Worst Teacher/Professor ever?

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I have been very lucky during my education. I have had very good teachers and my elementary, middle, and high schools all earned A's from the State of Florida.

My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Susan Moore, was the first one I was not fond of. I do not think that she wanted to accept a special needs student into her class. I moved to Jupiter, Florida, in October 1994 (I still live in Jupiter today.) and it was towards the end of the first quarter of the year. I was acting up a lot at home and at school due to the move. Ms. Moore gave me bad marks in my behavior on my first report card. She failed to inform my mother of what had happened to me at school. Had my mother known, she would have helped me correct the behavior at home. I eventually shaped up after that disastrous report card.

My second bad teacher was my seventh grade science teacher, Mrs. Carol Purcell (I eventually had a different Purcell for science in eighth grade, not related to the seventh grade one.) She often got upset with her students when they would ask questions and she had me thinking that I had cancer cells in my body as a twelve-year-old. Thankfully, I only had her for part of the year as my classmates and I spent the second half of the year with two different teachers.

My third bad teacher was my Algebra II Honors teacher in tenth grade, Mr. Mark Smith. That man barely taught the material in this class that all high school students in Florida must pass in order to graduate from high school! Students who typically make A's and B's in school were earning D's and F's in his class, including several of my classmates. I managed to earn a B, but that did not make me happy as I typically make A's in math. Mr. Smith briefly became my precalculus teacher in eleventh grade, but I quickly switched out of his class and I earned an A with the other teacher.

The only other bad teacher I ever had was Professor Witny Librun. He taught my precalculus and Calculus III classes in college. I had no problems in the former, but I really had problems with him in the latter. He often skipped steps when working out problems on the board, usually omitting the previously learned concepts that would be used to solve the new problems. I often got C's and D's on the tests, despite my nonstop studying. I miraculously got an A in the class, though! He must have known that I needed to pass that class to transfer to Florida Atlantic, where I am now.

I'm just grateful that I've had so many great teachers in my life and only a few bad ones. I plan on becoming a math teacher so that I can make a difference in the students' lives.

Ooh, I have met some truly terrible teachers. I do bilingual education, so besides the quality of the work, these people have a tendency to have massive communication problems in English. I am astounded at the stellar marks the program gets in the yearly assessments.

The absolute worst one would have to be my Geography teacher. He has the unfortunate problem of speaking English poorly and not liking being corrected. He refers to both parentheses and quotation marks as "angles". How he came to use this word is a mystery, as does not appear to be related to his native language's words for them. He pronounces "chaos" as "gay-os". He will often be at a loss for words, use poorly translated words, or simply not use English (which should be a capital crime; he is employed to speak English!).

And I've not even mentioned the teaching itself. He will, as a homework assignment, tell us to read certain pages of the book. Then, we will spend the following lesson reading those pages aloud, even though all of us have already read them and reading aloud is very slow. After this, he feels the need to translate the page for all of us, even though he's the only one who has trouble with it. 3/4ths of all lessons are wasted on this reading/translating process.

That's not the worst though. One time, he handed us a print-out of a page from Wikipedia and made us write extensive definitions of all the supposed "hard words", which were mostly quite simple. Then we had a lengthy class discussion about those words, not the content of the page. After that, we each read a sentence of the page in turn and translated it. It's a bloody Geography class, not English As a Second Language! To think he gets payed good money (well, 'tis but a teacher's salary, but still) to give is print-outs of freely available (and possibly incorrect) Wikipedia pages...

High School: some sort of computer teacher. She sent me into a meltdown one day, and ultimately I ended up switching schools (not strictly because of that though...though that isn't what she thought)...she said something like "yeah, I didn't think you would make it here." When I asked her for help (only one time) she told me she didn't have time to help people, she had a class of 20-something kids. And she was going to give me a zero one day (not just for the day) because I didn't have the right notebook or something. I think she was seriously bitter or something.

College: I had a very sweet instructor, but she had no idea what she was doing. She held a doctorate but had no idea how to teach us. She told us to read at home, and in class she basically had us read textbooks aloud It felt like 2nd grade.

