Tell us about the best/worst teacher/prof you've ever had to this date.

[Edge Of Pain]

Best (If I could pick 2, I would) -

My I.C.T teacher in year 9, he was totally awesome. Strict, but great teaching skills, because he will tell you exactly what and how to do something in a way other teachers just cannot. His walk and voice scared the class into silence, but so much so that people were afraid of getting it wrong. The best part is he is kind of rich but still chooses to teach at such a school.

Also:

My good Science teacher, (NOT the one below) was awesome. He controlled the class alright, and thought biology was a little dull, which I also do. (No offense to those who like it) When we were in our first year of secondary school, he got a test tube full of lime water and blew into it using a bung to show how cloudy it would get. He even let people use personal music players during lessons if you got your work done fast. That encouraged people to work during lessons.

Worst

• Could not control the class
• Took almost everything as offense
• Refused to teach a class twice
• Once locked herself in a cupboard just because she could not get the class to be quiet.

She was such a bad teacher that many parents wrote complaints to the school, most of which asking to have her fired. She eventually was fired, after one too many complaints.



There used to be a really friendly fucken cool music teacher who went on to become head of key stage and totally lost his coolness.

 

[Bulblax]

Worst

• Could not control the class
• Took almost everything as offense
• Refused to teach a class twice
• Once locked herself in a cupboard just because she could not get the class to be quiet.

ahaha we had a teacher like that once. english teacher in 10th grade. She could not control the class AT ALL, and how she went about it was calling the assistant principal (who's actually a cool guy but he doesn't take any crap) into the class on essentially a daily basis to keep things in control.

Sometimes she would just give up and not even teach though, and then the next day would give a quiz on what she WOULD have taught. and also asked people random questions about what she would have taught and if you didn't know your participation grade was marked down and it was like 20% of your grade.

come to think of it, she was probably a worse teacher than the physics one.

 

[n3ther]

Best Teacher: I would definitely have to give this to my Chemistry for 10th and 12th grade. She loved her subject and was very knowledgeable. She wasn't always approachable for questions but that was only because she didn't like morons. Many people would ask her ridiculously unnecessary questions that they should already know from the notes or from reading the textbook. The axiom, there are no stupid questions, definitely didn't hold for my chemistry teacher. She had an amazing dry wit that I loved.

Worst Teacher: My AP U.S. History teacher was the epitome of incompetence. She could not teach to save a life. She would lecture about one time period for too many weeks. We skipped a few wars or spent one day on them just because she didn't have time to cover them extensively. She also covered less historically significant events for unusually long periods of time. I think one time she requested for us to create a script to perform over the 1860s? It was a complete waste of time like most of her class. She also had huge mood swings. One moment it seemed like she was being a sweet saint but then one act of misbehavior and boom she exploded. Many of her students including me suspect that she is bipolar.

 

[Annhialator Zero]

Best

My P5 (That's Year 4 for England and third-grade for America) teacher, we only had one teacher as it was a small school but I really liked him. He was funny. He didn't act like most teachers who have a whole year to teach and just teach them all the same, he tried to help us and treated people like individuals. He hated "bullies" which was great because I got loads of shit in primary school. He was good at science in particular so we got to do loads of experiments that seemed ridiculously cool for a nine-year old. He never got angry which was cool.

Worst

Without a doubt the Maths teacher I had last year. She seemed to think we were all retards. Even once we understood fractions we were still taught it in parts of cake. I happen to be very good at Maths (As in did my GCSEs two years early) but she refused to let me do higher standards, I just had to do the same thing as everyone else. The other problem was she was constantly getting things wrong, half of the time she would say something and I'd have to correct her, it was stupid! She also had no respect for differences, there were two dyslexics in my class and she went psycho at them for not being able to read stuff she'd written on the board. Finally, we were doing group work one day and my group was doing it wrong, I got angry at them and she started shouting at me, I reminded her I had been diagnosed with Aspergers so hated group work, she said 'are you going to use that as an excuse all your life?' My parents wrote a letter to the school about this and other ways they'd ignored about it, and she replied saying she'd never said it! Thank God I've left that school.

