share your bad teaching experiences

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OK, let's start a thread about really annoying teacher you've had...

Let me give a story:

It was a design & technology course. We were meant to create some artefact, but before that draw out the dimensions. I couldn't draw 3D and when speaking with the teacher, he just spoke to me as if I was ret*d and couldn't get it (well, I really couldn't get it).

Anyway, any stories of bad teachers...

Was it one of those 1, 2 or 3 point perspective drawings; or isometric?
I remember having to draw in the horizon line line in for those. They were hard. The only way to explain 3D drawing is by drawing a diagram: can be confusing though if not explained properly. All those set-squares and desks...

I think it was a little unfair of your teacher to treat you that way and not offer support, but then again teachers aren't perfect.

I’ll start off by saying that most teachers I’ve had have been great bar the odd one or two. Remember that teachers are also human though and are not immune to stress.

I remember one science teacher going over the same topic again and again because he liked it. He was fascinated with one species of animal to the extent that he had to mention them every lesson. So engrossed was he by the living habits of these animals that he always mentioned them at every possible opportunity.

If we were talking about the composition of concrete or something completely unrelated he’d always end up talking about his “pet” critters. His logic was often tangential in the extreme scrawled illegibly onto cards, which was a shame because he clearly knew a great deal about his subject and was so well read.

In the end, he apologised to us because he had not been able to cover all the required material for the exam. He admitted that he’d legitimately forgotten to teach us a topic because he’d been so “caught up in other things”. I however had revised the required material for the exam because I basically had to learn the entire syllabus from the textbook and numerous trips to the library on my own. My independent research and my taking the initiative can’t have done me any harm though.

The teacher was so impressed with my organisation skills, that he basically relied on me to remember when he’d set homework assignments and when they were due. Whenever there was any doubt as to what homework had been set, he’d say to everyone:

“She’s written it down! She always writes it down in her diary! She’ll know!”

So I became the “unofficial” class secretary (not out of choice by the way and not for the first time in my life either). I felt sympathy for him though. His organisational skills reminded me frighteningly of my own extreme executive dysfunction issues that I’d had in the past (before I’d forcibly trained myself to get organised). His office frequently looked like it’d been burgled. There’d be nowhere to sit for all the mountains of paperwork and he’d frequently disappear under them. It was a stupidly cramped and tiny office anyway, not fit for purpose. It was cruel keeping anyone in there for any length of time.

He frequently lamented on the rigidity of the new fangled syllabus and often disagreed with examiner’s recommended answers to practice papers. He’d give long rambling speeches and ask us to make copious notes on them. He’d talk for half an hour about what we should write as an answer a one mark question.

He desperately wanted to teach enthusiasm for his subject “outside the box”. I don’t begrudge him for that: being a teacher is tough, especially if the syllabus is formulaic. He certainly didn't mean any harm and wanted the best for us.

Last edited by AmberEyes on 26 Feb 2009, 3:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.

There was one teacher (also a nun) who really annoyed me. We'd attend her class once a week. Every time she spoke to me it was to comment on how quiet I was, or to tease me that I didn't like her etc. From first meeting her, I'd become selectively mute, and could never reply to her questions or comments. Her focus on this made me even more anxious, and so I'd completely ignore her whenever she spoke to me. It was impossible to speak in her presence, and she'd just find it amusing and make it worse.

Well, I had a long series of teachers who didn't like me. This sounds paranoid until you look at the reasons:

I didn't do my schoolwork often enough yet got decent, passing grades and on occasion even corrected them.
I knew words they didn't know, and often spoke in a sarcastic tone learned from my numerous problem child older siblings.
All the students, as far as I could see, spent much of their day insulting one another. I lacked the subtlety to do so without getting caught.
I was backward, filthy, and tended to attract negative attention (teasing) which, since I was considered to be bringing it upon myself, was never much discouraged by teachers or administration.

