school was made up of ten buildings, and the biggest was a large space with little dividers to make "classrooms" that you had to walk through to get to your own "classrooms". Made for some interesting times. This teacher was a former drill sergeant, and taught a law class next to my algebra class and another year diagonally next to my english class. Needless to say, his voice reaaally carried and I learned more about law in those two classes than I did math or english.
edit: *giggle* kat's post wasnt there when I was typing, I didn't mean to echo Needless To Say in the very next post Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote: And we make fun of a lot of things we probably shouldn't which is why a Navy girl ended up running out of our class crying today...My class minus the crybaby is cool.
Sexual harassment in the service academies is a serious and thorny issue.
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posted
I'm not saying making anyone cry is manly. But just because one makes a girl cry does not mean one sexually harrassed the girl. Just saying.
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Oh geez, I'm sorry, that totally wasn't to you. I have no thoughts/feelings on the harrassment thing cause I don't know the circumstances.
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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I don't think I had an inappropriate teacher that ranks with these, but there were some questionable ones.
The teacher that got me interested in drama took off most of one month for personal issues, than won a cruise so took off for two more weeks later in the year. She was not brought back.
My 7th grade science teacher was bad, but not as bad as we made him. We had substitutes for the first 6 weeks of class, who had no control over the class. Then he came in without taking back authority. He set up a schedule. Read a chapter, do the questions in the back, turn them in. Anything else happening in the room he gave up on. He left the room to complain to other teachers. There were drug deals going on in the back, and I as the brightest and quickest, was coerced to allow the rest of the class to copy my answers.
I had a geometry teacher who told us to skip the symbolic logic part of the book since we wouldn't be needing logic in our futures.
But my biggest let down was one of my favorite teachers. I hung around her classroom before and after school. She had all the fun projects to do. She even took over the drama classes. It was fun. It was sociable.
It was only later that I realized I never learned a thing in her class.
In college I had two interesting teachers. One was a drama teacher who taught in two of my classes. He enjoyed telling the same stories over and over again. I numbered them, so my notes for class ran #12, important stuff, #2,#5, #20.
The other offered the class sherry on the final day. Of course it was an honors class and there were not many in it--about 12, and most were legal age. I don't think he could have gotten in too much trouble, seeing as he was Howard Nemerov--one time Poet Laureate of the United States.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Hmm.. the fun/sociable/cool projects class was the one where I learned the most. It was G/T. Most of the time we were left alone to do whatever project we were doing. I made a short (for fun, not a grade) a just shy of feature length (for a grade with the rest of the class. It was not nearly as good as the short) wrote a dozen essay length stories (not for a grade) a novella and a novel (both for a grade.)
I LOVED that class and I loved the other students I took it with and I LOVED the teacher. (all platonically of course =D )
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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There's a religion teacher at my university that made my (very religious) friend cry when he told her, "DOn't worry, I'm sure God understands why you don't love him enough to take my class."
Posts: 368 | Registered: Dec 2005
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My advisor made me cry several times. But now he's one of my favorite professors. I was just so worried about what he thought that I took everything really personally.
posted
Is it inappropriate for a teacher to lie to you? I had a G/T teacher junior year who lied directly to my face on 3 separate occasions. It wasn't a surprise to me when the G/T group dropped from about 60 to about 15 the next year.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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quote: (took him throwing a chair at a student to make it happen, though).
I had a teacher who was fired for flicking a staple into a student's eye. He wasn't doing it maliciously, just being an idiot.
A long time ago I had a teacher at my school who threw a student across the room when he was angry. He wasn't fired, although everyone knew about it. The student in question was pretty notorious for being bad (although young), so I guess they let it slide. I think also maybe (at least at the school I attended) the allowable eccentricity level was higher than normal.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I've had a disproportionate amount of really good teachers, and maybe half a dozen that just didn’t like me. I kind of have a habit of polarizing teacher’s feelings towards me. I took a theatre class sophomore year, and the teacher was, to put it lightly, a communist, hippy, anti-western religion, self-aggrandizing monster...
We got into some scuffles.
She repeatedly presented as a fact that Israel’s goal was to dominate the world and establish a Jewish hegemony over the world. In addition to her comparatively tame beliefs that modern medicine is meant to keep people drugged and in a hypnotic state to make it easier for the government to brainwash them, that the US attacked itself on 9/11, and that JFK was killed by a Zionist plot.
