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Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: Lunchbox on 28 Apr 2011, 17:06
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As inspired by a tweet from manly friendly man @ryanpequin (http://twitter.com/#!/ryanpequin):
let's all take a minute to remember some crazy unprofessional bullshit that one of our elementary schoolteachers did or said
My fourth grade teacher was ancient and angry. She would rap us on the knuckles with rulers. One day she was standing on a desk to hang something from the ceiling and a ceiling fan blade whapped her on the head and she fell down and we all laughed because we hated her so much.
She also made me sit next to the worst boy in the class. One day he vomited all over himself and our desk (and my books) and she wouldn't let him get up until she had finished the lesson.
My boyfriend tells the story of a teacher she had who would hand out lollies to the class - after she had picked all the good ones out of the packet for herself.
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My Year 9 English teacher would tell stories about her family life without remembering that her daughter was in the class. Her daughter would also address her by her Teacher Name every time she spoke in class. Awkward.
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My 10th grade math teacher dropkicked one of his students. I had switched out of the class at that point, (he was a pretty awful teacher) but I never saw him again.
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My teacher from year four was hilarious. My first few years of education were at a tiny one teacher school (there was about eight children in total), where the teacher was my father. In 1997 I moved to a normal sized primary school and experienced lots of children! Swearing! Bullying! Different teachers! It was a completely different world I had never experienced.
My teacher that year was Mr Brien. He was over 6' tall, so from the perspective of a very small 10 year old he was a giant. Straight up giant teaching me things. When I first started there I would be super eager to learn and do my work quickly, and would promptly let him know when I was done, generally a fair while before the rest of me class. To keep me occupied he would get me to organise his bookshelves and cupboards. I learned fairly quickly to take my time with my work after that.
We had one "problem" girl in our class. Renee. She had ADD and would very rarely take her medication. Normally we would just try to not pay attention to her and get on with the class, but sometimes, children being jerks, we would get her worked up so we wouldn't have to do any work. One day in our weekly French lesson we did just that, which resulted in her grabbing a girl by the hair and refusing to let go. Eventually Mr Brien got called in and he had to forcibly take her to the principal's office. He did this by throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her out of class. She still held onto little Annie Graham's hair. The image of a Giant man carrying an hysterical small girl out of the room while an even smaller girl scurried after them being dragged by the hair is something I will never forget.
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My 7th grade teacher was an alcoholic who tried to cover her vodka by drinking out of a sprite can. She was caught and fired.
My 6th grade substitute (who was there most of the year) didn't really know how to do anything, so we ended up getting square dancing lessons every day. I remember most of the class hating it, but I thought it was pretty awesome.
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Being taught by my father was another situation that seems ridiculous when I look back on it. At school he was Mr Taylor. I had this very distinct separation between him and my fater that I would tell him what I did with my dad on the weekend. He would always play along. He was an amazing, encouraging teacher who understood how kids worked, but sometimes he would be an absolute arsehole.
One time he picked up a drawing from one of the littlies and started yelling at the poor kid. "THIS IS BRILLIANT!" he bellowed. "MICHAEL, THIS IS THE BEST DRAWING I HAVE EVER SEEN!" He roared. Everyone in the class froze, watching Michael stare in terror and confusion at Mr Taylor. "GO TO MY DESK AND GET YOURSELF A STICKER!" He basically screamed. Michael burst into tears, thinking he was in trouble, and had to be consoled and convinced that everything was fine.
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I got kicked in the bum by one of my teachers! I think I was doing something pretty dumb but I definitely didn't deserve that and I knew it back then, too. I went straight to the principal and ratted the bastard out. Fuck you, teacher.
My history teacher in Year 12 seemed to take great pleasure in telling us we were the worst class she ever had and that we were all going to die destitute and alone. No exaggeration. We would've taken it personally but she said it to everyone, apparently.
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My dad also has regaled us with stories about his teaching experiences when he was still starting out. He also loves to talk about the time he held a small boy out a window by the ankles and having the rest of the class try and get Dad to drop him. Also the story of having to teach a single class full of over 40 kindergarteners sounds like some sort of horror situation.
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-one of my favorite english teachers in highschool was notorious for playing favorites and alot of people i knew really hated him. luckily, he really liked me for some reason so I never had a problem with him. One incident that sticks in my mind was in german class (which the guy was not qualified to teach, by the way) where this black metal kid i knew asked a serious question which the teacher somehow misinterpreted as...something else...which caused him to directly tell the kid to go sit in the hall. Naturally, the guy was confused and said "what? why" and then the teacher just started yelling at him and telling him to quit talking back and all this stuff even though he was just asking a question (the first time, and the second) and he basically got browbeat into crying and ran out of class. Never seen a wimpier metalhead.
-my dad almost beat the shit out of my fourth grade teacher for talking shit once. the guy was an asshole and very old fashioned, didn't really know the meaning of the words "fair" or "equality" and yeah, he's lucky my dad's a hippie because he would have ruined that guy's life with ease
-when i was in middle school a student teacher was demonstrating how a sling works (or thong; the thing you put a rock in and swing over your head to hurt people from afar) with an eraser or something and it slipped out of his hand, flying across the room. I swear the whole class saw it happen in slow motion, this perfect pink eraser tumbling chaotically through the air. We all saw it heading right for this kid's face. There was no way it wasn't gonna hit him. He didn't even react until the last second when the eraser was right in front of him, at which point he casually lifted his binder in front of his face and blocked it.
I'd never seen anything like it before. The casual attitude, the lightning fast reflexes, the bad decision making teacher. it was great.
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Does having really bad halitosis count as unprofessional? Because my fourth grade teacher would always come up behind you to check on your work and lean over yr shoulder and wheeze and stink all over the place and you'd have to sit there and just kind of endure it. Like, it was a literal ordeal having to be in close proximity to this guy. He also had pedo glasses and a pedo mustache, and was probably a pedo.
This same teacher called my parents in and explained to them that I probably had A.D.D. and should be on Ritalin or something. Thankfully my parents told the guy to fuck off. As much as I talk shit about my parents these days I am extremely thankful that they made a lot of good decisions about my education, like that and also not sending me to a Catholic high school (it was on the agenda for a little while because of the higher standard of education at private schools, but thankfully the came to their senses and in the end I lucked out anyway by the nearest public high school having an extremely high standard and well-developed art, music and I.T. programs anyway).
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I was homeschooled by my mom who has like three degrees, including a law degree. My schooling was really normal and well-adjusted, and I got along really great with my mom. However, her sex education lessons were really awkward and came at random times, but that's not craziness really. At age 11 she gave me a lecture in the car on why penis size doesn't matter in sex. It was terribly awkward, but I've never been insecure about my penis size!
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My ninth grade science teacher would chuck a beanie baby mouse at us. Then again it was only if we deserved it.
One cool thing he had us do at the end of the year was give us a playing card which we would have to give to him after we graduate high school.
Also he ran the Chess club and had a giant snapping turtle named Tito. When I gave him back my card he had psoriasis pretty bad.
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Well, at least I know I won't be the worst teacher ever (if I can get a job next January)
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If your username's anything to go by, you'll end up in this thread sooner or later.
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It kind of is?
