To ask about eccentric teachers you had...

[Tedster77]

I don't mean the ones who were clearly out of all order (we had several - I can think of at least 2 in prison). I mean the ones who just went their own way....

My textiles teacher used to put on Madonna's True Blue album every single lesson and sing along as we were presented with a dustbin full of offcuts and a sewing machine and our imaginations.

My report card said 'your daughter produced a draught excluder' - which was sort of accurate.

One of my teachers was a nun and would throw chairs at people who crossed her.

Drunken A level English teacher who forgot to teach us Hamlet.

We used to check how full the whisky bottle was in his bottom desk drawer before he came in the room. Empty bottle = bonkers lesson.

My Y4 primary teacher's husband was into taxidermy - buying, and doing a bit too.

As a result I spent a term sitting alongside a stuffed anteater.

Geography teacher who loved teaching us how to swear in Spanish, his room was also above the heads office so he would drop boxes “accidentally” and move tables a lot - especially when he knew he had meetings!

I'm convent educated - all my teachers were eccentric by the mere fact of being nuns .

English teacher who wore full robes everyday. If you misbehaved she reapplied her lippy, kissed you on the forehead and if she caught you later in the day and you'd washed it off you'd get detention.

French teacher, swore at us in French, sprayed us all with perfume because she said we stank and sang pop songs at the top of her voice when we were doing tests 'to make us concentrate' - batty but brilliant. Also the hippy art teacher who smoked roll ups during lesson, stubbing them out in a plant pot. He said everybody could draw, just some better than others. He used to meditate in class. I got an A, he was bloody brilliant.

Our science teacher used to make huge floating gass bubbles and then set them on fire. Nearly lost eyebrows several times!

One of our maths lecturers at university used to eat tissues.

Interesting fact: 50% of the maths lecturers in my first year were left handed.

Sketch that's bizarre!

Maths teacher who would open the door of any rowdy classrooms and hurl board rubbers at anyone's head (whether being rowdy or not!) with amazing accuracy.

The teacher who liked to smoke in the store room and set the school on fire. She said it was irresponsible to store paper in a room where someone might wish to smoke.

We had a mad science teacher who was known for 'shooting'questions at you during the lesson with his toy gun - if you got it wrong he would pull the trigger and a little flag saying bang would shoot out the end

I still remember the vast majority of science from his lessons through no other medium than him being so entertaining to listen to

This is already proving even more entertaining than I could have imagined

We had one in the last four years of secondary school that we loved. She used to sometimes say things in a really sing songy voice followed by a long sniff. It was when she was telling us to do something that she was doubtful that we were going to do i think.

My re teacher (who was happily married) had a photo of cliff richard in the class room and regularly used to profess his love for him.

A supply teacher we had three times in one year and each time told us a different name! Surely she can't have changed her names that many times?!

Oh and one who told us she was an insect in her last life, or something similar

I don't think teachers have half as much fun these days.

We had a teacher who skied down the M1 when it was closed due to snow.

My art teacher at school was a volatile man who binned everyone's beach paintings because he "wanted to see bodies - arms, legs, heads!" The next lesson we had to do a painting of a beach again but with bodies on. I took him a bit literally and painted windbreaks topped with disembodied heads, limbs lying in the sand and pools of blood. It was only when he took our work in that I noticed everyone else had depicted happy sunbathing and beach volleyball and that I might have gone a bit off piste.
He held mine up and bellowed "Who did THIS?" so I put my hand up. And he said "It's brilliant, this is EXACTLY what I wanted. Flo is a genius!" Fucking nutter!

Where do I start? Miss Taylor, the school librarian, who kept a bottle of gin in her desk drawer. Mr B, who did not want to be teaching science so showed us slides of his holidays & driver ed films instead, Mr Z who told me (aged 14) that sex was better exercise than gym class, Miss D who had a weird obsession with the man who invented a certain cursive script and kept a photo of him in her room as a model for us to aspire to, Mrs C who wore a lot of flowy scarves and banged on about how misunderstood Ted Hughes was, Mr C who threatened me with a sword he kept on his wall if I didn't wear a daft outfit he'd set his heart on us wearing for an event.

They were all a bit mad, but not particularly charming.

One of my lecturers at university used to take his shoes off to teach, and more than once wandered off to the next lecture in his socks and forgot them!

History teacher who could be persuaded to stand on his head when we got bored. He would empty his pockets and stand on his head for ages. We were a rowdy lot and would flap the old fashioned desk lids up and down in applause and this would usually result in the Head coming along to see what the commotion was. We never learnt any history but the classes were hysterically funny, for all the wrong reasons.

FloellaBumbags I agree, that sounds genius.

We had an English teacher who'd "top up"
during lessons - he'd hide books and pamphlets in his cupboard and spend an awfully long time arranging them to hand out - I swear if any of the many smokers in my class had flicked a lighter he'd have gone up like a wartime zeppelin

Our English teacher kept ghosts in a jar. She told us this.

She apparently bought one in to school once, someone unscrewed it and she cried - although I suspect this story is probably apocryphal.

Was never sure if it was an affectation to give us something to talk about and add interest or whether she did actually believe it.