So the teachers and I nurtured a mutual dislike for years. I consider it immature of them to have allowed it to be so visible. The worst ones were first, the one who would actually crack jokes on me in class, second, the one who told the whole class about work I hadn't done and said that maybe if I got embarrassed enough I'd do the work next time in order to avoid future incidents (yeah, I was passing anyway, so naturally I deliberately did not do the work. Why would I, at 14?), and Ms. Sylvia Neil, the wicked Witch of the South. She was supposedly the advanced placement teacher, but all she really was, was a frowzy wannabe who had delusions of a higher artistic sensibility. She resented my casual approach to education and got so that she would send me to the office for minor mistakes that she would have calmly overlooked in her pet students.

All in all, I have found a sad lack of teachers who look for the students strengths rather than taking personal offense at the student's weaknesses.

My worst experience happened when I was five. The regular teacher was away and we had a relieving teacher instead. The class was quite disruptive, but I was not (as I was to the best of my ability, a "little Miss rules follower" at the time).

She was getting shorter and shorter of temper and we had not even gotten to morning tea/interval yet. She had us all sit on the mat not long before morning tea/interval and much of the class was being very noisy (I was desperately straining to "sit up straight" as per usual, although in hindsight I suspect I failed rather spectacularly at actually achieving this). So she tells us that the next person to talk or make a noise without her having spoken to them was in big trouble.

Everyone quieted down and this hag of a wench starts talking. As was quite usual, someone behind me decided to give me a short sharp tap in the ribs, and as they no doubt predicted precisely from earlier reactions, I jumped (quite a feat while sitting cross legged on the floor) and screamed/yelped loudly.

Before I even turned to see who had jabbed me, the teacher demanded I come to the front of the class. When I got there, she grabbed me by the ear and swung me around, dragging my earring and causing a small rip in ear. I still have a very small and barely visible scar from the incident.

I had a student teacher in 6th grade and she was horrible. She lose our school work and say we have a missing assignment and make us do it again. I have had to do the same school work over I already did and I hated it so my mother started making copies of it at home and keep it in a drawer in my dad's office and when my teacher lose that assignment, my mother would make another copy and I'd turn it in again.

When she teach math, she did bla bla bla, talked a lot and it would bore us kids out so lot of them would goof off and they throw things and move around in their seats and the teacher would never look up. I would be in my seat and I'd take out a book to read. The teacher would see me and take the book out of my hand and say "You need to pay attention" so I take out my notebook and write and she take that away too and tell me I need to pay attention, so I would lie my head down and sleep. The school seemed to like picking bones about me and ignore the other kids in the video. My mother had movies get taken of me in school and she watched 6 whole hours of the video and saw how other kids misbehaved and goofed off and I had one outburst because one student kept bugging me and I kept telling me to leave me alone so I finally hit him. The staff made a big deal about it and my mother was on my side.

I can't remember, but it was some excercise to help use understand and implement 3D drawing. I am spatially challenged, I'll probably never learn to drive.

I understand teachers are only humans, after all I come from a family of teachers! I just was doing something and the memory of that teacher came to me, so thought I'd start an amusing thread....thanks everyone for contributing.

When I was a kid my teacher was unable to show me how to tie my shoes left handed.

Seriously.

Currently I'm having problems with a lab TA in an engineering class. She basically tells us how to do the lab and how to do all the calculations, so that labs consist entirely of following instructions, with very little learning involved. She also grades labs with random marks and "points off" at the top of the paper, with no explanation of what you did wrong. I made the same mistake three times thanks to that. And yesterday I became aware that she evidently has no concept of how data translates into graphs, because she was evidently totally convinced that you could change length data from "measured from top" to "measured from bottom" by just sorting the data points the opposite way--forgetting that this does not work for anything but utterly linear data with the exact same intervals between the lengths.

Here's what I mean:

Initial data, measured from bottom (min 0, max 10):
1
5
8
9

Initial data, measured from top:
9
5
2
1

The way the TA re-sorted the data:
9
8
5
1

See the problem here?... The intervals are different so the concavity of the graph will obviously change. And this girl is a grad student...

Of course, with my wonderful ability to communicate verbally, I was unable to translate that idea from the graphs in my head into the English language, so she still thinks I must be utterly stupid and prone to changing experimental data.