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O HARRY U SO CLEVURRRR
I had this one teacher in middle school who had her husband cheat on her with a post-op m2f, and she was pretty broken up about it, so I talked to her about it as best a middle school kid can. She had photographic proof of them in the act, which I was allowed to see. It didn't freak me out or anything, so that kinda says something about the laws pertaining to access to pornographic material, but if I'd said anything she'd have been sacked and put on a sex offenders list by now.
I actually have never told anybody about that before. I still won't give her name, 'cause like, she never did me or anybody else any harm (and she was feeling really shitty so I figured I would listen). She did pick up a kid in his desk once for disrupting the class, scared the shit out of him. He never fucked with her again, though, and he didn't get hurt at all.
She also had a lot of really great stories from her time in Vietnam as an Army nurse, that class fucking ruled.
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Wow. This thread is incredibly depressing.
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My 7th and 8th grade English teacher wore leather bras, and possibly leather panties (most likely fake leather, but still...)
I only know this because she stood barely 5 feet, and I stood 5'9" at the time. She also wore low-cut shirts that...well, being substantially taller than her allowed me to...exercise my peripheral vision whenever she walked by or stood next to me for whatever reason (hey, you gonna blame a 12-14 year old boy for taking a peek at boobs? especially since she was well-endowed for her height?).
Oh, and I forgot to mention that she was fresh out of college at the time, too.
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Reminds me of my swimming teacher who had a bit too small of a swimming suit and generous amounts of pubes.
Yeah...
Her idea of teaching us to swim was to tie something floating around our feet so we could focus on swimming with our arms. Apply your knowledge of physics to figure out what happens when you tie something made out of plastic and filled with air to the feet of a kid who can't swim. Took me five years to learn how to swim after that, didn't even want to go near water.
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My teachers were pretty allright. With the worst one every second class was singing and/or watching a movie.
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My 4th grade teacher molested a classmate of mine, he never recovered and was pretty off all throughout school. He confided in me once that a lot of the time he just wanted to castrate himself. Whereas most of us had been sexually active for years, he was repulsed by the idea of even touching himself. Senior year he really started cracking and was in and out of mental facilities throughout the school year. A month before we graduated he killed himself.
Anyways, back to the point, when I was in 4th grade that teacher made me sit in time out for farting in class, what a fucking joke.
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I had a supply teacher in elementary school who did some really nasty things. She told us all to put our heads down on our desks when we were being too noisy - one of my classmates didn't, and she marched over to him, grabbed his hair and slammed his head down, causing a split lip. She was escorted off the premises by police! I don't know what happened after that.
I used to keep in touch with one of my highschool teachers, because everyone at my highschool was on really great terms with at least one teacher and it wasn't uncommon to sort of become friends in a sense. That was until he started signing off his emails with "love you!" That kind of freaked me out, I guess because I still thought of it in the frame of a student-teacher relationship, albeit a very friendly one.
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I don't have any "horrible teacher" stories, but I have a few from when I was a teacher that might be amusing.
Right after my son was born, I was like many new parents and not getting nearly enough sleep, plus he was sick a lot and I'd just spent the weekend with him in the hospital. Monday morning, one of my students asked if I'd graded the tests I'd given last week. I told him I hadn't had a chance to grade them yet, hopefully I'd get them done that night. He went off on me, about how the kids are expected to do everything by the day they're due, but teachers don't have to, how I'd had a whole weekend and did who-knows-what, but hadn't managed to grade the tests and hand them back like I was supposed to.
I lost it. I told him that he was correct in that he had no idea what I'd done that weekend, but he since he didn't know, he was in no position to judge me and therefore he should just shut the fuck up! The room of course went totally silent. I then excused myself and stepped out for a minute to ponder my impending unemployment. My classroom was one of those portable things in the parking lot because I had low seniority and there weren't enough real rooms, and it was snowing, so I let the snow cool me down for a bit.
I stepped back inside and apologized for losing my temper and for my inappropriate choice of words. He apologized as well. The others students thought it was amazing because this kid was apparently a complete pain in the ass to teachers and fellow students alike, and they'd all put up with it for years. I was actually a hero for putting him in his place, and some of them told me about it afterwards. Most amazing was the effect it had on the kid. Think of Eustace from "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." He was Eustace Before, and now he was Eustace After.
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My teachers were uniformly pretty excellent and I learned a lot by osmosis despite being a problem child that they eventually expelled. I feel sort of guilty about it in retrospect.
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Most amazing was the effect it had on the kid. Think of Eustace from "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." He was Eustace Before, and now he was Eustace After.
Good! Finally something not horribly depressing about this thread.
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I don't think I ever had any crazy or interesting teachers.
All told, my life has not really had anything to make it stand out whatsoever.
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That's ok, I do what I can.
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I went to a Christian private school from K-8th grade, so I had plenty of... interesting school staff members. The only story from that time period I can really remember is when my friend gave me some of his older video game magazines and I brought them in to school to read (I read constantly and had already devoured the school library). One of the magazines happened to have an advertisement for some game called Route 666 Racing or something, with a tagline about "the road to hell..." and an image of a burning highway. Well one of the playground monitors happened to glance over my shoulder as I was reading, and she was SHOCKED and APPALLED that I would have such DEMONIC material at school! I got hauled to principal's office in tears, and had to publicly dump the magazines in the trash can.
High school had plenty of mediocre teachers, as well as a few that I absolutely loved. Especially good was Mr. Sterling, a hugely overweight History nerd whose bloodstream was probably 70% caffeine from all the coffee he drank. Super bitter and sarcastic, but he knew EVERYTHING about American History/Gov, so his classes usually ran like an extended Hark! A Vagrant (http://harkavagrant.com/) strip. I was shown his daughter's prom pic a year or two ago: while his daughter and date were posing for pictures before leaving the house, Sterling stood in the background with a shotgun.
On the opposite end of the spectrum was our resident Chemistry teacher, a 50-something hispanic man with an near incomprehensible accent. We documented many times over the years that if two students wrote the exact same answers on a test, the female would get higher grades. Girls also did better when they wore low-cut tops in his class.
While I know this started as elementary teachers, I have to throw in a teacher I had for my Earth Sciences class last quarter. Technically, she was the TA assigned to half the class for once-a-week discussion sections. However, she admitted that she had no experience on the subject, did not attend lecture, or prepare in any way for class, and would spend class time having us work on our homework. My personal favorite instance was when she was having us share our answers with the class. One group asked if the answer they had worked out was correct, since the number they got seemed much more complicated than expected. She just said "Oh yeah that's right" and would have moved on if someone else hadn't spoken up with the actual answer. After they walked through the problem correctly, they asked her if that was right. She then looked down and read the correct answer off the paper in front of her. She had been too lazy to do that the first time. Evaluation & Feedback at the end of the quarter was fun for that one.
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My history teacher in Year 12 seemed to take great pleasure in telling us we were the worst class she ever had and that we were all going to die destitute and alone. No exaggeration. We would've taken it personally but she said it to everyone, apparently.
I had a history teacher in Year 8 who did that to my class too. There is a bit of a story behind it, though.