 

[SynysterCola]

best? I'd have to say my computer organization professor. First let's go over the flaws:

She's dyslexic, has A.D.D and takes anti-depressants. So according to some students, she's downright crazy. She also doesn't teach perfectly. I swear out of 75 minutes, she teaches for about 20 of them. I learned a lot from the book and projects (thanks CMU).

But in spite of those flaws, she has been my favorite.

She encourages us to make mistakes. She wants us to learn, not memorize. That's why her tests are made to make you think, not as she says, "spit-back". While she may seem like she is incapable of teaching, she knows quite a lot about what she teaches.

She forces us to think outside the box. She gives extra points for solving hard riddles on her exams/quizzes. She emphasizes context: "Always read the friendly problem." I noticed my scores improved since I wasn't losing points to not reading directions.

Then comes her exams. To give you an idea of what she gives:

Midterm: 75 minutes to for 25 pages of problems.
Final: 125 minutes (5 extra minutes to read through the exam) for 50 pages.

Completable? Not really. But she wants us to show what we have learned. If there is a section we can't do, skip it. That is why she is also generous on partial credit.

Finally, it comes time for grades. This is how she does it: She first uses the proper cutoffs for exams, projects etc. This is the worst case grade. She then adjusts the cutoffs to reward you for doing well in...say the projects, or even the final (she'll wipe out the midterm grade and replace it with part of the final grade if you do well on the cumulative final).

Of course, a handful of people still do not pass the class.

One last thing: she also gives a lot of life lessons.

Somehow...I learned a lot from her.


In terms of worst professor...maybe my GVPT100 prof. She had an accent, making it hard to understand. Also she would show a slide of notes for about 7 seconds...then move on, just like that (no online slides). Her exams were based off of the slides...not the book! ARGH!

 

[Blue Ditto]

Best Teachers: The first teacher that I want to name is my violin teacher. I've learned a lot from him, though not so much violin--it was more about confidence and just "going for it"; he was trying to teach me that it was alright to make mistakes, just learn from them, and simply move on with your life. It's funny how now that I've stopped being taught by him that I'm actually truly applying his lessons...he also had a great, if somewhat dry, sense of humor, and quite a bit of patience for when I was feeling depressed. Even I wouldn't have had patience for myself if I had to deal with all the days I was feeling moody...

Next up would be my 11th grade English teacher. She, like my violin teacher, has quite a bit of patience especially considering there are two guys in the class that absolutely love the limelight and LOVE being obnoxious. Anyway, she's also really goofy and friendly and I generally look forward to her classes. The only flaw that I can think of would be that we read terrible books. She sort of jinxes it with the whole "hey, I think you guys will love this book!"...

My orchestra and choir teachers too, and my science teachers...

And finally, my fourth-grade teacher because we were friends. It was cool. I was a real brat back then.

Worst Teachers: My sophmore math teacher would be one of them. She was cool in that she didn't grade us for participation, but then again I didn't really learn much from her and sort of dreaded coming into her classroom.

My third-grade teacher was another one. I really didn't like her and the feeling was mutual. Oh yeah, and my first-grade teacher was HORRIBLE. I don't really want to get into that though...

 

[UmbreonPup56]

Best: History teacher I used to have. Really explained things very well and I learned some good stuff from him.

Worst: My current Science teacher. He can't control the class well and the way he teaches makes me not want to bother listening to him.

 

[tennisace]

Worst

Oh lord, I'm not even going to hesitate for this one, as it's evidently my grade 6 Math teacher. He was one of the worst excuses for a teacher that I've ever seen in my life. First off, he hardly ever got up off his chair because he was too fat to be walking around, so we always had to be coming up to him for help and he'd yell at us if we didn't. Then, there's the fact that he's a very spiteful man. For example, I was handing in an assignment and then he tells me that I stapled it on the wrong side and if I handed it in that way then I'd get a zero. Ok, fine he was being stupid enough there, but I decided to comply, and I take the staple out which is a pain in the ass and I staple the other side, and little did I know that he was counting down from 20 because he was like whispering it. Ok, so then he gets to 0, and I'm literally right beside his desk and he yells "You get a zero on your assignment!"

