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.

I had a highly (Christian) religious history teacher who had a camper van and spent the summer holidays touring Soviet Bloc countries, distributing bibles. Or this si what she told us.

I have no idea how she smuggled them in or was never arrested .

She was as mad as a box of frogs. Bloody brilliant teacher though.

A fab physics teacher who never taught a lesson with is at our desks if he could help it. Think three quarters of the class running around a layout while the rest acted as lights and switches to teach about electricity and circuits or slamming things on desks while we had our ears on the versus sitting up to demo how sound travels through different mediums. Bonkers but really made it easy to get.

A shipbuilder turned music teacher who basically started bands, had us perform musicals and somehow took a bunch of us council kids to the state’s on exchange with a posh American boarding school.

Mr Ridge who was a fantastic history teacher who couldn't pronounce his R's but was passionate about local History.

We called him Mr Widge and his Woman's down by the Wiver Wibble

My GCSE and A level art teacher was very eccentric. He was in his 50s and he wore a denim baseball cap everyday that he'd covered in fake flowers. He also regularly wore ladies flowery jumpers because he said that he didn't understand why only women could wear flowery jumpers. He used to rant and rave most lessons about the government or world issues that had nothing to do with the art lesson, and sometimes he would go off on a weird tangent which none of us understood. He also called us all "lizards". He was by far the best teacher I ever had and all the students loved him because he was so eccentric. I learnt so much from him and he really inspired and developed my love of painting. However, not long after I left school, and following a series of spats with the headteacher, this man was forced out of the school and he never taught again.

I had a fabulous English teacher. Mad as a box of frogs, often incomprehensible with dreadful handwriting. Ofsted described him as “eccentric” He was way nderful, so caring and nurturing and genuine. He sadly died of a brain tumour after I left school. There were over 1000 people at the funeral

German teacher who, being absent one day, left us a tape-recorded lesson. No cover teacher - we just ran the tape and followed the instructions on it.
Part way through, the teacher's voice - on the tape - became much louder as he told one of the pupils off (by name) at the exact moment that pupil was misbehaving.

Mrs Kallani (definitely not spelled correctly) my European Studies teacher, always wore 3 pairs of glasses and would start giving the answer to tests after about 10 min as she got bored.

Looking round my uni. Head of History does his history spiel, turns to the side of the stage and invites the Head of Literature to the stage, but calls him head of history. Head of Literature shakes his head, head of history: "Oh yes I'm the head of History aren't I!"
Later on when one worried mum asked what medical facilities were on offer if her precious darling got poorly. Head of History answered, with an airy wave of the hand: "oh I don't know, just try not to get sick I suppose!" I loved him - his lectures were ace, but everything outside history was very vague to him!

I had a few at secondry school.

The first was an art teacher who would rant at us about "Public enemy number 1: THE RUBBER! Public enemy number 2: THE RULER!" etc every lesson without fail, and once gave a very long speech about how an entire factory's worth of white paint would be ruined and impure if even the merest speck of red paint was added to it. Whilst the latter is technically true, I doubt one tiny speck in several thousand litres of paint would make any detectable difference to it.

Second was a (male) science teacher who most notably donned a pair of knee-high stiletto boots and jumped up and down all over a sheet of polystyrene to demonstrate how weight and surface area affects pressure. Absolutely fine if that's what he wears outside of work, just very odd when combined with a regular suit and rather unexpected.

My favourite was our crazy funny chemistry teacher though. He blew a small crater in the school playing fields with a rocket, a hole in the ceiling demonstrating the power of petrol, got a warning from the police after filling a bin liner with hydrogen fitting it with a magnesium fuse then lighting and letting go, and made mustard gas in the lab (not in a fume cupboard) to demonstrate how it moves. He would also happily talk off on all sorts of tangents which was usually fascinating and funny, but didn't exactly help with getting through the syllabus!

Our headteacher at primary sticks out in my memory.

He took our classes swimming, and would always appear for the last 15 mins of the session, in his black and white striped trunks and get in for a swim.

He taught science. We were supposed to listen to a tape (of something to do with the moon landing, even though it was the 80s) and, without fail, every week he'd get side tracked and start talking and we'd never get around to listening to the tape.

When doing sound, he let off fireworks on the school field.

When doing hydraulics, he took the lesson standing on the school roof (one storey) while we kids all stood at ground level, looking up at him.

He gave us IQ tests and arranged for a few of us to attend Saturday G&T sessions called the Eureka club. He drove us to some of them in his brown Maxi which I vomited in once.

Our history teacher used to get us to draw pictues in our work books...but if you ever used a brown pencil for colouring in you'd get detention. He told us that the colour brown ruined all pictures. His faves were red and yellow. ... totally batshit!

Pretty tame compared to some of the others. My A level chemistry teacher used to let us distil booze in the lab then drink it out of lab beakers at Christmas, accompanied by his wife's mince pies, which he'd heat up in the incubator.

God, we loved him. Not just because of the illicit drink. He also used to do the 'throw a chunk of potassium [or rubidium, if we'd been extra good] into water and watch it ignite/explode' experiment to order. Also, he used to let you off your homework if you could answer a crazy question (e.g. spell Kjeldahl flask, in the days before the internet and quick answers).

