We all remember those teachers: the ones who were mean, who didn't care, or who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
The teachers who would rather save face than to admit they were wrong in front of a bunch of teenagers - even if it meant ruining your day. In other words, the teachers who were just plain awful.
A group of Redditors recently came together to share their tales of the bad teachers they encountered growing up, and you will be surprised at just how awful some of them really are. Read on to learn about the woes some of these students had to deal with growing up in school.
Don't forget to check the comment section below the article for more interesting stories!
#25 The Chemistry Of Crying
My chemistry teacher in high school was a total jerk. He would tell us if we didn't master chemistry, we should start picking out bridges to live under and how we would never get another job outside of chemistry. He would call people out in front of the class that had failed an exam, making several girls cry. The icing on the cake was one day, a larger girl asked him if she could go across campus to grab her notebook or something she left there. He said, "Yeah, sure, you could use the exercise."
#24 He Likes Me, He Likes Me Not
In my engineering class, my final exam had 23 questions. Every kid in the class got a grade percentage by multiples of five (95%, 90%, 85%), which was impossible with 23 questions. It turns out he never graded them and just gave us a grade on how much he liked us.
#23 Time For Summer School
When I was in the 12th grade, I had an English teacher who was horribly picky with essays. Everything else was fine, but essays were very hard to get good marks on with him. I spent 15 hours writing a simple 3-page essay and finished it a few days before the due date so I could have him check it over. He took it home and said he spent about 15 minutes reading it and only checked off a few grammatical errors. He said the essay was fantastic, and if I fixed those, I would get a very high mark.
I did. I failed the essay... The same thing happened for the whole year for every essay, so I had to take the course over again in summer school.
#22 No Excuses
#21 Don't Correct The Teacher
My teacher in high school tried to tell the class that Achilles was a Trojan soldier.
I was like, "No he was Greek."
Her: "No, he wasn't."
Me: "Yes, he was. He fought Prince Hector."
Her: "Oh, yeah. Right."
She sent me to the office after class for making her look bad. I got detention for disrespecting her and arguing. The rest of the lesson on The Iliad after that was watching Troy - not even reading the story.
#20 Teacher Or Textbook
My 7th-grade science teacher:
Him: "The air is around 78% oxygen."
Me: "Isn't it nitrogen?"
Him: "How can all that oxygen be nitrogen?"
Me: "Well it says in the textbook that it's 21% oxygen..."
He proceeds to "talk" to me outside, which was basically an up-close intimidation.
#19 From Third Grade To Jail
#18 Same Paper, Different Grade
Move to Trash#17 Kicked Out
I had a college professor who never once showed up to class on time. It was a Monday/Wednesday/Friday class, so it was only 50 minutes long. She would regularly show up 30 minutes late, then refuse to dismiss us until her 50 minutes were over.
So after the first week of this nonsense, some student said something to her right after she arrived late as usual. The teacher got so furious and personally offended that she kicked the girl out of class and told her to drop the course because she wasn’t going to teach someone so “disrespectful.”
#16 Bye-Bye, Teacher
Midway through the first semester, things started going off the rails. As an introduction to a book about racism, Ms. Witherspoon had us share every racist term we had ever heard and write it on the board, then added ten more. We never read the book.
One day she got tired of teaching and assigned quiet reading for the rest of the class, which was about an hour and a half. About a half hour into it, one person coughed and another laughed quietly. She then shouted, "Do you think I'm a freaking idiot?"
On her final day, she wanted us to tell her all of the bad things we had ever heard about her. She had been around that school for a couple of decades and was never well-liked, so there were a lot of stories. She wept as we told her, but encouraged us to continue. The next day, all of her personal belongings were gone from the classroom, and we never saw her again.
#15 No Vacation For You
Growing up, my family was pretty low income. My dad was a bus driver, and my mom worked as a social worker for the Department of Health and Human Services. Finally, one day, after years of saving, we bought tickets to Disney World. My first official vacation.