Yeah, there was another time where one of his classes did kinda bad on an assignment, so he decided to go ahead and READ OUT all their fuckin marks to OUR class! I uh, don't think teachers are supposed to be doing that. I haven't even started on his actual teaching yet. His teaching was HORRIBLE! He did not know how to teach at all, in fact, his way of teaching was to ask the smart people in the class to solve the problem on the board after he gave us an example, and then if no one understood what he was talking about, he'd just tell us that we were idiots, and if we'd object to his rudeness, he'd call US rude...

This man found satisfaction in seeing his students fail, and I am glad that the future grade 6s at my proud middle school will never have to see his face again because he retired, and I hope that he never comes back, because I hated his math class with a passion, and I strive to be the opposite of him when I become a teacher.

You basically just described my 8th grade English teacher. She did the exact same thing, except that instead of calling us idiots she'd scream at us, and she was always eating, never teaching. Also, she was obsessed with penguins.

 

[Tracker]

My current gym teacher, who I will not name. This is him lecturing us about health:

"See this? *holds up Mars bar*
This is caramel, chocolate, and nuggat. *Unwraps and shows us*
All sugar.
In other words, crap.
If you eat this, your energy will be crap, your performance will be crap, and your body is going to be crap. You will be crap. *eats the Mars bar*
*awkward silence*"

 

[SynysterCola]

My current gym teacher, who I will not name. This is him lecturing us about health:

"See this? *holds up Mars bar*
This is caramel, chocolate, and nuggat. *Unwraps and shows us*
All sugar.
In other words, crap.
If you eat this, your energy will be crap, your performance will be crap, and your body is going to be crap. You will be crap. *eats the Mars bar*
*awkward silence*"

I love it in general when people do that.

My roommate once had a teacher for high school for calculus who...just stopped showing up to class. Needless to say the final grades weren't good.

 

[Bologo]

Heh, sorry for bumping up this thread, but I'd really like to hear some more stories. (They're all very good, and I'm learning a lot for when I become a teacher later on!)

Also, what qualities do you feel make a good teacher? What would the perfect teacher be in your opinion? This would probably be different for everyone, since not everyone likes easy teachers, and not everyone like hard teachers.

Heh, personally, I'm really not a big fan of hardass teachers, such as my grade 12 Advanced Functions teacher, since he spends a lot more time yelling at us than actually teaching (which is turning some straight A students into failures).

However, I don't like easy teachers either. Sure, I can get a high mark in their class, but what's the point if I don't learn anything?

I think that if a teacher is too hard or too easy, they're going to have a high amount of students skipping their class, because it'll either be too pointless, or too intimidating, which will result in failure, or damn close to it.

Yeah, so share your thoughts, and keep up some stories.

 

[wildfire393]

My worst two teachers were both Math teachers at UIUC.

Stats Teacher:
- Had trouble with basic math (1-.6-.1-.2=what? Took her like two minutes to figure out) and recognizing numbers (10,000. What is this number? Is this one hundred thousand?)
- Could not pronounce anything correctly. Sigma was "Sig-uh-muh". Variable sounded like "War-ee-bo". She both spelt and pronounced Binomial as "Binominal", even after being corrected by a student.
- Brought with lecture slides to class and read off of them. They were clearly not written by her, as they spelled "Binomial" correctly. On several occasions, she forgot to bring the slides to class and had to borrow them from a student in order to teach.
- Did not pick out the homework, just used the problems that had been used previously. This was evident from the fact that the book we were using had changed and many of the assigned problems did not exist.
- Did not communicate with the TAs, who were actually competent, which stopped said TAs from being able to help us prepare for the tests, as she would not tell them what material was being tested.

And that's only the second worst. The worst was this.

