Forums → The Tavern → Terrible teachers

Better thread is better.

*slaps Seal of Approval on thread*

I have more or less been blessed with good teachers so far, with the good being subjective; though I wouldn't say any of them were excessively harsh. A certain degree of harshness is good, I find the older I get, the teachers get more and more lax since they treat us as adults, which on one hand is nice for the maturing process, but bad when one tends to throw in the towel and buckle under huge stress, with no one prodding us from the rear.

I did have teachers who had mean streaks, such as a teacher who stuffed grass down my shirt when I was playing and not paying attention during gym class. Same teacher ripped my book apart for bad handwriting.

But I'm grateful to her, because she pushed me in my adolescence, and she was fantastic at teaching. Harsh, but fair, and kind when you show flair for work, or you just put in effort.

So no, I haven't came across ''terrible teachers''. Might have gotten knocked around and given light beatings a few times when I was younger, but they contributed towards my entry into the top school here, so that's fine and all.

As for my teachers now, I have a bunch of white expat British teachers, three of whim like to tease me and use me as a joke punching bag in front of the entire lecture hall. I don't mind since being friendly is a nice sign from a teacher, better than being a silent middle of the road dodderhead.

And to not make this post an entire waste of space, here's to my English teacher in "high school*":
While generally being eccentric and kinda air headed, she did hvae some awesome moments of "Are you serious?!!". Besides refusing to ever give an explanation on why we couldn't pronounce her name in any fashion we wanted, she also was quick one day to point out an error the entire class had made. An error we had been instructed to make by the grammar book we had, which she had told us to use.
We are talking some 20 students making the exact same "error", with our dearest teacher the only one who had gotten it "right", even if that right was against anything the grammar book had said.
And thus we used most of the class arguing with her about whether or not she was right and the book wrong, or if we should get a better grade for our translations.
I can't remember what it ended up with. I think she decided there was no more to it and we all got our crappy grade, but she might have redeemed herself.


I'm not American, we don't have high schools here, but eh.

Well, I can throw in some one of my examples I suppose.

During my high school days, we had one English teacher who was pretty cool. He was laid back, cracked jokes and taught and enjoyable class. However, he was gender biased when it came to grading papers and reports.
All the 'retty' and 'opular' girls always got grades in the high 80s-100 range. Regardless of how decent the assignments ended up being. Everyone else, myself included, had to work our knuckles and minds to a sticky paste in order to barely pass. And I had this teacher for two years in a row.

Example of gender bias:

'Pretty/popular' girl:
One did a report on some idiotic book. Maybe "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" or other such nonsense. It was obvious she just skimmed the book, sparksnotes'd the rest and slapped it all together into a shabby little breakdown of the book. What did she get? 85.

Myself:
I read, cover to cover, "Mein Kampf". For those of you that do not recognize the title or have not read all of it, it is Hitler's autobiography of his life and the rise of his National Socialist movement. Split into two parts (The first detailing his life and the rising of the National Socialist movement), and the second about the crazy beliefs he had after the movement had taken hold of Germany. I may be over simplifying a tad, but you get the idea.
I presented and extensive and well-presented breakdown of the book. The ideologies, the writing style and interpretation of the message in it. It was a solid project. What did I get?
A 70. Because, according to him, I "did not fully grasp the message in the literature."

Voidy, did I somehow get your teacher? Because that's how my lit teacher is now.....Chick Lit over an important political Bible? What's the world gone to?

"Mein Kampf"

Is it actually called that in English?

Reported him for sexual harassment.

Yes. Apparently translating the title into English would of confused people or something. Calling it "My Struggle" might of made people believe it was some self-help book or the like.

People reported him, nothing happened.

Oh hmmph. Terrible can mean a range of meanings I guess, and harshness is a factor I throw in to judge, since most teachers here would be harsh when considered outside the Asian context, so when I say harsh....It really means something. But terrible? I don't think I've encountered a teacher who is genuinely terrible; most of them explode only when the student is stupid enough to wave the red flag in front of the bull. I had a teacher who was excellent at teaching Mandarin, but because of one student who has a love-hate relationship with him, he made him empty the wastebin, and mount it on his head. Or another time, both started enacting Tom and Jerry and ran around the class when the teacher tried to grab him. Or when he booted the student out of class and told him to create a new class. But only because the student pushed him into insanity land. So no, no indisputably terrible teachers....yet. Must jog my memory.

Off topic: Because that's the book's infamous name, and most people would instantly recognise it even in other languages. The English Version I have has the German title printed on it too.

While not really a teacher per se:

During my first year of school, I was on the bus and some girl bit my arm fairly hard. So, reacting like a normal person would, I pushed her away from myself immediately. She banged her head off of the window by the seat and started crying.
The bus driver freaked out and called the principal in to yell me at.

He took me off the bus, started full on yelling at me (saying "What the hell were you thinking?" and "What's wrong with you?&quot. He then decided it would be a great idea to grab me by my shoulders and slam be against the side of the bus, to see if I liked how it felt to get shoved around.

When I went through the last couple of years before "high school" I had a language teacher that had a most wonderful habit of giving me the same grades over and over again. I could have written Shakespeare level essays and she would still have given me that C+/B.

Yes I rather like a teacher that makes it harder to do well in the class because they make you study more, as long as they do grade well and give everyone a fair shot at an A. I always start hating teachers who give you projects that don't really have to do with the material we learn in class because you're not really learning anything nor really showing what you learned. That's why I like math so much because it's all test grades and if you know the material you do really well. That is until our teacher started making us do "summaries" of each chapter for a grade because people weren't doing well on the exams.

There is also the pushover teacher who gives everyone an A for no reason. I would hate these teachers except they give me an A so I can't really complain. I just get mad because I work twice as hard as others do because we all get A's.

I haven't really experienced a truly [/b]terrible[b] teacher yet, but wow these sound bad

Thres a supply that has come in a couple times and yells at us for standing outa line and the one day she yelled at us for passing her class when they were just standing by the wall!
Also the one time at lunch my friend started choking on his grapes (it was funny) and told us all to cut our grapes. THAT IS SO DUMB

I like turtles.

Obvious troll is obvious.

*on-topic* My teachers, meh, they're okay. They can be kinda pissy at times, but, overall, they like me.