In year 8 I moved to a different high school 6 hours away from my old one, and while my brother and I had been accepted into the school (we were out of zone, but pretty dang smart, so they let us in anyway), but they lost all our documents we had given copies of, so they had no idea which class level to put me in. The head of the Science department asked me if I knew where a local town was near where I used to live, and I shrugged and said "I think so?" So I got put in the bottom science class. History/geography chucked me in the middle class and hoped for the best.
Now, 8H3 (my class), was taught by Mr Durell, a guy we all called Mario, because he had a helluva moustache, was short, and i think maybe he was Italian. We would try and see how quickly we could get him off on a tangent, because that would mean he would talk about anything other than history. We were a pretty shit class in that we didn't really want to do any work. Except for me, I guess. One day he lost it, yelling at us all saying how we were all idiots and would drop out of high school and be on the dole and a worthless waste of space for the rest of our lives. Throughout this tirade I just sat there thinking "what the hell? No I'm not!" and then stopped paying attention. This abuse made absolutely no difference to the behaviour of any of the students in that class. We just made fun of him more because of it.
I don't know if it was a common occurrence or not, though.
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In grade 8 my class had a Russian French teacher that everyone hated and was rude to.
I sat quietly and acted politely, even if I didn't really care much about doing the work, and got a 98% that I definitely didn't deserve.
I wasn't there for this one, but in high school, a philosophy teacher took the podium during mass to make an impromptu speech about... something. Something that the administration didn't like at all, I guess. considering the mic was cut pretty quickly, and everyone started yelling at once, and the teacher had a thick accent, I guess it's understandable that no one I spoke to later could agree what the teacher was talking about. They fired him directly afterwards, anyway.
Also, my grade 12 English class was taught by a media studies teacher who did not give a shit. The final exam took half an hour. It was two short sight passages and a bunch of short answer questions.
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In 12th grade my ceramics teacher was convinced that I had stolen money from an envelope that was for art supplies or something. She had absolutely no evidence beyond "You look like you would take something that isn't yours!" which she said in front of the entire class, which was quite embarrassing. I stood up and told her that if she was going to accuse me of something like this, that I would get the school board involved and that she was guaranteed to lose her job because she was wrong. She pretty much dropped it and didn't cross me at all until the very last day of school, where she got on me for something or other, and I pretty much explained to her that everybody thought she was insane (which they did) and that she could fuck herself.
I would have gotten in trouble and maybe have not been allowed to walk, but nothing came of it I think because she could never remember anyone's names. Nowadays I think she had aspergers or something.
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I went to a really religious school, so the proportion of religious studies to secular studies was astoundingly high. Even through our final years we had to take multiple Jewish studies classes covering different areas of religion, though at least they finally stopped giving us exams for them. In Year 11 I had a scripture teacher who told us that, while it was not totally obligatory, she had known people who failed biology in America because they refused to write anything about evolution on their final exams, and she thought that was admirable and we might consider it. At one stage, we were discussing marriage in a religious context, and someone raised a point about how one religious perspective/commentator or something wasn't taking into account how unhappy something might make people, I think it was about divorce and how that commentator thought you should avoid it - and she said, "It doesn't say anywhere in the bible that God wants you to be happy." She then proceeded to tell us that her grandparents had a seemingly miserable marriage and fought all the time, but THEY stayed together, and that was something worth emulating. Fortunately everyone recognised that she was an idiot, but if she'd been a primary school teacher, she could have done so. much. damage.
We also had a terrifying Chasidic philosophy teacher in years 7 and 8, who gave us a booklet of the class' topics for the year. I knew things were going to be bad when I looked down the index and found a topic on "mind control", which she proceeded to tell us was all about controlling your thoughts so as not to think about problematic things. In retrospect I think she meant not thinking about things that bother you all day, and being able to set them aside until a more convenient time to worry about them, thus assuaging anxiety. But she was exactly the sort of person who would have happily told us to use the technique to stifle religious doubt, and I think she actually did say something about quashing thoughts that were inappropriate or undesirable, so that section of classes did not go down well.
One of the very junior Jewish studies teachers really wanted to teach science, and was in the midst of training for that, so our (wonderful) science teacher (and it would not be fun teaching science in that school) let her have a go. She spent her entire lesson referring to astrology rather than astronomy.
We had an English teacher in year 12 who replaced one who left at the end of first term. She was an average teacher in terms of actual skill, but never had anything new to say about a text after the first class, and would just riff on the one theme she had picked up from every text for the rest of the time we studied it. When we were doing If This Is A Man by Primo Levi, we started a tally of the number of times she said any variation on the word "survive" in a lesson. She averaged about 40 times per double period. She also decided that reading the first text we studied during the year wasn't worth her time, even though it was going to be on our final exams.
We also had a science teacher who gave the whole class lunchtime detention because she thought we had been humming all lesson. Two people had hummed at the beginning of the lesson, and even though they had long since stopped, she kept hearing it, coming from different directions of the room, and kept getting progressively angrier, telling the class how awful this imaginary hummer was. I think she had tinnitus and didn't know it yet. This was the same person who, in year 7, called me up to the board to demonstrate a formula, checked my notebook on the way up, then told me to sit back down because she wanted someone who had gotten it wrong so she could correct them. There may well be some decent educational theory behind this, but at the time it just looked like a power trip to the class. She nearly redeemed herself by telling us that improper fractions could also be referred to as Dolly Parton fractions because they were top-heavy, but people pretty much detested her for her whole teaching style, and when she was fired kids skipped down the coridoor quietly singing "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead".
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This one time I was apparently the favorite in my chorus class but I forgot to go to the concert we had near the end of the year. What made it worse was that she called out my name to give me her certificate of appreciation and to her surprise I was nowhere to be seen. I don't know how I got to be her favorite though, I didn't really like the class and I wasn't particularly good at it.
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This is about bad teachers! Not horrible students who continually disappoint their tutors.
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I have no other crazy teacher stories! I have been eternally cursed with reasonable and respectful teachers throughout my life!
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From the opposite perspective
Considering some of the students teachers have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, is it any wonder they go crazy??
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At 11 I was at a cathedral prep school (private boarding school for the choir boys and others). The headmaster was a priest, and taught me Latin. One day, he asked me to translate milites, so I said "soldiers". "No, boy, try again." "Er, soldiers?" "No, boy, solDiers." He was actually objecting to my pronunciation of soldiers as "soldjers"...
There was also a Scottish woman (Miss M) of "a certain age" who taught French; we used to joke that she demonstrated the five French vowels as "ü", "ü", "ü", "ü", and "ÜÜÜ".
Anyway, one sad day, the headmaster's wife died. A year later, he remarried, to the assistant matron - who I know made him an excellent wife, and was a loving carer to him in his unfortunately decrepit old age. Miss M had a strict view of propriety, and decided that the headmaster had offended this; she decided to express this by telling the boys at every opportunity that the headmaster was "a wicked man." When she continued after repeated instructions to stop, it was decided to dispense with her services. A governor of the school, Canon H (a canon of the cathedral) came over, and a boy was sent to Miss M's room to summon her to the head's office. She sent back a message saying that she was teaching an extra French class; but then dismissed the boys, with extra sweets, and waited for the response. After a while Canon H went to her room, and told her that she was sacked, and that she was required to leave the building the next day, and to speak to no one meanwhile. At this point, accounts diverge: Canon H said that she was so overcome by emotion that she started to shake, and he took her by the shoulder to steady her and prevent her falling; Miss M said that he took her by the shoulder and shook her. So she sued - not for her job, but for assault. The case took a couple of years to reach its end, by which time it was being heard in the Old Bailey and made the Law Reports in The Times newspaper (she lost).
