Ungaming and Comment Chaining Part 3B
Directions: answer the question in the comment section. Then leave a comment on the blog of the commenter directly before you (so it’s a chain. #2 comments on #1, #3 comments on #2, etc. If the commenter above you didn’t leave an address, just go one above that. The point is to find new blogs/leave a comment–not stress). The first person who comments gets a free ride and does not need to leave any comments. The last person who comments gets…screwed. My answer is below the picture.
A follow up to the last question, and one much more deliciously terrible. Please, no googleable names used in your answer.
In case you can’t read it, the card states: DESCRIBE THE BEST WORST TEACHER YOU EVER HAD.
My answer: As a former teacher, one who has a great respect for all teachers, we also do need to acknowledge that some just suck at their job. That they should have never been allowed around not only children–or in the case of college and beyond, adults–but they probably shouldn’t be allowed around humans in general.
While I have some true horror stories, from the professor who would make me kneel on the floor when I came to speak to him (he’d sit on a chair and we’d kneel on the tiled office floor) to the English teacher who left her liquor bottles in the rubbish bin and taught us nothing for an entire year, my favourite terrible teacher was a college professor.
He was flown in for the semester to teach a class on Scandinavian history–and all apologies to the Scandinavians, but the years of Scandinavian history that we covered sucked in comparison to your exciting European neighbours–and he spoke no English. He had someone translate his notes into English and then he read them off the page by sounding out the words. It was three hours once a week of English read phonetically off the page. And if you didn’t show up, you couldn’t get credit for the class. Three weeks in a row, he must have gotten his pages mixed up because he read the same lesson on the Russification of Finland. Three times. Did I mention that it was in phonetic English? And you couldn’t ask him questions because he didn’t know any English? You couldn’t even ask if you could be excused to use the bathroom because he didn’t know the word “bathroom” and we didn’t know the word for bathroom in Finnish.
Once a week. Every week. Three hours. Just for three credits.
26 comments
The worst teacher I’ve ever had was my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Deal. She was always super crabby and had this fiery red hair. Anyway, I was always super nervous anytime she called on me because I was kind of shy, not to mention afraid of her. Anyway, we were diagraming sentences and the sentence was, “The dog chased the cat up the tree.” After getting a few wrong answers on what the noun/verb, etc. were, she announced to the class that ‘The next person that answers the question wrong is going to get this eraser thrown at them.What is the noun in this sentence?” Oh shit, please don’t call on me. Sure enough she called on me and I answered, “Chased.” The eraser came flying at me and hit me in the arm. I was so embarrassed and couldn’t believe she had done that. I hated her guts from that day forward. I remember that class like it was yesterday and I’m 33.
My first grade teacher. Terrible. Used to do her nails and read the newspaper when she should have been teaching us. I remember one day when we got report cards (back then we still got letter grades: A, B, C, D, F) and we were joking with her as we were lined up at the door. Kids were asking what the letters stood for, and she said, “A is for awesome, B is for brilliant” or something. Then this little girl who had some “D”s on her report card (she was holding it out and I could see it) asked what “D” stood for. The teacher (who knew what this girl got because she GAVE HER THE GRADES) said, “D is for dumb.”
First grade, people. I felt so horrible for that girl. That must have affected her for years.
My 6th grade teacher as well. She hated me. I still don’t know why but I know she did. She would collect my homework from me and then call my mom and say I hadn’t done it.
I had ALWAYS been teachers pet until that year. This woman just hated me. I still remember when I was trying to make her like me. I had written a story and I asked what she thought of it. You see, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I stood next to her as she read it and she started to laugh. I asked which part she liked (because there were funny parts in it.) Her response: “I’m not laughing at the story. I’m laughing at you. You think you’re ever going to be a writer? No, you’ll never be a writer.”
I was 12 years old.
I’m 38 now. I’ve written 2 screenplays and a novel–sold –not yet—but I am a writer. I won’t give up until I sell because I refuse to let that b*tch be right.
I had a teacher that gave me detention because I was reading a book in class. He was teaching a boring lesson and I was bored. So I was reading. So he gave me detention. (School policy was that I should have gotten three warnings before I got detention. My mom looked it up in the rule book and read it to him later.)
The self-absorbed scuba instructor I had last yeatr in Honduras, who completely ignored me during a dive. I unfortiunately ran into some trouble, and ended up with what they thought was a mild case of the bends. He was paying so little attention to me that he didn’t notice I was in trouble under water, and then when I got back on the boat, he was too busy talking, and wouldn’t respond when I was trying to tell him I was having trouble breathing. He was literally annoyed when I interrupted him. Had he been paying attention to me, the whole situation could’ve been entirely avoided. Now, I will never dive again.