He was the best! He loved teenage kids, not in a dodgy way, and we adored him. I bet teachers of today aren't allowed to behave as he did, more's the pity.

I had a history tutor at college who was a full on leftie-used to call us "comrades" and insist on us buying the socialist worker! Think he was a former miner as he used to tell us about getting arrested during the strikes in the 80s and HATED Maggie Thatcher and the Tories!

We all went to the pub on our last day and he insisted on buying us all a drink-I just asked for a small white wine to be polite, he insisted on getting a large (legend!).

Last I heard he had been suspended for something politically-related, I remember signing a petition to get him reinstated!

At secondary school we had a creepy fat PE teacher who used to give his number to the girls and invite them back to his house! 😳

Oh my god mammy I'm 99% sure your history tutor was my dad. Did he have a newspaper cutting pinned on the wall of him being arrested in the seventies? The headline was 'Behold the fascist hordes!'

He was also partial to acting out the mating ritual of drosophila fruit flies

Did his name begin with an "S"?

No - he was Dr "G".

He was somewhat obsessed with badgers and would call people 'Badger' (apart from me who was 'Ferret' and another chap he called 'Wombat'). After one school inspection he was told that he needed to 'nurture the learning process' by the next a-level class we had transformed the lab into the 'Tabernacle of Nurtured Learning'

We had a superb lecturer in uni who taught us maths, but one day he completely lost his temper because we didn't understand the topic he was trying to teach us and stormed out the room, slamming the door after shouting at us all for being stupid. He came back 5 minutes later, apologised, and went back to teaching the class. Scared the life out of me at the time because I have ASD and that was so unexpected I freaked out - he literally went from zero to raging fury in a second - but in retrospect, I think he quite probably was on the spectrum himself.

In secondary school, I had an engineering science teacher who had a self-programmed machine which fired ping pong balls at noise source (ie: noisy pupils)...and he was my dad! He was also the best teacher I had, got superb results, and had to go back after retirement to tutor the pupils to help them pass the exam cause the replacement teacher was incompetent.

I had an RE teacher who used to start each lesson with important life advice such as 'remember ladies, no bouncer will search your tampon box' 'deodorant and chewing gum makes your smoking more obvious' 'romance sucks without respect' 'people who brag about their sex life are liars' and 'only ever take what you can afford to spend to the pub' He's now my DS' form tutor I love him.

Oh we had a fab RE teacher in sixth year. She taught us about campaigning for legalistation of weed, abortions, FGM, prostitution , all sorts. She was absolutely incredible.

Also had a socialist politics teacher who blamed Thatcher for his teaching career, refused to wear blue , painted his classroom red and insisted we watch Boys from the Black Stuff, Cathy Come Home etc. I was fifteen I think.. Yozzer disturbed the hell out of me!

We had a young physics teacher who tried to make learning fun. I remember when the whole class were water molecules that had to change from ice to water to steam when the teacher/Bunsen burner came by us
We had a less effective calculus teacher who would switch off his hearing aid and just write on the rotating blackboard whilst droning ...

The HT took our maths lessons, he never actually taught us maths in the way we expected at age twelve but instead told us stories and left us to "discover" the maths behind it Pretty sure Maths being taught to us would have been much easier than how we were expected to discover it for ourselves tbh and I still can't spot the link between Ugg the caveman hunting for food and solving quadratic equations

We had a very “right-on” history teacher who we used to see rattling a collecting tin for CND of a Saturday down the high street. He was spectacularly easy to wind up, some of the boys who were less concerned with being politically correct used to just take the piss all the time. I swear he actually left the floor screaming at somebody once, like a cartoon character.

Science teacher took somebody’s eyebrows off with a Bunsen burner. Another chemistry teacher forgot what carbon monoxide smelled like so unstoppered the test tube and took a big sniff. Went down like a ton of bricks!

AnnL82 he sounds hilarious

We had a teacher who would throw a board eraser at your head if you were caught talking. It was in the days when throwing stuff at kids wasn't acceptable, so she would throw it millimetres above your head and it would crash against the wall. She had a bloody good aim!

I had an amazing history teacher with a hot temper who both frightened and amazed us all. I remember him acting out the French Revolution by sashaying down our desks as Marie Antoinette 'choosing' soldiers to shag her (propaganda). He also taught British social history through this great epic story across several months of Wayne and Waynetta and their seventeen children moving in next door to the posh people to talk about social decline. Loved him.

Also the mad ex-doctor Biology teacher who specialised in manually inflating sheep lungs for dissecting to demonstrate how breathing worked and trouncing the entire class in physical activity every few weeks. Again lots of acting out being a cell etc.

Same biology teacher once took us for chemistry and sniffed bromide by mistake and nearly burnt his lungs out. Taught the rest of the class almost without wincing!

He might have also been the one who got excited dropping potassium into water, dropped a bit bit in and exploded the container.

I had a maths teacher who used to set us work then sit back and play Diablo on her (school) computer. We all helped her we were a top set and she got excellent results from her classes!