Calc 3 Teacher:
- Undecipherably heavy Bulgarian Accent
- Faced the whiteboard the entire time she taught, meaning you couldn't even hear the words that you could not understand unless you were near the front.
- Wrote lightly, fairly small, and in light colors in a class of like, 700, making figuring out what she was teaching even harder
- Had the amazing ability to complicate things that you felt like you already knew beforehand.
- Was literally startled when students tried to ask her questions in class. When asked to explain why she had done something that did not make any sense, she said "I don't know, that's just how it is done". When someone corrected her pronunciation of "parallelapiped" (because no one in the class understood what the hell she was saying), she snapped at them, saying "Well, you're not Greek from the original Greece, so you don't know how it's pronounced either. Maybe we're both wrong!"
- About 60-80% of the credit on every test was given for Calc 2 things, like complex integration techniques, rather than the stuff we were actually learning. Meaning even if you somehow figured out what was going on in Calc 3, you'd easily get a C or worse on the tests because the majority of the material was stuff you haven't seen in a year or so.

 

[Dragonknight!]

wow, i have 2 worst teachers. in the same year. this year. 10th grade.

1st one: apparently its a jewish holiday 2 days a week that she has to attend, she has 38 foster kids, apparently gets into car accidents with a semi without getting hurt, and says that the moon causes us to have sex and commit suicide. she says that she's going to give back the essays we wrote the first day of school 3 months ago, and we still haven't gotten them back -_-
She writes tests based on the the smallest details in the book (english teacher) and then curves all of the tests by 16% after everybody fails. sample test question: "in the book the color of water, by james mcbride, how did james feel when his mother went into the store?"

2nd one:
second day of school. we go into the classroom. we sit down, and the teacher goes on and on about the rules of the classroom and how its an advanced class so she wants everytbody to be great mature students etc etc.. and then she says, ok, go back to work. we're all silent, and somebody in the back whispers to his neighbor. "what are we supposed to do?" and the teacher turns around, and goes
" WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!"
"I..uh.."
"WERE YOU JUST PAYING ATTENTION? THIS IS AN ADVANCED CLASS!!"
"i was jus-"
"NO EXCUSES! IF YOU WANT TO BE IN THIS ADVANCED CLASS, YOU HAVE TO FOLLOW MY RULES! IF NOT, YOU NEED TO TALK TO YOUR COUNSELOR ABOUT PUTTING YOU IN A MORE APPROPIATE CLASS!"


ive been scared of her and hated that class since that day.

 

[Janenmori]

Best: My religion teacher (I go to a Catholic school), freshman year. He was always cool about everything and his stories were the best.

Worst: Bio teacher, also freshman year. She is honestly the mother of Satan. She would give us a bunch of handouts as homework and we were supposed to do them then she would go sit at the computer and do God knows what. Then she would give impossibly hard tests and expect us to know what they were about when she did not even teach. She also has a bad rep around school for being overly strict and she is running Saturday detentions this year.

 

[Luphrous]

Hello, very cool that you're going to be a teacher. I've considered it myself, as I certainly is something I could enjoy and be good at, but low pay is a bit...I wouldn't normally care about pay, but with the chance of America going into depression...I want to be able to support my family and all. But oh well, I've still got plenty of time to worry about that(10th grade lol).

Worst Teacher: Normally I don't complain too much about teachers, even if they are pretty sucky, but one teacher does stand out. My 7th grade Geography teacher. Near the beginning of the year, we were doing some worksheet on latitude/longitude. Now apart from the fact that stuff is incredibly easy, I had learned it last year at my old school, which had a slightly different course than my new one. So the worksheet has ~10 problems where we have to give either the latitude or longitude(don't remember which) of some points and I decide to give both just for the heck of it. While checking it the next day, she makes me mark every single one of them wrong, for not following directions. <_<

Best: It's between two teachers actually, for similar reasons. They aren't afraid to act like themselves when teaching, and both are hilarious because of it. One them has plenty of jokes, and is always so....dunno, just himself I guess. The stuff he does is just awesome though, you see him in the hall and he throws these wacky gang signs at you, he calls you a retard when you do something stupid(not actually in a mean way, and it's quite funny just hearing a teacher talk like that). He's also a world traveler, and it's quite funny when he asks a kid "What part of India/Vietnam/whatever are you from?" and then proceeds to tell them more about the place than they knew.

The other teacher is also great, when he catches a kid sleeping/texting/not paying attention, he quietly walks up to them, then screams their name and asks for a high five. He also randomly stops in the middle of a sentence, crumples up a paper, and does some funky backwards/fade away shot thing, aiming for the trash basket.