One of my first professors in grad school. So demanding, unyielding and contemptuous of us students. He made me and other students burst into tears. Yea, what a big man.
My first grade teacher. We were making holiday banners to take home to our families and in the morning were supposed to outline everything in pencil, then in the afternoon, we were going to be allowed to color everything in. Being the overachiever I am, I finished penciling early and started coloring before lunch. The horror!! She scorned and humiliated me in front of the whole class, even made me stand up front to be an example of what you shouldn’t do. Then she took my crayons away and didn’t give them back until after everyone else had already started coloring in the afternoon. I’m 35 now and still have never forgotten that humiliation. My parents still have that banner and hang it up every year. At least now I can laugh about it when I see it.
My year 5 teacher (ex vietnam vet) who would come to school in his army uniform, yell at us till we cried, and took us to the abbotoirs for our school excursion. I was vegatarian for 9 years following that.
He told my little sister she was “nothing in comparison to me”. Which was interesting because all I remember is being terrorised for a whole year.
aaaaaand… all of these stories are part of the reason I’m considering homeschool…
(not playing the game… skip me 🙂
Oh, my worst teacher was Mrs. Watson. She had a “barf bucket” in our room so that if you had to throw up, you did it in the bucket. And then you had to clean out the bucket. Well, I didn’t make it one day and instead threw up on her shoes. One of the most deserved things I’ve ever done!!!
My worst teacher would have to be my 7th grade science teacher. She didn’t like me for some reason and always found a way to talk about me without physically addressing my name.
Hmmm… there were a few that I really didnt like, but I can chalk that up to differences in personality. The one that really stands out as the worst teacher, was my eighth grade cooking class teacher, Mrs. S.
Up until I ws in her class, I thought of cooking as something fun. I enjoyed it, and by age 13 I was already a pretty decent cook out of necessity. Mrs. S seemed ancient to me, altho looking back she was probably in her late 50s. She wore a nurse’s dress, cardigan, and those squeaky nurse shoes every day, and honestly walked like she had a pole stuck somewhere not very nice.
She had the ability to turn every recipe into something akin to root canal. She took all the fun out of cooking. Everything was exact, precise, and specific. If our notes on her demonstration didn’t exactly match what she said, we would not be allowed to cook that week, and would get an incomplete on the assignment.
For someone who has always used cooking as a creative outlet, she was my kryptonite.
Mr Roads led me to believe I had no artistic talent.
http://www.weebleswobblog.com/2009/01/show-tell-cityscape.html
Many years later, I no longer believe him.
Man, that must’ve been a long 3 hours. At least you weren’t on your knees on tile, though.
My 11th & 12th grade drama teacher was horrible. I went to a performing arts high school but this teacher really didn’t get why anyone would leave the state to go to college and study theatre. He was in his late 60’s, totally burned out from decades of teaching, and would just sit in the corner of the classroom smoking next to a cracked open window. We were usually told to just, “work on some scenes” and then every once in a while he would hoist himself up, hack a lung up, and then ask if anyone “has a scene for us”. Then some poor group would go to the center of a room and begin a scene. He would almost immediately stop them, tell them that the scene was BEYOND their scope, and then go into an hour long speech about how theatre was dead in America. Real award winner, eh?
I had a professor of Religions of India who was a Japanese first year professor. I actually think that he left the class to puke his first day. He was so nervous everyday, and his English was not stellar. He was actually a sanskrit scholar, and not a scholar of religion, per se, which meant that instead of teaching us about the religion, he explicated words in sanskrit for us. WHOLE LECTURES about five words. Ugh, they were the longest lectures of my life. The books assigned were interesting enough, and he did always talk to me after class about Japan and being a motocross champion in his before life, but it really didn’t help my understanding of Indian Religions in the slightest. I got an A, but would rather have, you know, learned about the Religions of India. People out and out heckled or walked out during the many videos of obscure rituals we watched that had no relevance to Hinduism or Indian religion. But the best part of that class was this one vegan tattooed dude, who may or may not have been a Hari Krishna (I cannot rightly recall), who showed the professor his tattoo of a Japanese character on his forearm. The professor said, “Do you know what it says?” And the kid said, “Truth.” And he said, “Um, no. I actually is the symbol for fruit. Like a tree fruit. An orange.”