I had another professor wasn't a terrible instructor, but he gave me a really hard time. I had some medical related absences (in the hospital more than once during his class) and he basically didn't believe me. He lowered my grade to like a C and wouldn't change it until I got these hospital records to prove it. This was all even though I was registered with the disability office.

My third grade teacher.

For some reason, my third grade teacher hated me. She was always looking for ways to get me into trouble, including falsely accusing me of beating another student and, on another occasion, pulling the fire alarm.

I had 2 worst teachers:

My US History teacher in high school was horrible.. At first he gave us a lot of sheets that NOONE could keep up with, so he decided to go slower. BUT instead of changing his approach, he just went TOO slow. So when he gave us a practice regents as a final (a week before the real deal), I noticed that a lot of stuff didn't look familiar. So I asked him, then he said, "Oh we only got through half of the material." I was furious... when I told my parents, they researched the curriculum and discovered we actually got only through a THIRD of the material (we were supposed to have gotten to the Clinton/Bush era, but only got to the civil war!) The worst part was that since I was in a BOCES programthere were only fouror five kids, then he blamed it on us!! ugh

The other was my art teacher. She was extremely rude to us and even made fun of one kid she didn't like for still being in high school (he's 20), which is really mean in my opinion. Then she encouaged other kids to make fun of him! Plus her teaching method was horrible as well... another kid worked hard on drawing a bird, and instead of showing him a different technique on a separate sheet of paper... she erased his and drew in her own! When he confronted her she said "Well if you want it to look bad, go ahead!" Then when I was talking too much about a subject, ( which I tend to do sometimes) did she pull me aside later to discretely tell me? No, she ranted about it to the rest of my class after I left! Then when the principal confronted her about it, she later ranted about THAT in front of my peers!

Both of them were extremely unprofessional.

Those are some of the many reasons I'm glad I'm out if high school!

-Kate

Calculus II where teachers introduce numerical integration, integration by parts, etc. was difficult when the teacher would rather teach from a handout they created before the semester. After the first exam every student got basically half the points free because he screwed up his own formulas, proof's etc. and needed the class to correct him frequently both in lecture and revisions to his notes. He did not get us a final copy of his handout until four months after the class was finished, and I withdrew at the last possible moment too in order to avoid dealing with his terrible work. This was also when I was beginning my assessment as well.

In college it has to be my theater instructor.She was always screeching instructions in the auditorium. She was also overweight and alcoholic. She would always assign group work everyday in class because she was to lazy to make tests.

I've had only a few teachers and professors that I've really disliked over the years. I had one prof in University who always picked on me. She used to make fun of my facial expressions all the time. It really pissed me off. My parents said that she teased me because she liked me. I disagreed. She is very nice outside of the classroom but I guess she felt she had to entertain the other students at my expense. The last class that I took with her was Romantic Novel and she had six to seven novels that had to be read during the semester. This was impossible for me because I was enrolled in four other courses that also had heavy reading. Also, I was not all that interested in the novels at all and I only took the course because she wanted me to in the class I took with her in the previous (Winter) semester. She did not remember me at all when I came into that class in the Fall and made fun of me even more. I was also very intimidated because I felt like the dumbest person in the room. We had to go into groups for discussion about the books we had read and this proved to be very difficult for me. I was glad when that course was over. I try and avoid her whenever I see her at work. When I graduated, I had to give her a card for her to read with my name on it. I was so nervous because of her treatment of me in the past but she smiled and said hi when I gave her the card. She is a nice person outside of the classroom but I really didn't appreciate the teasing I got from her in class.

Another one of my profs actually made fun of another student with Asperger's. This student would randomly say things in class that kind of went with what she was saying but were redundant and trivial. She accepted it at first but then got really mad with him. The students also made fun of him but yet he is somehow friends with most of them. I was afraid to speak in her classes because of this. She even got offended when he passed her in the hall and didn't say hi to her. What does she expect? She embarrassed the s**t out of him and made him feel vulnerable. I even used to make fun of him until I found out he had Asperger's. Most of the NT classmates knew but still made fun of him. She was the one who caused that to happen. I lost all respect for her after seeing what she did to him.