So basically, I guess be yourself and not super up tight like some teachers. Teachers like that are pretty easy to get to know, and it's very hard to not have a class where you don't laugh at something they do, which honestly makes any bad day just a little bit better.

 

[Bungalow Bill]

My worst teacher would without a doubt be my science teacher this year. She is sexist and favors all the girls in the class and blames the guys for everythin, even if it's the girls that are doing it. She also goes on about how she loves Greek and Gossip Girl and if we start to talk to someone else, she yells at us. She basically yells at us every 5 minutes. She also takes everything as something disrespecting her. We never learn anything.

The best teacher I've had would be my Math teacher for the past 5 years. She teaches from 4th grade up, so I've had her for a long time. She yells a lot, but she's cool and makes us laugh a lot. She taught us a lot of tricks for factoring and got us prepared for high school.

 

[macle]

I currently both my best and worst teachers

My algebra 3 teacher is horrible. Most people are getting under a C average including me. :( She gives us huge 5 page tests and expects us to finish them in 45 minutes. Also she bitches at me a lot.

My Us history teacher is amazing. He is like 26 years old so he isn't an old guy with a monotone. He has good lesson plans and i've learn more in that class than any other class.

 

[Olie]

My best teacher has to be my Junior high band teacher, who was also my English teacher in grade 9. He was loved by the entire school that we held a whole concert for him and his kids after his wife passed away. He also let me chill in his room if I had to wait for a ride, and always influenced me to do better which I did. I still visit his class from time to time to have a chat.

My worst teacher was likely my fuckin retarted bitch Math teacher in grade 10.
This lady never got her work done, always took like 2 weeks to mark tests, gave us detention if we didn't do our homework, and got preggers and left after one semester. She was also one of those teachers who fancies the girls and hates the guys.

 

[Darth Meanie]

My best teacher was fairly indisputably my AP US History teacher in 11th grade, AP Government Teacher in senior year, and Academic Decathlon coach.

This guy was first off a pretty incredible teacher. The two classes I took of his are his self-proclaimed worst classes because he has to keep notes for his lectures. He has had a consistently sky-high pass-rate for the AP test above the national average, and really nails in the knowledge. His class had a steep learning curve at first; the first quiz was a real wake-up call: 7/20 average IIRC.

Fortunately it was actually fairly easy to get an A on his class despite the monstrously difficult quizzes. He had massive study guides ie. 20 pages hand-written to turn in for extra credit, and you'd get a 10% bonus to the test and be completely prepared for it. Also he had a modified grading curve: an 85% was an A. He still has never had a person get a 100% on his hand-written tests though, despite over 20 years of teaching.

I was in Academic Decathlon in the last year of my high school career, and he was the team coach. This guy was dedicated. When the State competition was coming up, and just before county, we would be studying 20+ hours a week, 2 hours after school every day, until 8 on Fridays and a school day's length on Saturday. We ended up winning the Virtual National Competition though, and I've got a nice collection of Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals to prove it.

He had some great stories about the school he used to go to, horror stories of his former principal and the rampant waste he fought. I wish I could remember them all, but they were hillarious. He was ultra-conservative, and would butt heads in class frequently. He always won.

Someone is always coming to say high on him or see how things are going with Acadec or classes, which shows how much respect he has, myself included. My campus is on a college so he gets to see some of us fairly often.

I got a 5 on both AP tests to those wondering. And $1250 in scholarships from Acadec.

My worst teacher, there are a few.

A collective medal goes to the three different Spanish teachers I went through in one year. All female, all hispanic, all picked up off the border and thrown into a classroom apparantly. No organization, no learning. I know not one word of Spanish after those classes, and I have no idea how I got an A both semesters.

These ladies were just stupid: one had us do an assignment in class, but wanted us to instead of turning it in there, e-mail it to her. But she didn't want 27 e-mails, so she numbered us off. Person 1 would e-mail their homework to Person 2, who would attach theirs and e-mail it to Person 3... yeah, I'm serious. Oh, and class was done at 1 and she wanted it in by 9 that evening, even though we had two days until we'd see her again. WTF???

An individual medal goes to my Senior year AP english teacher for the guy who tried to hard, burned himself out, and still wasn't helpful.

