What are your terrible teacher memories?

[lovelyjubbly888]

A bit random - and in no way a teacher bashing thread! I was just inspired randomly by a thread about whether people make sure the sink is dry after use.
I had an absolute hag of a home economics teacher - who one day had a right go at me after I had washed up all the dishes. She lifted up the wash basin, and there were soap suds on the bottom of the basin. She got angry at me for it, and made stay behind and wash it until there was not a soap sud left. I was then late for next lesson. I'm still indignant about it, she was a fucking loose screw.
This was only 10 years ago!!!

On my first day in high school, I answered the register and she bawled,

Sinner Boy!? Is your sister Jenny Boy?

"Yes, Miss."

Well I don't like her and I shan't like you!

She spent the next three years making my life a misery.

I’m dyspraxic and have very poor fine and gross motor skills. This makes it difficult for me to perform tasks such as writing and getting dressed as quickly as everyone else. It still affects me now but was a lot worse as a child. In school teachers used to tell me off all the time for being the last one to complete work or get changed for PE. I think they thought I was being lazy or doing it on purpose but I really wasn’t. I was a good kid who always tried to behave well. I found being constantly yelled at incredibly embarrassing, especially as it was usually in front of other children. I developed crippling social anxiety by the time I left primary school.

We had a teacher who would always switch off the ceiling fans during assemblies “because children are just like dogs, they get overexcited in wind”. Very bizarre, especially in Far North Queensland summer heat of 36/37 degrees C. He was English and always wore long trousers and long sleeved shirts (all other male teachers wore shorts and short sleeved shirts) so we hoped he would faint, but he never did.

I had piano lessons from a very grumpy old woman when I was around 9. I was terrified of her. I just couldn't read sheet music but pretended I could and just played the pieces by ear when asked. One day she realised I'd been faking and had learned nothing about music. She shrieked at me and tore up the book. I ran out into the snow, fell over and broke my arm. I have never played music since!

I have a few (Catholic school in the 90's)

PE teacher doing the 'pinch' test. We used to have our fat tested basically and if it was more than an inch you were 'fat'. It was done in front of everyone and it was announced loudly that 'Uh oh Mother needs to do a few sit ups'. I'm 42 now and I could still cry reading this - I've had an awful relationship with my weight since. I've never been massively overweight - I'm
small and curvy but I've always measured my value by the number on the scales.

We had some really disturbing teachers - I remember an RE teacher screaming in my face saying I had 'rolled my eyes' I hadn't I just didn't know where to look when she went off on one. A maths teacher I was so scared of I had to be moved down a class and could only take the middle paper so couldn't get the grade I was predicted and an English teacher who enjoyed making first years who bought notes to the class cry. I joyfully remember the day she covered our class for 6th Form English and she did it - we all thought 'nah not on our watch' and pulled her up, took the distraught 11 year old back to class and went to the Head to report her the evil cow.

For some reason we had two English Language teachers that alternated classes during one year of secondary school: Mrs A and Mrs B. Midway through a lesson Mrs A stopped and said to me (in front of the whole class) that during parent's evening the night before Mrs B had told my parents how good I was a English and that I should think about doing a degree in it. She went on to say that she didn't think I was that good and wouldn't be able to do that. The rest of the class probably found this very interesting! I was embarrassed and kind of deflated. I actually got an A at O'level and Mrs B came over and congratulated me on results day, Mrs A didn't. I did an SLT degree and a large portion was English and Language which I loved.

One of my classmates was mocked by a teacher - she was a bit odd looking -I later realised she was treated cruelly by her DF so had low sel esteem. She died in her fifties-alcohol etc

I had a really pervy female teacher for two of my A-Level subjects. Any set text she picked would have a sex undertone, and in drama she often had us acting out scenes that we’d just had sex or whatever. She bullied me something chronic but because she was sleeping with head of sixth form he did nothing about it.

Years later she friends requested me on FB!

What the fuck sort of teacher doesn't know that sort of thing???
We all have weird random gaps in our knowledge (there have been whole threads on it on MN!) The point is how you deal with it. I teach primary and every so often a child knows a fact that I don’t and I always use it as an opportunity to praise the child and model how to deal with realising you’ve made a mistake without getting upset.
Teaching is such a hard job but the things I’m reading here are so unacceptable.

When I was in the sixth form one of my teachers started a purely physical relationship with friend of mine. It was not a relationship as such. She was about mid-forties and he was 18/19. She knew that I knew and he said she would sometimes talk about me - I said I really didn't want to know. Lessons were a bit uncomfortable to say the least. Then my boyfriend told me that friend had given him a lift but had detoured to her house and he had asked him to go inside, BF said he'd just sit in the car, but friend insisted. When he got inside she asked him if he would join them for a threesome and friend said he was up for it. BF hastily declined, they went upstairs, he didn't want to stay in the house while they were doing the deed, so spent about an hour sitting by the car. Friend became ex-friend from both of us. Lessons were incredibly uncomfortable after that! She was completely unruffled.