I still remember to this day how this teacher (3rd grade) yelled at me that she didn't know how I could have a good time with all the homework she was going to give me. "Who goes on vacation during the school year?" she asked.
She wound up giving me multiple assignments, including a daily 2-page diary and daily homework that was WAY more than what they were even doing in class. My parents were really angry... They wound up having to get the principal involved.
#14 Repent Of Your Sins
#13 There Must Be Something In The Water
#12 Bullied By The Teacher
Our teacher was new to the school, so no one knew what to expect.
At lunch one day, several of my friends and I were goofing off and tossed a couple pieces of ice at each other. We didn't disturb any other tables, and no one at ours got angry about it. She saw and decided to punish us for it with a week of detention, an essay on our wrongdoings and having to sit at a small table and not talk during lunch for an entire week.
I took a book to lunch with me one day, and she confiscated it, saying, "This is silent-lunch, not reading-lunch." So the next day, I took a sketchbook. That got confiscated as well. "This is silent-lunch, not drawing-lunch."
At the end of that quarter, she rated my conduct 0/5, which requires a parent-teacher conference (and is usually reserved for kids who get caught fooling around in the bathrooms, smoking, fighting, etc). No one else involved in the "ice incident" had gotten below a 4/5.
The final straw from the administration came when she started telling kids in class about her romantic life. She was a newlywed and would say things like, "Oh, I'm just so tired. I was up all night with my husband - we had SUCH an amazing time!" She was asked to not return the next year.
#11 Student Or Judge?
My graphic design instructor would be dead-honest about how she felt about our work, but she would also never tell you how to improve. If your work didn't meet her expectations, she would literally write "SUCKS," "AWFUL," "THAT'S TERRIBLE" or "TERRIBLE CHOICE OF COLOR" on our projects. Shortly after, 90% of classmates would stop showing up to her class
Worst part: Apparently I was a top student in her class and she would always pick me to judge my classmates' work.
#10 Something Smells Fishy
#9 It's Not My Job
#8 You Should Have Known
#7 To Argue, Or Not To Argue
Teacher: "The Crusades happened in the fifth-sixth century B.C."
Me: "B.C. stands for 'before Christ.'"
Teacher: "Yes..."
Me: "The Crusaders were Christian."
Teacher: "Yeah, fifth-sixth century B.C."
I just stopped arguing because it was useless.
YouTube
#6 My Way Or The Highway
#5 "Stupid" Questions
In elementary school, before religion was removed from the curriculum, I had a teacher who repeatedly gave me detention every time I asked a "stupid" biblical question during religion class. My parents are atheist Chinese immigrants. I had no idea who Moses was, how it was possible for him to part the Red Sea or how Jesus was able to turn water in wine and resurrect himself.
She looked at me as if I were the antichrist.
#4 Wrong Accent
I had a geography teacher who was Hawaiian (I live in Hawaii), and we learned nothing about geography, only Hawaiian culture. Before we could enter the class, we would have to do a Hawaiian chant. This was every day we had this class. When it was my turn to chant, I pronounced all the words correctly, but she said I had a "mainland" accent--I'm originally from California, so I couldn't do the chant right. She made me redo the chant seven times, and I was the only one who couldn't do it. Everyone laughed at me, and I cried at the door.
#3 No Left-Handed Writers Allowed
The worst teacher I ever had was when I was in grade two. She whacked my knuckles with a ruler because I was left-handed. She insisted I absolutely could not write left-handed. If I handed in anything that was written left-handed, I would get a zero.
#2 A Semester Of Work Down The Drain
First, my professor approved my research paper, and then after I had done all the research and written a rough draft that I turned in, she said I should pick a different topic. It doesn't seem like a big deal, except that the final paper was due in less than a week, and it was the only grade we were going to get for the entire class. To compound this, I'd been researching the topic for the entire semester, and she was going to grade our research for print-off dates to make sure that we had been doing the assignments when she assigned them. When I asked about that part of the grading, she said I would receive no credit for my research. I had to go to the dean and have myself removed from the class and take it the next year.
