Progressive Boink

[Terry Cheesecake]

I've had a few horrible teachers in my day, but really, nothing compares with the shitheads who are teaching high-school now. How do I know this? Because at 26 years old, these new teachers are my peers.

cheers d00d

[James]

Hell, she knew nothing of english.

but did she know of jujitsu AND regular karate

(seriously though that sentence is ironically and hilariously slanted)

[Duzzy Funlop]

i was just in a play where one of the characters screams "you know nothing of jobs! and nothing of this town!" so i've kinda been doing that with everything jamison.

[James]

could you not do it in a thread where you are chastising someone for not being good at english

seriously man you sound like a Final Fantasy Tactics character

[Maynard,]

The worst teacher I ever had was my high school German/economics teacher. I think I'm supposed to complain about how stupid he was, but I personally loved every second of it. Some examples of how stupid, lazy he was:

I never learned to conjugate a single verb in four years. I only know one person, who is now a German teacher, that learned any German.

He placed a transparency on an overhead projector upside down. When he saw this, he turned around the entire projector until he noticed it was projecting on another wall.

Could not figure out why his printer wasn't working until the school's computer expert had to put paper in it for him.

The German letter for G is pronounced "gay." When teaching us the alphabet, he was replace G with "San Francisco."

I forgot to do a semester project once until 10 minutes before class. So I got went to the computer lab and looked up the first German thing I could think of. I printed the first webpage I saw about the Volkswagon Beetle. I cut off the URL from the top and bottom of the page and photocopied it to full size paper. My hand written bibliography included something written by Bob Terwilliger and "The Beatles On The Beetle" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I memorized a few facts from it for my speech. Grade: B+

[emily]

It was a pretty humiliating for her students.

Then they shouldn't have been assholes and fallen asleep in class.

[Duzzy Funlop]

could you not do it in a thread where you are chastising someone for not being good at english

seriously man you sound like a Final Fantasy Tactics character

i'm sorry james, i'm sorry

[Mally]

There was one prof in college I remember as being an asshole. He taught Linguistics. I have a hard time with Linguistics anyway, and he certainly didn't help matters. If we didn't understand something and tried to ask him to clarify or give us another example, he'd get mad. Like, "I've already explained this! Why don't you understand yet?" Pretty soon nobody wanted to ask questions.

He taught two sections of this class. I was in the 9:30 section and then there was an 8:00 section. Once I was talking to a friend of mine who was in the 8:00 section. "You're in the 9:30 section?" she said. "Wow, he's always telling us how much he hates that section, how your class is so stupid." How nice!

To this day, I have trouble knowing what to do with commas, and I BLAME HIM.

And then there was my 4th grade teacher. I was a bright kid in many areas, so she assumed I must be good at everything. This is not a wise assumption. Once we had some third graders join our class for an art lesson. The "art" was some kind of paper folding. She was facing us, demonstrating. "Now fold this horizontally, now bring both ends together." I have terrible left-right confusion (I know the difference in my head, but not in practice) and I can't follow someone's movements when they're facing me, and therefore I must mimic them in the opposite way... well, you know what I mean. So I was not able to fold it the right way. The teacher got mad at me. She told me I should have been a good example to the third graders, but NO. I was just not helpful or competent at all. This made me cry. Not long afterwards, she had us make beavers out of clay. My beaver's tail wasn't flat enough. She got angry at me, saying how bad the tail was and why couldn't I just do it right? This also made me cry. These are the only 2 time I ever remember crying in elementary school. We had to come back to school for a history fair the night of the beaver incident, and I did NOT want to see that woman again. I begged my mom to let me stay home, but she made me go.

I used to hold things against a lot of my old teachers, but then I went to work at an elementary school, and I began to understand. Sometimes kids are annoying. Even the mostly saintly, patient teacher is bound to snap once in a while. And teachers are only human, bound to make mistakes. But still. Never attack a child's art skills, for heaven's sake.

[Folby]

You should just use commas like I do, all the time. Use them in place of periods, some people will hassle you about it, but I think it's great.

[Andy]

My worst was a Religion teacher who mistook a picture of Batman for a picture of the Pope.

Not kidding in the slightest.

[TheEvilGingivitis]

My grade 7/8 English teacher was more or less pretty bad.
She kept pronouncing "raucous" as "ruckus" and thus used the definition of "ruckus" as our vocabulary to be studied. I pointed out to her that they are two completely different words and even showed her the dictionary definition, which she twisted into "rough-sounding" to match her own definition. Both definitions showed up on a vocabulary test, and I lost a mark for picking the correct meaning of the word.
Dignity is negated when one's methods of retaining it are childish.