At the same school, while I was there, there was an occasion when the head cook was promoted to matron... This led to the time when I had to write home to get my mother to call the school to get me taken to the doctor (I was found to have an appendix abscess, and was in hospital for six weeks).
When, at my next school, my (married) housemaster ran off with another housemaster's wife, this seemed comparatively tame.
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(@ Kugai) Agreed. My mom is currently working at my old high school since she's used to working in education and she wanted to be there to make sure my little sister doesn't get in trouble in the big scary world of Public School (it's not going to stop her). However, the only job they had open was an Aide position for the Special Needs teachers. My mom got assigned in the mildly disabled class, which is 30% students with learning disabilities and 70% students who think school is "gay" and enjoy shouting obscenities at the teacher in the middle of class. She's had to learn what paperwork to fill out when students get arrested. Coming from her previous job at my old Christian school, it's a bit of a drastic change.
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Paul, that sounds like the plot of a Muriel Spark novel.
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Life imitating art, eh?
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Oh man I had a teacher who made me hold my wee until I had no choice but to piss myself. Because with my high school's scheduling, classes were 90 minutes long. And we'd just come back from lunch where I'd had plenty of fluids because P.E. was the class preceding! Fuck that guy what a fuckin dick.
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Oh and my stepmom is a teacher and is a TOTAL BITCH. I tell people here who my stepmom is and they're like 'OH MY GOD THAT HORRIBLE WOMAN' and I'm like 'Trust me dogg I have worse stories I guaranfuckingtee it that woman is unfit for any kind of relationship with a child.'
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My middle school teachers were pretty okay!
Apparently my 7th grade history teacher (also my sister's, 4 years before me) had ripped the phone out of the wall because he kept getting calls during his lesson. I think he might have been a historical gamer because he was really good at painting miniatures and what not. He also would walk up and down the rows of desks with a cowbell.
My 7th grade science teacher was/is a storm chaser!
My friend and I got our perma-sub in English in 10th grade to say "what? NO SHIT" in the middle of class.
My 12th grade history teacher was an ex-marine drill sergeant, and he had various ways of waking people up if you fell asleep. My favorites were him lifting the front of the desk (it was a desk/chair connected sort of deal) until the person woke up and freaked the fuck out. Also he would spray compressed air right into your ear, that one was fun!
My 9th grade gym teacher was explaining the plan for the last day of class (take the final exam, then play basketball, yay) and one kid was (again) talking while he was talking. He turned and just shouted in the locker room, "TO-NY PAL-IN-TRO-NY WILL YOU SHUT UP FOR FIVE MINUTES?" Tony was only like 6 feet away from him.
Same teacher once stormed into my 9th grade math class with the head of the athletics department because a kid came to school drunk. He nearly dropped some super loud F-bombs. I was really freaked out because this was all happening right next to me. HE THREW A DESK TOO!
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My 6th grade science teacher had possibly the best way to wake up students. We had desks that 4 students could sit and and I was in one of the two desks in the front row. The guy next to me had fallen asleep, so my teacher picked up a metal pole he kept behind his desk and very quietly walked up to our desk. (The entire class was quietly giggling.) He looked at the sleeping guy for a few seconds and then threw the pole onto the ground right in front of our desk, scaring the shit out of the guy. It was hilarious.
My 10th grade chemistry teacher and 11th grade physics teacher used to go bowling for students. They didn't like when kids loitered in the halls after school had gotten out. Those of us with after school activities got a kick watching people run away from them.
That same chemistry teacher had been put on probation for chasing a student with a homemade blowtorch. And one year chased a student down the hall with a yard stick for messing with the class cat, Max. (The teacher had found the cat and had been allowed to let it stay in the greenhouse attached to our class. Max was lying in our doorway and some kid kept coming up and poking Max with his foot. We told our teacher, so he hid out of sight and when the kid did it again, Mr. B jumped from behind the door yelling at him and chased him down the hall with the yardstick. It was awesome. (We all loved Max the cat, he was our class mascot.)) Luckily I had him the year before he retired, so Mr. B really did not care about what he did.
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I had a tutor when I went to live in England, and she would make up stories about history because she had no idea what she was talking about. One involved Carew Castle (whoa! I just looked up a picture of it and I remember it SO WELL!) and apparently the last royal family who lived there owned a monkey and the prince and the monkey got into a gunfight and they shot AT THE SAME TIME and killed each other AT THE SAME TIME.
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My Secondary 2 (Grade 2 of High School) science teacher was a chain smoker. He decided to stop smoking the year I had him as a teacher. He kept a stack of dictionaries next to his desk. Let's just say that when he was angry and/or was in need of a nicotine hit, ducking was required.
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My 11th grade English teacher would tip talkative students out of their desks, toss their papers on the ground, and throw things out the window (we were on the second floor). He was a pretty good teacher though!
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There seems to be a pretty good pattern of teachers who are tenured/about to retire? I know there's a lot of worry over whether tenured teachers will just slack off, but in my experience those are the ones who are really into their subject, so they just use it to teach in more innovative ways.
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let's all take a minute to remember some crazy unprofessional bullshit that one of our elementary schoolteachers did or said
yeah right because I can remember anything from back then
Does middle school count? Because I vaguely recall a few teachers doing awesome fucked up things like occasionally stepping outside to roar in anger, and the teacher who sat on the table in the front while wearing a skirt.*
Once I got to highschool any eccentricities my teachers had paled in comparison to my eccentricities. Man my highschool teachers were awesome. The Spanish teacher who made up a word that means "pissed," the physics teacher who had us sling water balloons at him... well there was the English teacher who was a little too into telling us about sexual imagery in various stories, but even that was more hilarious than concerning.
*She was the health teacher, so perhaps that was related.
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Wait I thought of something.
When I was in primary/elementary/grade/whatever school the Assistant Principal would take classes when there were no casual teachers to fill in. I don't know if he actually knew anything about teaching because whenever he filled in he would just bring in an acoustic guitar and make us sing Paint It Black over and over again.
I hate that song now.
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one of my high school science teachers ate a candle in front of the class
turns out, it was a potato and he was making a point about observation skills, but still.
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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.
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Oh man I just remembered how my stepmom used to have me draw up all the tests for all her English 7 classes one year, at a rate of $5 a pop. She made me write her an answer key, too.
I am actually fairly good friends with a number of people who were her students in that grade (7th) during that time period. When they learned that it was basically me who taught them that year, they laughed. Apparently my tests were the hardest they'd had that whole year.
Cosmic lulz came recently when I found out she still uses those tests I wrote to this very fucking day, and I dropped out of high school almost 7 years ago. God I love being better than my stepmother in literally every single thing.
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God I love being better than my stepmother in literally every single thing.
I don't want to bring up any bad memories but I bet she is better at sleeping with your father.
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This is about bad teachers! Not horrible students who continually disappoint their tutors.