I feel really bad for this guy, even though I almost flunked his class the first semester (but I did get a 5 on the AP exam). He was an incredibly harsh grader, had nasty quizzes and almost no room to build grades up. Essays no matter quality would be C at best, unless they were absolutely fantastic. Then you got a B. Somehow though he was still working himself to death though in his classes, he stretched himself really thin. He didn't really seem to care anymore, and I feel really sorry for him.

 

[Stathakis]

I currently both my best and worst teachers

My algebra 3 teacher is horrible. Most people are getting under a C average including me. :( She gives us huge 5 page tests and expects us to finish them in 45 minutes. Also she bitches at me a lot.

My Us history teacher is amazing. He is like 26 years old so he isn't an old guy with a monotone. He has good lesson plans and i've learn more in that class than any other class.

man I didn't even know algebra 3 even existed e_e

aaanyways, we have this geometry teacher whose goal is to give us an a, which is kinda cool as it basically gives me one less class to worry about what with all the bonus points he gives us.

and I have a history teacher who is like 26 but still speaks in monotone e_e

 

[foibles]

my best teacher was the one I had for drama in the 7th grade. She just seemed to know how to 1) control the class, and 2) make sure evryone had fun while they learned. My worst teacher ever is my present English teacher, who has a strong tenancy to assign compleatly useless stuff and fail to outline rules and requirements. She also displays most of, if not all the symptoms of PMS (except all the time, not just a few days every month.)

 

[Outlaw]

Best Teacher

Definitely goes to Mr. Parish my Electronics teacher. I didn't really learn much besides the basics but the best part of it all was, almost everyday we would play Counter Strike against the Drafting Class. I usually had him for the last class of the day as well. On top of all that I got to be his teachers assistant my senior year so I spent the last half of the day over at the career center building playing CS and working on computers. Good times, good times.

Worst Teacher

Definitely goes to Mr. Barker my middle school principal and PE teacher. Some back story first, my middle school is a private baptist fundamentalist brain washing facility to put it nicely, I hated most of faculty there but this guy was the worst of the bunch. Besides being a downright quack, he was also former military which is a bad combination. We hardly ever got to play basketball and such because he was making us do boot camp bullshit the entire time. I hope he dies in a painful way and rots.

 

[Luduan]

Worst: Many of my teachers were pretty terrible people and/or teachers, but my 10th grade world history teacher was definitely the worst. Complete xenophobic imperialistic wingnut (think Deck Knight x10). He tried his hardest to make life miserable for me because of my political views, but his class was so fucking easy that there really wasn't much he could do. Everyone else enjoyed it though because I spent most of every class period arguing against his insane views.

Best: My 8th grade Algebra teacher. She is one of the nicest people I have ever met and an amazing teacher.

 

[macle]

man I didn't even know algebra 3 even existed e_e

aaanyways, we have this geometry teacher whose goal is to give us an a, which is kinda cool as it basically gives me one less class to worry about what with all the bonus points he gives us.

and I have a history teacher who is like 26 but still speaks in monotone e_e

Thats how smart I am :P Yeah I meant Algebra 2.


My history teacher implied that a girl was a whore today. It was awesome. Also he is a huge sports fan so I talk to him for most of the class about sports.

 

[Itchni]

I have had pretty average teachers my whole liefe but there are two that stand out for me.

Best:
I have had the same teacher for grade 10 science and grade 11 Biology and he is just awesome. Its very funny because whenever someone says something really stupid he calls them a retard in a really funny way. He also teaches very well and i have never walked away from that class below a 90%. Allmost no homework helps too :)

Worst: I has the worst english teacher for grade 10 english. The first day of school, i was the "new kid" in grade 10. Se called the last school i went to retarted and said she didnt want me in her class. First assignment we had were a few questions for a short story we had and I had them all done within 10 minutes. I handed it in and she bitched at me for 20 minutes infront of the class about how no one could get the assignment done in 10 minutes without any spelling and grammar mistakes. I got that assignment perfect and what did she say to it? "It was a fluke". I ended up with a 98% in that class and would allways nitpick my assignemnts trying to take off marks. It was quite frustrating...