My grade 9/10 English teacher was absolutely terrible, too. She was incredibly shrill and all of the answers were either her own opinion or whatever sounded the most clichéd and pretentious. ie: one rather irritating girl answered her question of why Scout was the narrator of To Kill A Mockingbird by saying that it was "to convey her childlike innocence". Gag. Also, she would continuously mispronounce even the most basic of words (my favourite was probably "China" with a soft i) and any attempts to correct her were a form of back sass to her.

My current Leadership teacher is also annoying and shrill. She gives you this creepy stare sometimes and on the last day of Media Studies (also taught by her) last year I just stared right back in the same creepy manner.

One of the grade 5/6 teachers I used to have was both crazy and better suited to teach kindergarten-age children. She had an elaborate time-out system that involved a traffic light and clothespins.

[First-Tiger]

I'd have to go with my freshman English teacher.

• She assigned us word searches regularly. In an honors level high school class. And sometimes they weren't even real word searches. One was an advertisement for the WB's fall lineup, and had you find the characters from 7th Heaven.
• We had weekly vocab words to learn, which is kind of lame in itself, but the teacher would regularly give the wrong definitions. (e.g. "That is so opaque you can see right through it!")
• She would always take off five points for getting a question wrong. It didn't matter how many questions there were. On the midterm, my friend got a 42/50 and failed. When I pointed out that someone could get a grade of -150, she said "I don't have time to do the math."
• We had five book reports over the term. One girl passed in the same one five times and got a different grade every time.
• We watched "ET" for some reason, then had to write a 500-word or more summary of the plot. One kid failed for making his 490 words.
• We also watched "Remember the Titans" two or three times.

We did not learn a single thing that year. The worst thing about it was that the other freshman English teacher was known as one of the best and most dynamic in the whole school. A few kids transferred from the honors section of our class to the other teacher's lower level sections. I wanted to, but couldn't because of scheduling my other classes.

Also, in one of my classes that same year, we had a substitute teacher. He was a big, intimidating older guy who looked like he had been in the armed forces. He brought out a TV in front of the class and said, "This isn't on the lesson plan, but it's something that I feel very strongly that you need to see." I was kind of scared shitless at that point. He turns on the TV, and it's a video of The Beegees in concert. When some kids started laughing, he flipped out and threatened to give everyone detention if anyone talked again. Then he just sat at the back of the class and tried to make sure everyone was paying attention. It may have been the most surreal thing that has ever happened to me.

[Wat, But A Girl]

Some notes about the instructor of the Drawing 1 class I took two years ago:

-Talked in a very soft, slow voice with a very significant lisp that would make one assume immediately that he was gay (not trying to stereotype here, that's just how it was). However, he had a wife and constantly tried to hit on female students. Also liked to touch everyone constantly. To this day I can not figure out what he was.

-Related to above: also frequently and creepily tried to convince his more attractive female students to take a job as a nude model for the art department. At one point a friend of mine who was in this class and her roommate happened to be walking around campus and they ran into him. He started making awkward conversation and demanded to see her sketchbook on the spot, then asked her roommate if she wanted to take said job.

-Once at the beginning of class started going on about Google Earth (I guess he had just found out about it) and said that he liked to use it to look at beaches in France because he could see the sunbathers.

-Produced really awful drawings with terrible perspective and shading.

-Expected everyone to basically copy the example pictures he made in class for each project. Would pretend not to understand when you explained why you made a particular creative decision in a picture if it went against his advice, and would sulk like a child if you didn't correct it immediately.

-After each big drawing project everyone had to do like a one-on-one thing where he'd critique your drawing and you'd have to shovel pretentious bullshit about why you did this and that down his throat. During my last critique he kept making fun of my drawing because I had taken artistic liberties with it (i.e., slightly going against the guidelines to make it look good), which I wouldn't have minded so much except that after I told him I didn't care if he graded it down a little he kept going on and on about all the things he didn't like about it. Also he flat-out told me that if I tried to take Drawing 2 with him he would fail me no matter what.

[Rusty Cooledge v2]

Holy fuck I feel bad for all of you.