Whenever I tried to refute one of those points, she would tell me, "she was the teacher, I was the student, and I had no right to try to tell her what was right and wrong." Keep in mind that we’re in a theatre class, with her making these points as random irrelevant asides. The conversations usually ended with me getting sent to the office, not for being rude but for refusing to drop the issue. I ended up having to drop the class because the administration wasn't as concerned about her anti-Semitism.
The problem is she is the only teacher that does AP English, which I want to take next year, so I have to decide between taking the class I belong in and biting my lip until it bleeds every other day, or being condemned to mediocrity.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Oct 2005
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I learned so much about sex, drugs, and Vietnam from that Earth Science teacher.
That English teacher who showed Animal House that Tres thinks is so cool is rumored to have had several affairs with students. She also took a disliking to me, and once told a kid that I was friends with to move to a seat further from me because I was cheating off of his quizzes. He stopped being my friend, because he thought I was just using him to cheat. The evidence? We both had exactly the same answers on a quiz. Of course, we both got 100%. She also accused me, out loud and in front of the class, of cheating on a different occasion on a test. The evidence? I got 100% of the questions right. Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
In 7th grade I was switched into all honors after taking a placement test, and one of my teachers decided to hate me because of it. And I had her for three periods. THREE!
I was left behind because she refused to help me with the work the class had already done. She took any chance she could to make me look stupid.
I had her in art too, which I am very good at, and when we were doing paper mache sculptures we had to come up with our idea on paper before we could start. I wanted to do a really good job, so I was taking a long time coming up with what I wanted to do. She then yelled at me for being lazy and not doing anything, even after I had told her I was still thinking. She then sent me to the school councilor to talk. I told the councilor that she hated me, and then, somehow, my teacher ended up being told that I was scared of her.
Then, after the project was done, the teacher had said that mine was one of her favorites.
On a rainy day, everyone would go inside the gym to eat. After my friends and I were done eating we stood up. Then the principal came and told us to sit down. I had a confused look on my face, and then he told me to come outside with him. He said I gave him a dirty look, then I was confused even more, and I asked him why he thought that, then he said I was talking back and sent me to sit in his office till he came back. I missed some of my next class.
Posts: 1287 | Registered: Apr 2006
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Heard anything in the news recently (late July I think) about a teacher in the Midwest who got arrested for having an affair with a ninth grader at a high school in Baltimore in the 70's?
Yeah, and the worst part was, my mom had been very good friends with him, and apparently got in touch with him after he was arrested and sent him a card or something (she kept insisting he was really a very good person at heart...).
I was home alone one day, and the phone rang....Yeah, it was him.
It was awkward.
Posts: 464 | Registered: Jul 2004
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My u.s. history teacher would say funny, yet hugely inappropiate, comments to the girls in the class. He was also known for a long history of wierdness. Such as marrying a former 18 year old student/stripper. Also smoking wee with students in the dark room in photo class. Some girl said he sexually harrassed her this year, but it turns out she was lying.
Posts: 41 | Registered: Feb 2006
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quote:Originally posted by vonk: I had a highschool creative writing teacher show our class A Clockwork Orange. It was awesome. Though by the time half of the class got offended and decided they would rather sit out in the hall than watch the movie she decided to turn it off.
Yeah, I had a high school English teacher show us the same movie. He figured that, since we were the honors class, it'd be fine. I walked out not long after it started and at least half the rest of the class followed.
Yeah, it's not an appropriate movie to show to kids our age, especially not without, oh, I dunno, parental permission or something or at least telling the kids before hand what it was about so they could opt out.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
One of my middle school teachers always gave me a weird vibe. A couple years after I'd taken two years of his classes, he was investigated by the FBI for having inappropriate sexual conduct with one of his 12- or 13-year-old students (via the Internet). Charges were never filed, but he was fired.
posted
When I was in sixth grade, I was in love with my science teacher. He was a great teacher.
A few years later, I heard that he had "run away" with a friend of mine, who was a year younger. She was fourteen at the time their "relationship" was outed. I am not sure how long it had gone one, but it was at least a year.He had been her speed skating coach.
He was fired, and I am pretty sure never taught again, though he does live back in the small town now.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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Dan and Icarus bring up a good point: the "cool" teacher.
There are always one or two in middle school or high school. They stay after, they are good buddies. They like the cool kids. They often gossip about student relationships, destroy friendships, butt their noses in where they don't belong. Students think they are great because they "understand them."