My worst teacher was my 7th grade English teacher. She didn’t even bother with lecturing, just took roll and wrote stuff for us to read on the board then gave us a test once a week. Then she couldn’t even get half of the names right during roll. Five days a week for nine months 2pm went something like this: “Tony”, “Anthony, here”; “Carey”, “Corey, here”; “Are men in ta”, “Arminta, here”; etc…
Don’t get me wrong, it was an easy A, but nobody learned anything. Including the teacher, who never even learned our names.
I had my fair share of teachers I hated — most of which were actually pretty decent when it came to the teaching part. The only teacher I can recall learning absolutely nothing from was my high school algebra teacher, Mr. B. He was a huge flirt (though definitely nothing to look at), and gave good grades to any female students wearing low-cut or tight shirts on test day. He even nicknamed one of my classmates “Double D” — yes, those were here initials, but still. What a perve.
The worst teacher I ever had (outside of a university setting).
My 2nd grade math teacher, who practically killed all of us who loved learning with negativity and nearly corporal punishment. Back in the 70s it was ok to grab kids and slam them against the wall and drag them to the principals office for the least little thing. Things that are so kid-like.
She was burnt out, and as I learned when I was an adult, a heavy drinker and smoker. She reeked of cigs and day after binge breath.
She killed my love of math and science in such a way that, I turned to my love of writing. Here I am. Thanks to her, in the most roundabout way.
The worst teacher I’ve ever had wasn’t actually a bad teacher, just a bad person. It was high school Biology and his room was filled with tanks of lizards, snakes, rodents, bugs… you name it, he had it. I’m terrified of snakes – a personality flaw I learned from my father. One morning in class, he decided that he wanted to make all the girls hold his 10 foot boa constrictor around their necks. I refused. He threatened to send me to the principals’ office (NO!) if I didn’t come to the front of the classroom and let him drape his snake across my shoulders. Shaking, crying, I did it. I hated him for embarrassing me like that. As the years went on, I learned that he regularly invited the cheerleaders over to his personal “studio” (in the basement of his home) where he would photograph them in their uniforms with his snake wrapped around them in compromising positions. Why did the girls let him do this? Maybe because he was the cheer coach. What a pervert. That was almost twenty years ago. I found him on Facebook and saw that he’s still teaching. Hopefully, his female students are smarter than we were.
Um i have more than one…. real quick…
3rd grade teacher had a rattlesnake fetish I think. she wore their skins on her hats and boots- then one day she brought one in and made us cook and eat it, no i did not eat it- till this day I can still smell it.
9th grade biology teacher- a disaster. He had probably been teaching for 50+ years, was a lunatic and could not teach a thing. Students would constantly make fun of him, throw things at him and he just lost it for the entire period. everyday.
9th grade typing teacher. total alcoholic. would go into coat closet behind his desk, throw a few back and come out lit!
college english (forgot which english) sweet old lady, was schizophrenic I think. she was totally sweet and then some days would come in and start yelling and flip out and then cry, we learned nothing from her, thank God for our books.
The story about your Scandinavian teacher reminds me of my high school Algebra teacher. In Pre-Algebra, I got an A. In Algebra I, I got an A. In Algebra II, my teacher was from Argentina and she LOVED math. She would get so excited, she would scrawl furiously on the chalkboard while chattering away in a thick, thick Argentinean accent. I must have missed some vital mathematical concept in that class because I got a D and never did well in math again. She was a nice lady, but terrible teacher. In English, anyway.
In nursing school, my psych-nursing teacher reminded me a lot of Bette Davis from “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.” I wondered if she was crazy because she was a psych nurse or if psych nursing MADE her crazy.
I had some great teachers, one of whom actually built two story playhouses in his classroom.
My 5th grade teacher was the hardest teacher I ever had, but she taught me how to write and for that I’ll always be grateful. Gotta give props to a woman who teaches O. Henry to 5th graders.
My comment isn’t really about teachers, though… I wanted to chime in on how much I hated The Ungame as a kid. Gaah! Thanks for letting me vent. 🙂
Aaand – I’m an idiot.
Worst teacher: my German teacher who would stop in the middle of a babbling lecture, tell us the word for “lick”, then continue on.
I’ve been pretty lucky in the teacher department. One of the worst was during college. I was taking business calculus and our teacher was a “pure mathematician” in her words, so she couldn’t teach us the business part of the calculus.
One time I had a question a week before the final and she couldn’t answer. Her reply was, “let’s hope it’s not on the exam”.
My worst ever teacher was… my adoptive mother. She home schooled my siblings and I for a year, and by month two I was begging to be going back to public school. Overbearing, over protecting, ubchallenging and plain boring.
That is priceless. Wow. Three hours. And the English language so conducive to phonetic pronunciation, too.
Bea