In fourth grade I had an older teacher that was very stern, but not so stern that the kids really disliked her; they kind of made fun of her behind her back but didn't do stuff to deliberately piss her off or anything. I only remember two things from that class - first, she would point at the chalkboard with her middle finger whenever she was holding chalk, and one day one of my classmates raised her hand and said, "Miss Harris, do you know what that means? It means F-U-C-K-Y-O-U!" She got sent to the principal's office for cussing. The second thing I remember was that someone passed gas and everyone was giggling about it but nobody would confess to it. All the giggling was pretty disruptive so the teacher walked around and smelled everyone's butts to find out who did it, which of course just made everyone laugh harder.
My middle school P.E. teacher was pretty much a male chauvinist. He would let the boys play basketball and use up the entire gym while the girls had to sit in the bleachers and find stuff to keep ourselves busy. I wanted to play so badly but didn't want to be the only girl playing so I hated that. Oh, and he would belch into the microphone all the time. Real classy guy.
My high school biology teacher was a pretty old, very overweight guy who was really sweet but got made fun of a lot. He would garble his words when teaching, and we had a really long classroom so those of us in the back couldn't figure out a thing he was saying. We'd sit back there and write what it sounded like he said, and then have a good laugh comparing notes later. I still have trouble refraining from saying "gudrocarnoms" instead of hydrocarbons because that became our running joke. He also was a mushroom hunter and would talk about that constantly. He actually brought some morels in for us to try one day, and cooked them in a stick - WHOLE STICK - of butter in a frying pan over the Bunsen burner. He would give us extra credit for coming in and filing papers for him, which was great because he usually had test papers from the other classes and we would look at the answers. It really wasn't necessary because we learned pretty quickly that the more you wrote, the better you did. It didn't even have to be related to the question - once, I hadn't studied for our muscular system test, but I'd done really well with the skeletal system so I started writing about that instead, and got full credit on the question. There were rumors that someone had snuck the entire lyrics to the national anthem into their answer and he never noticed.
One of my high school English teachers was just... wacky. She was like a 60-year-old lady who "believed" that Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke to her during class, and she would hold conversations with him. It was a little disconcerting because it was one of those "is she just trying to be funny or has she really lost it" things. She was pretty cool overall but REALLY obsessed with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
One of my college geography teachers was, well, a complete idiot. I think he was actually filling in for someone that year because I don't know how he could have gotten the position otherwise. That year we learned that it is exceedingly hilarious to say "Tajerkystan" instead of Tajikistan, because of COURSE if you don't know how to pronounce it, you should just make fun of it. Also one day we were talking about the different items on American money, and he asked the class if we knew what "E pluribus unum" meant. He called on a guy who obviously didn't want to be called on, and who answered "Ummm... In God we trust?" We started to chuckle and then the teacher loudly proclaimed, "That's RIGHT! In! God! We! Trust!" and went on some rave about this great country of ours, blah blah blah. I don't think anyone ever corrected him. It wasn't worth it.
I had a logic professor who thought it was clever to teach the class one way, then when test time came around he would use a completely different book with different symbols so that everyone did really poorly because they didn't know what the symbols meant. He would also use questions from the book that were a much higher level than what we were learning at the time. I felt kind of like an ass because logic was really easy for me so I STILL aced those tests, including the extra credit which were always really hard... which meant that when the class complained about his tests he would say, "Well obviously you just didn't study well because we had ONE person who got an A+ on it." That pissed me off because I didn't want to set the bell curve that way, so I confronted him about it one day with a couple classmates. He told them, "The book was available at the library, you had access to it, you should have studied it." We finally brought it up to the philosophy head and pointed out that there was only one copy of the book, among MANY other logic books, and there was no way we could have known he'd be using it. The guy got terminated at the end of the year.
My painting professor had no idea how the grading system worked. I admittedly slacked off in that class, mostly because she didn't teach painting, she just said, "Here's what I want you to paint today," and when I turned in shoddy work because I'd never painted in my life, she would say I should have known what I was doing. However, our art classes weren't entirely graded on talent; just showing up for class and at least attempting the work was supposed to get you a C. At the end of the year she gave me a D- and I flipped out because the worst grade I'd even gotten on a painting was like a B-. When I confronted her about it, she gave me this long-winded answer explaining how you take this number of paintings divided by these grades and when you use a 100-point scale it equals this but since you have to convert it to a 4.0 you divide by this other thing and... I don't even know how she arrived at the final number because she wasn't using real math at that point. Essentially she tried to tell me that an 80% was a D-, so I had to TEACH HER MATH to prove that I should have at least gotten a B-. She finally caved but it was in one of those "I still say that's a D-" ways.