Kinda. Lunchy just said it was about crazy unprofessional bullshit, which isn't always bad.
My first year teaching, I had no idea what I was doing but it was fun and my students seemed to like me. Life in Michigan is very boring, so when the Detroit Pistons made the playoffs and eventually won the NBA championship (yeah, that's how old I am) pretty much the whole state celebrated.
I'd stayed up to watch the game and hadn't prepared anything for next day's classes, so next day I just wrote "PISTONS!!" on the board in red and blue (team colors) and had my boom box cranked, and every class that day was just a party. Or at least a day off. No presentations, no homework, I sat and listened to tunes all day and blew off work, and no one complained 'cause they were doing the same. Sometimes teaching is the best gig.
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I just remembered! The ISS teacher (I don't know what to call him, he wasn't really a teacher? But he was pretty smart and would help on any topic; we were friends 'cause I was in there enough and I was the only one who didn't lip off to him) always kept a mallet on his desk. If he saw anyone sleeping at their desk, he would take the mallet, creep up, and slam it down on the desk.
It was amazing.
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The teacher at my first Australian junior school who called me "Ching-chong", and treated me like a retard because my English was poor.
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The teacher at my first Australian junior school who called me "Ching-chong", and treated me like a retard because my English was poor.
That's the kind of teacher that deserves a kick to the crotch.
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I had a speech impediment when I was younger and needed a speech therapist to get my problems resolved. However, I didn't learn this till the second grade, because my first grade teacher graded us on how happy we were. So my big smile got me through perfectly fine, even though I was developmentally behind, while some poor kid with a bad home life or deeper emotional issues got a frowny face. Way to go school system.
The teacher I loathed the most was in grade 4 though, because she made us colour, even for math. Granted, finding projects for colouring in math is pretty skillful, I didn't really appreciate it at the time.
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My wife is substantially deaf. A report from one of her primary school teachers said "V pays no attention in class; it's as if she doesn't hear what's said to her." Instead of checking whether she actually couldn't hear, they classified her as ESN. She only didn't get sent to a special-needs school because her father (a Jewish refugee) refused to send her to any place that had a "Jewish quota". So, by chance, she was sent to a decent school and managed to get an education after all. None the less, neither her schools nor her parents ever diagnosed the simple fact of deafness - that was only found when a fellow student at university (a good friend to this day) tried to interest her in some classical music and wondered why she so preferred music with trumpets in!
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The teacher I loathed the most was in grade 4 though, because she made us colour, even for math. Granted, finding projects for colouring in math is pretty skillful, I didn't really appreciate it at the time.
There is heaps to colour in maths. Venn diagrams, map colouring, graphing inequalities, choose-n-coloured-marbles probability problems...
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One day, I'm probably going to be in a thread like this.
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Don't worry, so am I.
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My final year as a teacher, I was assigned two sections of "Math 1". "Math 1" is what they call it when people somehow get to be juniors and seniors in high school but cannot add fractions or tell you how many sides a triangle has. I know some people just aren't great at math, and I have no problem with that, but the majority of them were in the class because they'd never given a shit about math or school or life in general as far as I could tell. All of my training told me that the key was to make the class fun and interesting, somehow relate the topic to them. Application problems were fun, at least for me.
Roy mugs Dirk, dropping him to the ground, and runs down the street at 20 feet per second. If it takes Dirk 3 seconds to get up, and another 2 seconds to pull out and aim his 9mm, how far away will they find Roy's body? (You may assume the travel time of the bullet is instantaneous, and Dirk does not move Roy's body other than to retrieve his wallet.)
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a hunner feet away if Dirk's homie dinnit shoot firs
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Answer: They'll never find the body.
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My final year as a teacher, I was assigned two sections of "Math 1". "Math 1" is what they call it when people somehow get to be juniors and seniors in high school but cannot add fractions or tell you how many sides a triangle has. I know some people just aren't great at math, and I have no problem with that, but the majority of them were in the class because they'd never given a shit about math or school or life in general as far as I could tell. All of my training told me that the key was to make the class fun and interesting, somehow relate the topic to them. Application problems were fun, at least for me.
Roy mugs Dirk, dropping him to the ground, and runs down the street at 20 feet per second. If it takes Dirk 3 seconds to get up, and another 2 seconds to pull out and aim his 9mm, how far away will they find Roy's body? (You may assume the travel time of the bullet is instantaneous, and Dirk does not move Roy's body other than to retrieve his wallet.)
Anyone else think of this Family Guy bit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stXG3np-BWE)?
"It's 3:00! Where the hell is Louie?"
"Well, you tell me. Louie left his house at 2:15 and has to travel 6.2 miles at a rate of 5 miles per hour. What time will Louie arrive?"
"(thinks for a second) Depends if he stops to see his ho."
"(rubs kid's head) That's what we call a variable!"
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My final year as a teacher, I was assigned two sections of "Math 1". "Math 1" is what they call it when people somehow get to be juniors and seniors in high school but cannot add fractions or tell you how many sides a triangle has. I know some people just aren't great at math, and I have no problem with that, but the majority of them were in the class because they'd never given a shit about math or school or life in general as far as I could tell. All of my training told me that the key was to make the class fun and interesting, somehow relate the topic to them. Application problems were fun, at least for me.
Roy mugs Dirk, dropping him to the ground, and runs down the street at 20 feet per second. If it takes Dirk 3 seconds to get up, and another 2 seconds to pull out and aim his 9mm, how far away will they find Roy's body? (You may assume the travel time of the bullet is instantaneous, and Dirk does not move Roy's body other than to retrieve his wallet.)
One of my math teachers used to do something similar. One exercise went something like about how one kid in class decides to chase after some fat chicks for some sweet lovin', and ran at 20 miles an hour after them but got a nicotine attack after 4 seconds and had to stop, so how far did he run?
The teacher also poked fun at our Vietnamese exchange student one year, telling him to quit looking out the window because there wasn't any Viet Cong outside the window. And he'd tell the kid to not jump out the window and commit hari kari for getting a 97% on a test. The kid had a good sense of humor though, and took it all in stride.
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isn't hara kiri a dirty jap thing
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I think the assumption being that they're all "Chinamen".
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Asians are all alike.
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My English teacher told me to take more drugs or less drugs.
I think there were other stories. I don't remember.
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My math teacher compared me to the movie A Beautiful Mind and told me, point blank, that I needed to be on drugs in order to succeed in life. This was in ninth grade, when I didn't give a damn about her class.
One time I told her I didn't want to conform, and she replied, word for word, "I don't want you to conform, I just want you to be like everybody else."
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"I don't want you to conform, I just want you to be like everybody else."
That makes me think of this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n46CtDmKOg).
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The teacher also poked fun at our Vietnamese exchange student one year, telling him to quit looking out the window because there wasn't any Viet Cong outside the window. And he'd tell the kid to not jump out the window and commit hari kari for getting a 97% on a test. The kid had a good sense of humor though, and took it all in stride.
Yeah, you'd need a "good" sense of humour to see the "fun". One of the really enjoyable parts of being "Asian" at school, is that if you score highly, you get rewarded with sneering jokes like that. Bonus points for the illiterate "All Asians are alike" joke, that one never gets old.