Well 3rd grade hands down!! I did something wrong I had to write lines. I gave my teacher a gift and she said "Don't think this will get you out of trouble" I was stunned I just got you a damn Christmas gift (is what I thought) She sucked BIG TIME!

My 7th grade English teacher. If you did not raise your hand at least six times in one class period, he would basically fail you for that day. Participation was about 60% of your total grade, hence the effect from such was horrible. He also had a tendency to mock students who were shyer than others.

5th grade math teacher who magically repeats the same multiplication and such excercises OVER and OVER again because some slow f***s can't learn the stuff and we have to pass Every Child Left Behind tests. (Thankfully, I got into Pre-AP classes where there was real work). Also, she marked off a problem for doing .001x instead of x/1000 (wasn't x, for illustrative purposes only)

Oh how I dislike tangents. Even some professors who I otherwise like drive me crazy with completely irrelevant tangents. If they want to talk about football, their kids, cars, politics, and what's wrong with today's students, that's fine, but not while I'm paying to sit in their class and learn something about chemistry or biology. If they don't have enough relevant things to say to fill their class time, I'd rather just leave early, at least.

The worst, though were a couple of elementary school teachers. My first grade teacher thought I was a problem child because I did my work in 2 minutes then daydreamed, instead of following along with the class. It didn't matter that my answers were right because the questions were too easy. Also, the fact that I kept losing pencils was apparently evidence of an attitude problem. She also asked 20 6-yr olds to stand in an orderly line in front of her desk and be quiet while she corrected everybody's worksheets one by one, and then made it an issue if she got a page that had been rolled up, dog-eared, folded or rendered non-flat in any way. Thus, a good part of first grade was spent waiting in line bored out of my mind listening to my teacher complain about pages not being flat. "Ce n'est pas un hotdog." Over and over and over.

Then there was the librarian/music teacher who wouldn't let me take out Dr. Who books because she thought they were inappropriate for my grade level and might give me nightmares. Then she confiscated, supposedly permanently, the stuffed animal I couldn't sleep without because I was fidgeting with it in music class, and then was cross with me because I didn't want to sing about rainbows anymore. I stole my stuffed animal back, and never forgave her.

Hmm ... my preschool teacher was pretty bad. She was crabby and impatient, and she yelled at me all the time. She should NOT have been teaching 4 and 5 year olds.

I did have a math teacher in high school, though ... he was a nice guy, but SO inefficient! He had one of those smartboards (where you write on the whiteboard with special markers, and the writing shows up on the computer screen). The writing would always show up half done on his computer screen, so he would interrupt the lesson, like, every 5 seconds, to go edit the writing on the computer screen. A lot of it was really nitpicky stuff, like closing his "o's" and dotting his "i's" and crossing his "t's". He probably spent about as much time doing that, as he did actually teaching. This group of boys who sat behind me were always snickering when he did this - it actually WAS pretty funny!

He also gave "take home tests" a lot, and would be like "now, I trust you all not to cheat and look at your class notes" ... so you can imagine what happened then. And he almost never gave homework, and I never really learned the material, so I would either always do really badly on tests (in class, and stuff he hadn't really prepared us for) or I would do relatively well (because they were take-home).

Worst teacher ever: Math teacher in high school, had him for two years in a row.

He was vicious! Used to make fun of students and a few times actually said how much he enjoyed making them cry. He made my last year in there miserable, often told me I shouldn't bother to go to school, tried to get me expelled before we even reached half of the first term. And most notably, approached me in the school yard, when I was going over some reading material in my free time, and said "don't bother, I'll make sure you get a bad grade either way". I think about him and feel angry and powerless all over again. He almost got me expelled for ####'s sake! (over a green jumper, that should've been navy blue. According to him, it was the last straw, after being rebellious for almost three years at school. Never quite understood what he meant).