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.

My English lecturer who applied her makeup so she looked like Aunt Sally. She was incredibly stern but utterly brilliant. The makeup was a massive distraction though

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

Maths and PE teacher who enjoyed throwing board rubbers or cricket balls at anyone he thought wasn’t paying attention, including the person sitting in front of the target if they weren’t paying enough attention to duck (when I was aged 9, first year middle school). Definitely not allowed and stopped when he hit a teacher who walked into the classroom.

A primary teacher who "encouraged" pupils to learn their times tables by pulling a hair out of our head-the answer was meant to come out with the hair!
Not sure whether he was eccentric or sadistic!

Economics teacher who had a stuffed squirrel called Sammy on his desk. He used to talk to Sammy and sometimes he put on a squeaky voice and asked us questions pretending he was Sammy. Same teacher also had a feather duster which he would dust Sammy with and then sometimes dust us with too.

I had an english teacher who threw my furry pencilcase out of the room on to the grounds that it was an animal! He then said he heard it " scratching at the door" and went out to kick it up and down the corridor!!!! Then told me that "pets will NOT be tolerated in the classroom" ! He kicked it up and down a couple more times, as it came back to "scratch at the door".
Also had an art teacher who was obsessed with making dissolute pupils stand on a desk and wave theirs hands and say e.g. "I am the wicked child that stuck my chewing gum under the desk" . He caught me chewing gum and made me go and stick my gun in the middle of the road! He was otherwise very strange too. Private school. Shasta what you are paying foe, people (Not me)

I had an RE teacher who told us that she wasn’t scared when she watched The Exorcist because she saw an angel next to the devil. Then she disappeared. I’ve just realised she probably had a nervous breakdown.
I also had a maths teacher who used to eat Mars bars during lessons and would send boys to the shop to buy more when he ran out.

A science teacher at my school was known for being rather strange and once she was telling us about how she'd recently been on holiday with her parents and she heard them having sex in the next room. She said it made her smile.

We also had a 65 year old substitute maths teacher who rapped for us I was fortunate enough to witness it first hand, it was the talk of the school!

Maths teacher - wore a school uniform all year round and kept all important keys attached to a keychain stored inside his bumbag.

Science teacher - wore full robes every time we had non uniform days. He had an amazing moustache as well.

I had a history teacher who would pop into the stock cupboard for a drink and a cigarette- we used to watch the smoke seep under the door (days before smoke alarms). DC had a French teacher who used to bang her head against the wall and weep because they were all so bad at French - the poor lady eventually went off sick never to return

Very eccentric maths lecturer who came out with all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
The university got visualisers (glorified expensive web cameras) and the first thing he did was stick his head under it and pull faces for a full five minutes which was projected on to the whiteboard in front of 200+ students.
Another time when I was in second year, he got confused about something he’d written in his notes, so hid under the desk at the front of the lecture theatre and told us he was “going to think this over and get back to us momentarily”. He then sat and hummed quietly under the desk for several minutes, before re-emerging, grinning inanely and carrying on with the lecture as though nothing had happened.

I had a man who taught us 'philosophy' at age 8 , he made us do telepathy experiments, told us he could see ghosts (some bloody freaky little tales, one I remember with pictures drawn by him - can still see it now 20 odd years on) and encouraged us to talk about ghosts too.

He was stopped when the school were told bedwetting had dramatically increased!

I mean not eccentric but this thread reminded me of my old English teacher who appeared very put together, classy, posh, poised, well spoken, organised, good posture and had many qualifications. So much so that she could have passed for a royal. Seriously, so 'perfect'.

A friend in a separate English class told me she went to to a house party and saw Miss Royal absolutely off her face on MDMA, downing shots, twerking and slutdropping on the guys at said party. When asked about it she just smiled at said yeah, she had an argument with her fella and 'had to let off some steam'

The whole class was just

Mr L, who would stand very close behind his desk, adjust his package so it was resting on the desk and walk crab like left to right and back again throughout his lesson

@MyBrilliantDisguise - I had a nun who threw chairs too. Did your one teach French by any chance?

Maths teacher at secondary:

• "spontaneous roll call": we had to stand up and spell out our surnames in alphabetical order A to Z, or Z to A, or A-Z-B-Y etc, and say if the previous one wasn't in, so in the third case "Z isn't in, B". Any mistake would lead to a marked oral test.
• Every Monday, questions about squad and match statistics of his fav football team
• Sending 8 people out of the classroom for the whole 2 hrs, as we were 33 and his ideal class size was 25
• Marks assigned in raffles or based on the tidiness of our notebooks (he liked every exercise to be separated from the next by some kind of framed doodles that should have been colourful but not including green which he hated)

I could write a book about him. I was so petrified when I discovered that the anaesthetist working at my c-section time would have been his wife she has been very professional instead

I had a biology teacher who would hide under his desk and bark like a dog. He was also partial to acting out the mating ritual of drosophila fruit flies whenever the female biology teacher went through his classroom. He was often late to A-level lessons on a Friday afternoon and hungover on a Monday morning.

I had a science teacher (chemistry and physics) who would walk around the classroom barefoot, would sit up on his desk and sing folk music and play his guitar while we worked, and had crazy long hair and a long beard. He's retired now, his beard and hair are white, and he plays Prof. Dumbledore every year at Harry Potter Weekend at a local castle. That's him there on the left.

I went to a 'posh' girls school so most of the teachers very very boring tame. I did have one philosophy teacher though who was completely bonkers, kind of angry bonkers. My English teacher was great, completely out there and also very good at her job. She was very much a two fingers up type of person when it came to all the silly rules. Still keep in touch.

My art teacher was an alcoholic. Every lesson he'd just bark 'draw what you see', go into his store cupboard that he'd emptied out except for an armchair, lock himself in and drink. He was a teacher for years and once had to be rescued by the fire brigade after he'd passed out drunk and wedged his storeroom door shut with his body.

My teachers just seem to have been 'normally' weird.

There was one who always showed up 20-30 minutes late and drunk. Another who'd throw chalk or the board rubber at anyone who talked, and who also stared at some of the girls a bit too much. A couple who could not control their classes at all and it would just be chaos bordering on a riot in their lessons. One who got divorced, decided she was our friend rather than our teacher and had an affair with a sixth former.

There was also a history teacher, lovely man, but he had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about a particular bit of local history. If anyone fancied not doing any work in one of his lessons they just had to mention something to do with that bit of local history.... We didn't get much work done sometimes.

Also we had another who let us watch Bob Marley videos in class for their educational value.

And an English teacher who insisted all poems had to rhyme and gave out detentions to anyone who yawned in her lessons.

My school had an annual end of term fashion show, which usually involved the male teachers dragging up for a laugh. But one year the deputy headmaster walked on stage in leather jacket and chaps, leading the social studies teacher (clad in leather mini, wig and bra) onto the catwalk ON A LEASH. We thought it was hilarious but looking back it might not have been entirely appropriate...

Teacher who uses to bring a cup of coffee into the classroom, take off her glasses and use one of the glasses legs to stir coffee

I'm so impressed. Next time I need to stir a cuppa and there's no spoon I can just repurpose my specs.