Later on, as adults, we look back and realize that they understood us because they were acting like adolescents, not like adults.
I think there is a fine line, and it is not often clear where the line is/should be between teachers and students. But I think those teachers can do some serious damage.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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The worst professor I ever had was removed as the course instuctor before the final (but after the last class), and I'm pretty sure they just gave everyone an A. He was fired before the next quarter began. This was his first quarter at my school, although it wasn't his first position. Gross incompentence is something you shouldn't have to deal with.
Posts: 1621 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:The problem is she is the only teacher that does AP English, which I want to take next year, so I have to decide between taking the class I belong in and biting my lip until it bleeds every other day, or being condemned to mediocrity.
Okay, 1) you can choose to hold your tounge and not argue with a teacher even when she's saying things that are obviously not true. Took me a long time to learn that, but it sometimes does work. 2) Hatrack tells me that you can take the AP exams even if you are not in the AP classes, which I never knew when I was in HS. So you have a third option.
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You can indeed take the AP exams without the classes. I know because I didn't (I took politics instead of AP English) and I realised later that I could have completely... and even that the AP class didn't do that much preparation.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:We both had exactly the same answers on a quiz. Of course, we both got 100%. She also accused me, out loud and in front of the class, of cheating on a different occasion on a test. The evidence? I got 100% of the questions right.
I was accused of cheating without evidence. It went poorly for the teacher. We scheduled a parent-teacher conference which my Dad took off from work for, and the teacher missed that day. She had no proof I cheated. The kid sitting next to me had left his notebook out, which was missing a cover. The first page had all those questions you go over on the first day of spanish class - "Puedo ir el bano?" and so forth. The test was on subjunctive tense.
She went by and kicked the notebook by accident. This made a noise, and I looked down. Because I had looked, I must have been cheating off of it.
I got sent to the principal's office for responding to "Does anyone have any questions?" with "Is there another Spanish II class I can transfer in to?" By the end of the session with the principal, he assured me that this would be worked out. I heard from a reliable source that he chewed her out in the teacher's lounge and told her to "fix it." She ended up giving me a makeup test.
I did worse on the makeup test than the test I was accused of cheating on. It was Spanish class, and the makeup was an essay test.
The next year, she wasn't teaching any more.
My dad was accused of cheating in Latin class because his translation on a graded homework assignment was too good. After the exam, which was a translation of something original the teacher had written and which my dad did perfectly, the teacher apologized in front of the whole class for making the accusation about the homework.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
I know someone who wrote a very good essay. It was the first essay of the year and the professor had no way of knowing the girl's skills. "I would have given you an A+," the professor said, "if this was your own work."
She promptly told him it was her own work.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I had a professor who'd been teaching from the same slides for 30 years and there was no way he was going to change now. He'd come to class in plaid shirts, sandals with socks, etc. Whenever we asked a question, he'd say "the next slide will answer that question" and it wouldn't. I stopped going but my roommate didn't. I ended up getting an A (just showing up for exams) and my roommate got a B-. I still don't get it. I know I didn't learn anything from that class.
Also, I know this was discussed earlier in the thread, but I did have a comment about it. I think if we restructure our whole system from the bottom up, we could get rid of the grading system altogether. As long as children grow up without the concept of "easy A" then they can take classes they care about and people will start to gravitate towards courses they care about instead of courses they can get easy A's from.
And on a minor side-note. My sister, when she was in the second grade, wrote a poem and her teacher accused her of plagarism. That sent her home crying. She now has a master's degree in English and is currently at Harvard.
Posts: 258 | Registered: Jul 2006
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One time for our PE final we were supposed to write an essay about softball. I did mine on the history of softball. She read my first paragraph and was convinced I copied it off the internet because I had alot of the same things in my paper as another kid. Things like, the inventor of softball, and the date it was made. I don't know how I was supposed to write an essay on the history of something if I am supposed to come up with all the information without it being the same as it is.
Posts: 1287 | Registered: Apr 2006
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Tests can evaluate what you do or do not know, but they aren't meant to instruct. So, making an easy test does not automatically mean the class didn't learn anything. The evaluation may be invalid with results that are not representative of student learning, but that's another ball of wax.
I take it you are not a teacher, or at least not a very good teacher.