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Hey Chingchong, why don't you do some Kung Fu Karate and make me some sweet and sour chicken using math or something.
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Typical Hawaiian shirted loudmouth American tourist
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European elitists are the best people anyway.
(p.s. "great" britain is not eurpoe)
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Eurpoe sounds like a disease
or maybe a phase Poe had that we just don't talk about anymore
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Hey Chingchong, why don't you do some Kung Fu Karate and make me some sweet and sour chicken using math or something.
You forgot to demand I carry a katana... :-D
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Then you could go all Kamikaze Samurai Chin Chan Woo Fan on me. Wouldn't want that. I might have to shoot ya with my rifle.
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My English teacher told me to take more drugs or less drugs.
I think there were other stories. I don't remember.
So, clearly you went with the 'more' option?
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Bonus points for the illiterate "All Asians are alike" joke, that one never gets old.
You do realize that I'm full-blooded Chinese and that my comment was meant to be ironic, right?
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Hey, Jace, I got some uh this here moonshine if'n you wont it, but make sure you r'member that the password is "nig-lover" on account of our racist tendencies, cuz Bobby Lou gave me some new guns for my enormous collection and I'm a lil trigger-happy.
If you forget the password, you can always use the backup password, which is "Obama is the anti-christ cuz Jesus would never take away our death panels".
Oh, anyone seen our nukes recently? I see a towel-head over there. brb jumpin' in my GMC SUV
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Oh man, now I want some 'shine.
I had a math teacher in high school who told us this story that to sum it up was "I always wondered why animals drink anti-freeze, so I tried it. I woke up in the hospital a few days later." I liked his method of teaching math compared to the other teacher I had the previous quarter though. I don't really recall why though.
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Yeah, you'd need a "good" sense of humour to see the "fun". One of the really enjoyable parts of being "Asian" at school, is that if you score highly, you get rewarded with sneering jokes like that. Bonus points for the illiterate "All Asians are alike" joke, that one never gets old.
What? Hardly. That guy was easily one of the most popular kids within a couple months of him starting at my school. We loved him.
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Yeah, one of the reasons I like being on this side of the Pacific - But separate from the land of Redbacks and Two Step Snakes.
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You do realize that I'm full-blooded Chinese and that my comment was meant to be ironic, right?
I did not, no, but I did assume your post was ironic. My remark about "bonus points" was aimed, not at you, but at the teacher described in Sorflakne's post, for making an illiterate "hari kari" joke to/about someone from Vietnam. Reading back through the thread, however, I can see that I did not perhaps make that sufficiently clear, and I apologise for any offence I have given.
What? Hardly. That guy was easily one of the most popular kids within a couple months of him starting at my school. We loved him.
Again, my remark about sneering jokes was aimed at the teacher, not at you, or your fellow students.
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Everyone's a little bit racist. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHKIMOgoJoU)
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You do realize that I'm full-blooded Chinese and that my comment was meant to be ironic, right?
I did not, no, but I did assume your post was ironic. My remark about "bonus points" was aimed, not at you, but at the teacher described in Sorflakne's post, for making an illiterate "hari kari" joke to/about someone from Vietnam. Reading back through the thread, however, I can see that I did not perhaps make that sufficiently clear, and I apologise for any offence I have given.
No problem. I didn't offend you, you didn't offend me, we're all groovy cool.
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Everyone's a little bit racist. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHKIMOgoJoU)
Except for me
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(i'm super racist)
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That would be an awesome anti-super-hero.
"This situation is fubar. We need a super-racist."
"WHY HELLO THERE, <insert racist term here>"
"OMG IT'S SUPER RACIST!"
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Capable of recognizing the exact ethnicity of every person he meets, and knowing the most offensive and derogatory epithets for said person.
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More like capable of recognizing the exact ethnicity, and intentionally referring to them as the wrong one.
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"I know where you're from, I just don't care!"
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I can't remember much of elementary school except going to the nurse almost every day because I was an extremely anxious and terrified child. No one thought, "hey, maybe we should find out WHY she feels sick every day" they just let me keep going.
Also I had a creepy old gym teacher in 1st or 2nd grade that wouldn't let me go get a drink of water. I was a fairly intelligent child, so I asked if I could go to the bathroom instead. The water fountain was on the way back to the gym. So I went to the bathroom, waited a minute, then went back out, got a drink and returned to class. Only the teacher was watching me and saw that I got a drink, so he grabbed my arm and yelled at me for it. I was terrified of that man already, and he made it so much worse that day. I saw him in middle school for some reason, a few years later, and almost had a panic attack over it.
I was always falling asleep in class in high school. I stayed up late reading sci fi and fantasy novels so I never had any energy the next day. Apparently my French teacher often spoke to me while I was asleep and I responded. She and the class knew I was out and apparently made me say many hilarious things.
And a high school math teacher made fun of me for being long on hair (it was down to my hips at the time) and short on homework (I never did math homework, I was terrible at it). He was funny but pretty consistently picked on me.
I dropped my 10th grade social studies class because I decided one day that my teacher was a jerk. He said something along the lines of "kill all the old/sick/useless people, better for society" and I'm thinking now that he wasn't serious but at the time I thought he was. So I just quit the class. They tried to get me to go back, saying that if I quit it would look bad to the teacher (terrible argument, I hated him). Also I wasn't really allowed to do such a thing? But I ended up being the art teacher's assistant and that was awesome.
To end on a good note, I sung a They Might Be Giants song (can you guess which one?) with a different social studies teacher and I was the only kid dorky enough to know what he was talking about and that was awesome. I liked that guy a lot. And my horticulture teacher was like a super muscular and amazingly hot version of Seth Green.
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More like capable of recognizing the exact ethnicity, and intentionally referring to them as the wrong one.
If that happens to be the worst kind of insult, mind. If he cracked an anti-semitic joke to insult an inuit that would just be all kinds of silly.
Hey Jens say something in Swedish, you crazy Swede.
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I got thrown off SO HARD the other day when my good friend, a New Yorker, referred to a girl as "looking like a Jap." I had no fucking clue who or what he was talking about, since there wasn't an Asian female to be found, and all the other girls I could immediately see didn't look even remotely Japanese. After several minutes of cluelessness and "What the fuck are you even talking about there is nothing Japanese-looking about any of the girls I see," he explained that "Jap" is not just an amazingly insensitive and dated slur for Japanese folks, but if you call in the next 5 minutes it can also be shorthand for Jewish American Princess.
I still don't use the word "Jap" though, so what fucking use was that whole goddamn lesson?
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Yeah, I remember learning that in high school, when I overheard someone calling another girl "jappy". So apparently people took a racial slur and changed its meaning to...a spoiled Jewish girl?
I'm sure Japanese-American Jewish girls exist, I wonder if there are any "Japanese JAPs".
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More like capable of recognizing the exact ethnicity, and intentionally referring to them as the wrong one.
If that happens to be the worst kind of insult, mind. If he cracked an anti-semitic joke to insult an inuit that would just be all kinds of silly.
Hey Jens say something in Swedish, you crazy Swede.
That's not so bad. If you look at a topographical map of Scandinavia, anything to the east of the mountains is so stupid it might as well be Sweden.