[normalman]

The first thing that comes to mind is my Junior Year Keyboarding teacher, Mr. Ridgeway. Now, you'd think it'd be hard to screw up a typing class that consists solely of using a typing program and getting as far as you you can every day, but this guy was aggressive. Now, I've got nothing against deeply religious people, but this guy took it a bit too far. As the year went on, he devoted more and more time each period to "speaking out" to us, which mostly involved speeches about the true meaning of friendship and about how Jesus loves everyone, regardless of what that person may think or do.
He also would put up BC comics on the overhead projector and somehow spend twenty minutes explaining why a single strip was very, very funny. And you guessed it, if anyone was trying to get some typing work done while he was inspiring us, the result was a detention. I probably could've raised a stink about him preaching religious things in a damned typing class, but I almost felt sorry for the guy.
Runner's up include my bitter, washed up drawing teacher from college, who would never shut up about how he almost made it, and would constantly show us his concepts he pitched to Comedy Central, which included "Hippie and Anarchist Live in an Apartment and Do Drugs" and "Celebrity Court", which featured wonderful jokes about Micheal Jackson being a pedophile and Mike Tyson eating people's ears. My fifth grade English teacher hated children, teaching, and reading, and would purposefully try to fail children that she thought were "bad seeds". She once assigned us a project without telling us about it, and when the due date came and the class was confused, she called us all "conspirators" and gave everyone a O. What a sweet old lady.

[tmbg13]

My fifth grade English teacher.

Replace "fifth grade English teacher" with "junior year English teacher" Then add that she was in her 20s, consistently mispronounced words (like guile), constantly lost shit, and was out half the time because she was the debate coach, then you have what I had to put up with last year.

[fergusnoodle]

I had a teacher who just randomly started teaching us at the end of the term and he said that in public schools you didn’t have to learn maths. The reason you didn’t have to learn is because public schools in NSW are run by communists and communists hate maths. This was at TAFE and bizarrely most of the people in our class didn’t attend public school but my friends and I did and we told him that we had studied maths our whole school career. He said that our school must not be run by communists yet, we tried telling him that you have to study maths until year ten and then he was all AH HA! YOU DON’T HAVE TO STUDY MATHS IN YR 11 AND 12 COMMUNISTS! Bizarrely this guy was the MC at a wedding my friend was at so I dunno teacher/MC I guess.

I had too many terrible teachers to talk about but the English department wanted to throw me out of school because I wasn’t serious about the HSC. The last day of school the head of English said that he will see me drunk in the gutter at schoolies, which is like spring break for bogans I guess. At the time I laughed because I wouldn’t be caught dead at schoolies and I was thinking of him at schoolies being a total paedophile. Now I just think that man needs a different career as he has psychological problems. I feel better now that everyone else had horrible teachers as well but I am still pretty screwed up and lack confidence about my academic abilities due to these horrible people. It is fun to laugh about but these fuck knuckles are supposed to be moulding children into people when children are at their most vulnerable but a lot of teachers are psycho! I understand that children are horrible monsters also, but when I was at school I noticed the teachers paying a lot more attention to me disagreeing with them rather than the people who were causing trouble. Too wussy to deal with troublemakers I guess. Anyway all my teachers sucked except for my French teacher who agreed to pay me $15 each full week of school I attended!

[B]

The worst teacher I ever had was my second grade teacher. She was the first person to show me that learning wasn't amazing and fun - it was a chore, and that I will be punished if I don't do it properly. She once sent me to the principal's office for coughing. I have pulminary fibrosis and was in the hospital regularly for severe bronchitis. When I got there the principal went "wtf" and sent me back, and told her to stop doing that.

My least favorite ever was Mrs. Brown, my 10th grade Speech/Drama teacher. The whole year I put up with inane bullshit to get into the big class production. We were going to do "Dracula," and I wanted to be Dracula. SO HORD I wanted to be Dracula. For at least two months before the project was announced I asked her when auditions were. She said "later." The project gets announced, I ask her when auditions are. She says "later." Time goes by and I keep asking her, and she keeps telling me she isn't sure, and that she'll let me know when she figures it out.

Then, one day, I'm sick.

I come back the next day and SHE HAS HELD THE AUDITIONS AND ALL OF THE PARTS ARE TAKEN. I wanted to break off the fucking leg of some fucking local table and stab her heart to death. I ended up being cast as the "Wolfman," a character who has to dress like a furry and chases the cheerleader playing whoever around a couch before being killed.

I was the best Wolfman ever. I was Lon Chaney the motherfucking 11th. I chased the cheerleader, hammed it up, growled and howled, and when it was time for me to die, I took a huge back bump through a coffee table. At the end of the show, I got the biggest cheers. I had no lines and EVERYBODY involved and EVERYBODY in the crowd said I was the funniest and best part.

She gave me a B.

[webber Cooledge]

is that how you got your name

[Alex]

EVERYBODY said I was the...best.

She gave me a B.

Secret origins!