Every test is a learning experience for the students. A good test will help the students to better understand the course material. A bad test, just teaches something about the system.
You are correct that an easy doesn't indicate that the class didn't learn anything. What an easy test does is ensure that grades do not reflect whether the students learned the important material or not? And that isn't just important to future employers or schools that might look at the grades, it important to any student who is trying to evaluate whether or not they have learned what they need.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Belle: 4) Let students develop their own methods of organizing their notes and binders/notebooks.
That one is really, really good advice. I had a chemistry teacher who expected us to keep our notes a certain way, in a binder, and turn in the binders periodically for grading. It drove me up a wall because I was apparently the only left-handed person in the class, so I absolutely hated (and still refuse to use) binders for the purposes of writing notes. Her solution was to let me take notes in a regular notebook, then tear out the pages and put them in the binder. I think it was a complete waste of my time; we turned in binders when we had tests, and I should have spent that time studying, not transfering papers from notebook to binder.
But she took my side against my soap actress lab partner, who never so much as helped me clean up the labs. She'd copy down all my answers really quickly and walk out of class with no attempt to help. It was kind of fun to see how irritated the teacher was with her, since all the students in school thought she was so cool, gorgeous, whatever because she was in movies.
posted
I was in a class a couple of months ago where the teacher gave the same quiz on the first day as he did the last day for the final. The day after the first day, when we had a chance to look at the course material he gave a much shorter version of the test we had been given the day before. Every day he would add to it until we were back to the original test. We learned the material and then studied what we missed on the tests. It was the easiest A I've ever gotten, and it was a lot of information.
It was a short class though (six weeks), and the majority of class time was spent doing non-academic activities, so I'm not sure how that would work for something like high school.
Posts: 1156 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
I guess I've gotten off light, but this thread does remind me of when my 11th Grade Honor's English teacher told me I was "incapable of taking literature seriously" after she overheard me tell a joke about how the "turtle" chapter in The Grapes of Wrath was probably just John Steinbeck realizing that there was a serious lack of turtles in American literature. A realization I believe Dr. Seuss also made when first conceptualizing Yertle the Turtle.
But seriously, complain about this Astronomy teacher now.
Posts: 681 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
I had a professor in Pharmacy school who REFUSED to teach us. He told us the first day of class that he wasn't a very good teacher, so he didn't bother. He split us into groups, gave us pages to learn for the day, and let us read the book as a group.
If anyone had a question, they had to ask everyone in their group, then everyone else in the whole class, and only if not a single person in the class understood something would he explain it.
I guess by that logic, a pharmacist should be able to just take all the books home to read and consider it a full education. What an a-hole.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
My 8th grade english teacher had something against me. She was so against giving me A's that on one essay I got a B++++. :-\
Posts: 161 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:And that isn't just important to future employers or schools that might look at the grades, it important to any student who is trying to evaluate whether or not they have learned what they need.
That's a very good point. I know the few times I both thought I had aced a test and did poorly on it were the times I had mislearned the material - not just not learned it, but learned the wrong stuff.
Luckily, each time was a midterm and I recovered by the end of the semester. Without that grade, I would have thought I understood the material. The strangest thing about each situation is that the professor thought I was coming to argue my grade when I just wanted to know where I had gone wrong.
A poor grade after thinking I did poorly (differential equations *shudder*) was a different story.
There was one time I thought I totally tanked an essay and got an A. I had never had the aha moment in the class where it all falls into a nice mental framework and thought I was missing the point.
Turned out, I had gotten the point. And that was good to know. But, I wouldn't have learned that if the professor gave As to everyone in the class.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:My most innapropriate teacher did a handstand in a skirt on the first day, offered kids to help her come move out of her husbands house, gave us A's if we tried, and offered methods for guys to score on Valentines. This was a high school class and yes she's still there.
Who was that Breyerchic? I don't think I ever ran into this teacher...
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote: My 8th grade english teacher had something against me. She was so against giving me A's that on one essay I got a B++++. :-\
Hehe... that reminds me of middle school, where I had problems with my report card because in more than one class I had averaged final grades of A++, and report cards didn't go that high.
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:My most innapropriate teacher did a handstand in a skirt on the first day, offered kids to help her come move out of her husbands house, gave us A's if we tried, and offered methods for guys to score on Valentines. This was a high school class and yes she's still there.
Who was that Breyerchic? I don't think I ever ran into this teacher...
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