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Is Jap really a slur? Seems to be a simple abbreviation to me.
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(http://www.headinjurytheater.com/images/oc%20slap%20a%20jap%20superdickery.jpg)
Yes. Yes it is.
Also, Superman is such a dick.
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I've never actually heard jap used as a slur against Japanese people. I've always known it to mean Jewish American princess, but that may have something to do with being Jewish myself.
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It was a pretty common slur in WWII and I think ended up being viewed as derogatory ever since.
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Yeah I've heard 'that fucking Jap' etc, just like Paki is also short for Pakistani, and that's definitely a slur.
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Even worse, it makes me think about Pearl Harbor and Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett being like "GO GIT THEM JAP SUCKERS!"
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[...] I wonder if there are any "Japanese JAPs".
Japjaps?
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I had a wonderful P.E. teacher in kindergarten. She left and was replaced by a loud, obnoxious, somehow overweight guy (Nothing against overweightness, but he was a friggin' P.E. teacher). I hated him. We warmed up to the same Shania Twain song every horrible time. And he was, again, obnoxious. (Turns out that he was finally fired a year ago for molesting a girl.)
I had a horrible 7th grade English teacher. She made us read "The Pearl," a 90-page book (a terrible one at that). And then we had a 36-page packet to do. Most of it wasn't related to English. Like coloring a full sheet of blank paper as if it were a postcard of where the book took place. And then as I was answering some of the worksheet questions about the book itself, and a question said the answer was on page 100-something. Note that the book is 90 pages. Turns out a few people got longer copies (114 pages), so I had to ask someone to let me borrow her copy.
But that teacher's main bit (other than her love of Elvis) was "Chances." You earned little slips of paper if you did well on a test or whatever. She occasionally held auctions. Most auctioned items were candy bars. There was an occasional homework pass, but not much worthwhile. I was quickly earning a lot of these things, and I wanted to save them for something special. So I waited. At the last auction, she offered a "No Essay" pass. I wanted it. I bid all of my Chances on it. I easily won. Everyone else had wasted theirs on chocolate (Not that chocolate is a waste, but if you're earning school-related stuff, then you might as well use them to help yourself out). I was thrilled. Finally--something I could use! She loved stupid essays, and I hated them. She didn't assign good topics and was mean about it. So when she assigned the next essay, I waited for her to come to my desk (so I wouldn't be flaunting my ticket in front of the class) and asked if I could use the pass on it. She said that I couldn't, because she felt I needed to do that one. I sighed and said okay. She assigned two essays after that, neither of which I was allowed to use my 2000-Chance essay pass on. If I had known she wasn't going to assign any after that, I would have fought more, and at the end of the school year, I left dejected and defeated. (She was asked to retire a few years ago. During a school year. Apparently she'd been doing some pretty crazy stuff that school year.)
I've seen a high school math teacher fart in a student's face. Intentionally.
In high school, I had to have an evil device put in my mouth to make my tongue stop pushing against my teeth. Well, it was too long and gave me a lisp while making holes in my tongue when I was trying to chew and talk (not necessarily at the same time). I had a teacher pick me to read something out loud in class just so they could all laugh at my lisp. Another teacher had me say something about my "grill" in a car full of boys. (The "tongue crib" was removed a couple of days later and replaced with something more suitable.)
My favorite of crazies is Mario. I don't know if any students ever remembered his actual name. I know I knew it at one point. But all that's remained is his creepiness and mustache. He was a substitute teacher. (He was eventually fired after getting caught with some drawings he had done of a partially naked female student.) He currently comes to the public library every day, and he's there way before it opens in the morning to use a specific computer. He looks up almost-naked women.
I have more I could say about Mario, but I think his creepiness stands for itself.
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That reminds me of a couple of teachers I had - one was a substitute games teacher who made all the girls in my class line up in our (skimpy - polo shirt and shorts) gym uniforms so he could take photos of us... I cannot believe no one reported him, but a few years later he was jailed for being a paedophile so obviously someone did eventually.
I also had teachers who threw stuff; my German teacher used to throw the board rubber at the person he wanted to answer the question, but it was a foam one and didn't hurt if it hit you so that wasn't terribly bad. My form tutor threw a chair at me one time, because the girl sitting on the other side of the room from me was winding him up really badly and I guess he just snapped. We never saw him again after that, he just left and didn't come back. Word on the corridor was that he had bad insomnia and wasn't coping.
I've had some wonderful teachers too, who did out of the ordinary things. My favourite English and History teacher used to sit on the desks and just chat to us, but somehow her chats taught us more than other teachers' lecturing. My college Sociology teacher wasn't really qualified in sociology (she'd been drafted in at the last minute to cover maternity leave) and she got me to help her plan her lessons and stuff, which really helped me to learn the material because I was covering it twice. The school Music teachers would let the most dedicated music students hang out in the department building, even though we weren't technically allowed inside at break - most of us were in choir, orchestra, wind band etc. most days anyway, so on other days they'd just turn a blind eye to the fact we shouldn't have been there.
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my German teacher used to throw the board rubber at the person he wanted to answer the question
took me a moment to remember that rubber means eraser to you guys, not condom
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I thought of another one, in the "unprofessional but not really abusive or anything" category.
The school had Boys bathrooms and Girls bathrooms on each floor, and also Staff Only bathrooms, but only one per floor and it was only a single facility. Since this was completely stupid and I had the same five minutes between classes that the students had (I was a teacher), I just used the nearest Boys bathroom. Apparently it was quite unusual for a teacher to even step into the Boys bathroom, because they were always smoking in there, both tobacco and non-tobacco. They'd scatter, all the toilets would flush, breath mints would come out... I didn't care. I wasn't there to bust anyone; I just needed to pee.
The common strategy for those smoking non-tobacco seemed to be "drop it on the floor and they can't prove it was yours." A couple of times they would do this and then exit quickly while I was doing what I came there to do, leaving me in an empty bathroom with a few half-smoked non-tobacco cigarettes on the floor. Obviously in my role as teacher, it was my duty to confiscate it all, but I don't remember anything in the teacher's handbook about what to do with it after that. I'd moved halfway across the country to teach at this place and hadn't established any connections yet, so this actually worked out pretty well.
One time one of my "Math 1" students missed a test due to illness and was back on the day we were going over the answers and stuff, so he had to sit out in the hallway to make up the test. Later I went out there to check on him (and make sure he was actually still there) and he was just finishing. From sitting on the floor against the lockers, with his legs up so he could use his books as a "desk" a few things had fallen out of his pockets, including a nice little ceramic pipe. He stood up and handed me the test, and I told him he'd lost something, and pointed down. "Uh... that's not mine" he said, but I just said "Neil, pick up your bowl. It's too nice to just leave there."
Honestly, I was just there to teach math. If they wanted me to be a cop too, they needed to pay me more. And yeah, I could've confiscated it, but... I don't know. In that moment, the rules of the "community" seemed to override my supposed obligation to bust kids.
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Yeah, I remember learning that in high school, when I overheard someone calling another girl "jappy". So apparently people took a racial slur and changed its meaning to...a spoiled Jewish girl?
I'm sure Japanese-American Jewish girls exist, I wonder if there are any "Japanese JAPs".