"The way to remember how to spell friend's is friendships always end... friend ends in end."

- Mrs. Hudson

She said it with no smile, just a smirk of hatred.

Believe it was the second grade or earlier.

Nim,

That actually is a good tip, even if it DOES convey a bad idea.

Callista,

I had a similar teacher. I was BY FAR the BEST student in his class, and he knew it, and I got an A, but I got a 98 on a paper I SHOULD have gotten a 100 on! He marked me down two points because I said that the first index on an array would be linear. I said that although it means NOTHING really, and either answer could be correct, a decent person would make the earlier indexes linear since they would be more likely to be incremented first. I never got what the point was though. It wasn't specified in the language, so it wasn't a certainty.

The teacher I hated the worst, for this type of discussion, is a spanish "teacher" I had. She was ARROGANT, and once even INTENTIONALLY invaded people's space. She SAID this was to annoy people. Her theory was that they would then obey her commands. She was actually SURPRISED that some kids hurt her car.

lets see

one time i had to get up infront of an english class to do an oral book report. (public speaking is not my strong point)
anyway i get up and she twice interrupts me to repeat the stuff i just said, i look in her direction and she say's "don't hit me keira". which was weird because i did not do anything threatening at all.

this teacher would collect the assignments for the people that did them on time and give them to people that were not finished as an example, but people would just copy them. the sucky bit is that the people that copied would get higher marks then the ones that didn't copy.

both stories are about the same teacher. my brothers and sisters had her as a teacher and none of them liked her.

I had a junior college instructor who wanted to leave for his fishing vacation 2 hours early, so he, with no warning, took 2 hours off the time I had for my final. (I was taking the final on a different day than the rest of the class, per a written signed agreement (that I'd taken pains to make sure he was comfortable with) -- so it didn't effect any students but me.)

I couldn't finish the final, and failed the class. That caused my conditional admission to the 4-year university I was transferring to in 2 weeks be cancelled. I had already committed money to attending there which was not refundable. It was also a pretty exclusive university that I was lucky to get admitted to; my chances of getting in after re-applying from scratch were slim to none).

I saw the dean of the junior college. He, in nice words, called me a liar. I approached the vice-dean. She not-so-nicely called me a liar. I asked them to call the instructor and ask for the signed agreement (which I had naively not made a copy of for myself). He denied that there was any such paper, and said that I was a liar. (Also, he was chair of his department, so I had no recourse there.)

I thought about a lawyer but I had no money & how could that help, approaching the board of trustees, etc. but there seemed no realistic options. After deciding that assaulting the instructor with my car would be a bad idea, I talked to my career counselor, with no real hope, but she listened and believed me. She went around the dean & vice-dean to a high-level administrator she knew personally, who wrote a letter that got my admission reinstated. She told me not to tell anyone because she would be fired if anybody found out that she had circumvented and contradicted a decision of her bosses.

Looking back, it was one of the best learning experiences I had in college.

Being called a liar by so many people in positions of authority, because they were too lazy to check to see if I was actually lying, cured me any default level of trust in anyone in any position of authority. And always CYA, never rely on "good faith," and never underestimate how alien people can be in their mortality.

When I was in grade 5 or 6 we got a gym teacher who wasn't like our old one who was actually pretty nice. He had the worst temper ever. He would constantly scream and swear at us kids for practically no reason, threaten us, and I heard he even once hit a kid but I never actually saw it.
Finally one kid had the gall to privately talk about him to the principal. Me. She was also my teacher in grade 4 and we had a pretty positive relationship, so it looked like she was going to do something about it. But not only did he not get fired or arrested but he became vice-principal when I started junior high. He seemed to have gotten better after I told the principal about him, though. Too bad that nearly everything else about junior high was awful...

I had this one teacher in my elementary school back in 4th grade, who would not only let the kids bully me, but encourage it as well. Not only that, but would also embarrass and humiliate me in front of the other students.

I didn't have any really bad teachers, but I TA'd a class for a professor who was really bad at teaching.
The class was notorious for being horrible eggsperience for students and TAs, but I signed up to TA it to see how bad it was.