Oh and she met friend at a school social that she was supposed to be supervising! Truly terrible teacher.

I had a teacher in year 7 who bullied me. I was an easy target- bright, knowledgable (ok, irritating), and with an accent that was anything but the strong regional one.

hated him. Hated his subject.

Had a year 9 teacher in the same subject who I adored though and through her and my equally inspirational college teacher ended up doing the subject for my degree.

a year 8 English teacher who had snogged one of the girls in the class. He really couldn’t spell and I’d call him out on it (again not my finest move).

Oh and evil pe teachers. Gosh I wish I’d been taught to see exercise as a positive thing.

Back in the early 80s at secondary school, had a lesson called "Integrated Studies", no idea what it was all about. The teacher was awful and would single people out and make their lives hell.

Twat decided one week it was my turn and hit me across the back of the head with a long-arm stapler. I reacted and punched him in the stomach. Was forever removed from his class, nothing happened to him, which pissed me off.

He retired the next year and promptly died of a heart attack. Many of us cheered when it got out at school.

I was probably 5, in the infants and there was some sort of kerfuffle in the playground. One of the teachers grabbed me and shook me and shook me. My teeth were clattering together and I bit my tongue.

It gave me a really bad headache and I was sick later. She was really screaming at me. I've never understood why she grabbed me, as I had my back to whatever was going on.

Mr Jones - Biology. He used to throw the board rubber at us if he thought we weren't listening. To be fair, a lot of the time we weren't!
(This was in the dark ages 70s when corporal punishment was still allowed)

@SinnerBoy that's atrocious, if you had a headache and threw up it sounds like they gave you a concussion, they could have killed you shaking you like that

My mother was the deputy head of my grammar school and from the first year until the end of A Levels she constantly picked on me. She constantly called me by my surname and I and other pupils had to call her miss and then her maiden name. My mum was very old school and as i was not Oxford quality like my younger sister, i got the full stick. On numerous occasions she would come in to my lessons shout out my surname and tell the class i was in detention. This was the total opposite to favoritism and made me totally miserable.

I remember her at the end of year 11 on GCSE results day mum coming up to me in front of my school friends asking in a abrupt way was I staying or going.
I had just scraped the GCSE requirements for Sixth Form and had the worst results of all my friends.

1980s pervy male teacher who was my form teacher. Bumped into him in the street one day (I was 15) and he told me I was 'virginal' and 'alluring'. He was sacked for having a relationship with another girl in my form, also 15.

He was suspended from teaching, but managed to get back into it. I googled him a couple of years ago and read that he had finally been struck off, at the age of 60, for doing exactly the same thing to 15 year olds. He must have been doing it for decades. I don't think it was ever particularly physical, he just wanted the power and thrill.

I'd like to think his wife, daughters, church and community shunned the inadequate bastard but who knows.

My headmaster who towered above me at 6”5 grabbed my ponytail and shook my head about whilst shouting in my face, all for talking. I was in year 5! This would of been about 1991

I also witnessed him kick a boy up the arse so hard his feet left the ground. This was in front of the whole school.

I was taught by someone (this was early 60s) who I'm sure was a psychopath. He seemed to actually hate children and take real delight in bullying people smaller than him who couldn't fight back and who he could make cry. He'd throw the board rubber, not just chalk. In retrospect I think that he'd been bullied and pushed around and this was his revenge.

Ironically the mental arithmetic he drilled into us remains with me to this day.

Slightly of the thread but I want to add this about my mum: My mum was a brilliant actor who as soon as school finished morphed in to a great mum and vice versa into this character of a teacher. My mum was the definition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, when my school friends came round to my house there arrived in absolute fear but could not believe how welcoming she was !
Years later she apologized to me when it became clear the reasons for my academic struggles were down to un-diagnosed Autism and co- existing conditions.

They arrived in absolute fear...

I had year 6 & 7 teachers, where the classes were in adjoining rooms so classes spent a lot of time together.

The teachers, one male, one female, prefered only a few kids. Myself & DB were disliked because we came to the school way ahead of the classes because they were so slack.

I remember being picked on publicly for physical attributes or anything they could find, while their mean child entourage laughed. Also on school camp, on an island (not UK) we were not allowed to go into the water, yet woke up one morning to find one of the teachers had taken their group into the ocean.

Normally passive DM had a go at them once (I found out years later) and called them out on it.

If I saw those teachers now, I'd tell them exactly how sh*t they were. They affected my self esteem very badly.

Mum gave me a detention once for putting 'there' instead of they when she read a piece of English homework..