Yes. My first semester in the dorms was spent with this one, who kept an extra toothbrush to scrub the vomit off her shoes after a night out and screamed at her boyfriend on the phone for an hour because the necklace he got her for her birthday wasn't from Tiffany. Her mom was the tiniest, sweetest old Japanese lady and her dad was a happy nerdy Jewish guy from NY. I can't imagine how happy they must have been to send her away to college :/
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v352/redglasscurls/mandygood.jpg)
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screamed at her boyfriend on the phone for an hour because the necklace he got her for her birthday wasn't from Tiffany
I'm not surprised at her shittiness, I'm surprised her boyfriend stuck with her for a whole hour (also I guess that she managed to think of an hour's worth of insults for a nice present).
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Times like these I can be happy I was home schooled. Although, sex-ed was very awkward, so we will pretend like it didn't happed.
:psyduck: :psyduck: :psyduck:
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Dawg your sex ed cannot have been more awkward than mine and I was at a state school. Our form tutor was the most committed evangelical Christian I have ever met, and her sex ed classes were "Don't have sex before marriage or you will go to Hell". Well. That was helpful. It wasn't until year 11 (aged sixteen, at which point I'd already accompanied three friends to the clinic to take the emergency pill) that we were taught by an external nurse how to put a condom on, and I had never even heard of the implant or the injection until then.
How was homeschooling? I'm really interested, I'm hoping to homeschool my own kids when I eventually have them so I'd love to hear about it.
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It was amazing, because about two weeks into my father gave up and I spent the next year focusing on learning how to play guitar. :mrgreen:
(Not even joking)
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@barmymoo
Mine went well :), I enjoyed it because we could focus on more IT based stuff, and there was more involvement on my part, which is very important. But homeschooling requires a lot of work and studying(if you yourself don't know the subject yourself), but home schoolers perform statistically better. I did spend time in public schooling as well, which sucked a lot because of bullying.
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My homeschool experience was good but I was lonely.
When I went back to school in eigth grade, I cried twice on the first day - once because the movie 10 Things I Hate About You wasn't christian on the bus, and once because of all of the disrespectful your mom jokes.
So, yeah. I'd suggest against homeschooling your kids, especially if you're evangelical. It will take them years to get over it. And they might move across an ocean to do so. And only call around once a month.
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I don't even have kids yet, so I guess it is kind of premature to be planning this, but I'm not evangelical and I hate that film anyway so my kids are going to be fine.
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once because the movie 10 Things I Hate About You wasn't christian on the bus
Eh? Do movies have a religion? :?
I think home education (what homeschooling is called in Australia, as distinct from distance learning where children are enrolled in a school but study at home because they live in one of our isolated areas), might be a good alternative to poor schools, but is a poor alternative to good ones, and especially bad for ESL parents and students. It bothers me that the few people I've met who home-ed seem more concerned with what their kids should not learn than with what they should learn. Depending on parents' motives for home educating, I don't think it is an either/or decision. My parents kept my nose to the grindstone with home-ed as well as sending me to school (they thought my homework allocation was ridiculously light), and sending me to private lessons. School holidays? What are they? :laugh:
In NSW (education is controlled by state governments in Australia), probably the biggest problem with home-ed is that you cannot obtain the HSC (Higher School Certificate) at the end of high-school, or therefore an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank), unless you are enrolled in a school, so you'll be way down the back of the queue for admission to uni and many technical education courses. There are alternatives to the HSC/ATAR like the IB/UAC, but they're not accessible to home-ed students either. There are some private schools that offer "distance learning" curricula to home-ed parents even if they live just down the road, which is probably a good option provided parents can afford it, approve of the course material, and are OK with the (generally) strong religious affiliation of such schools.
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Don't ask me; I'm a dedicated agnostic. I think my 8th-grade-self had issues with all of the dicks in the movie. Like the one drawn on the business school kid's face.
Yeah, my parents sent me to a private school once they saw that I was outgrowing them, and when they were less concerned with what I wasn't learning (evolution), and more concerned with what I should be learning (social skills.)
…a decade later, I'm an evolutionary biologist with no social skills. Go figure.
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I'm just keen that my kids learn, well, anything at all. I went to two pretty good schools, one terrible one and a reasonable sixth form, and I don't actually know very much about most things, or anything at all about a lot of things because I decided aged 14 that I didn't care about those things (case in point: geography). Schools do what they can but in my opinion there's no way that a teacher with more than thirty people in the room and limited resources can be as successful as individual attention from one person, and visits to museums, libraries, workplaces (pretty sure I'd have cared far more about woodwork, for example, if I'd been taken to see some guy making furniture instead of being given a piece of plywood and told to make "something useful" out of it) etc. So much time in the school day is wasted on the kind of logistical wrangling that's unavoidable with five hundred people in the building and completely non-existant with only five.
But if my theoretical kids tell me they want to go to school, they can go. Like you say, there's holidays and weekends and evenings for fun trips to interesting places.
On the exams point - in the UK home education is completely legal and all you have to do is be able to explain to an inspector (should one contact you) what you're doing. The government have no right to demand curricula, learning plans, inspections, interviews with the children etc unless they suspect you're not actually teaching them anything - for example, if they know that both parents work full time and there's no tutor, then they can demand proof of education. Exams can be entered through local schools and it's pretty easy to set up. Not all schools allow it but most do, and I know loads of people who were educated that way, including my two half brothers who now both have degrees. I think in other countries it is much harder because the government is much more concerned about being in control of what the kids are learning. Here, the government are doing everything they can to offload that responsibility onto anyone who's prepared to take it, so I think we're golden.
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(Just a random thought, leading nowhere:)
When I was diagnosed with TB at the age of twelve, the school doctor had me thrown out of my (boarding) school as a risk to the other pupils (probably not so); I was educated at home for two terms, until the due time for my next school (and also the end of my treatment to cure the disease, though I was checked for some years longer). As my parents never made an unforced decision to do this, it's honestly never occurred to me in the fifty+ years since to think of that period as "home education" rather than just "being thrown out of school" - but I guess it was, really.
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What, a whole fifteen years old? (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7375598.stm) (Yes, I realise that is a girls' school - my point is TB is still very much here.)
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However, these days it is mainly associated with distinctly poor living conditions. Until the invention of antibiotics, TB was incurable, and so also more widely spread in society. When I had TB, the antibiotics used to cure me had been available for slightly less than 15 years.
As a child, I had a pre-war medical encyclopaedia, and its article on TB and sanatoriums was the largest in the book.
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(Just a random thought, leading nowhere:)
When I was diagnosed with TB at the age of twelve, the school doctor had me thrown out of my...
Wow, that really does put some emphasis on how old you are. To me anyway.
To me, it's the part where he says "the fifty+ years since" :mrgreen:
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You only have to look at my profile...
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That's a fair point.
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You only have to look at my profile...
We still need you and if we remember, we'll occasionally feed you.
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Aw, thanks; but it's only for a few more weeks, so you shouldn't find it too arduous!
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On the exams point - in the UK home education is completely legal and all you have to do is be able to explain to an inspector (should one contact you) what you're doing. The government have no right to demand curricula, learning plans, inspections, interviews with the children etc unless they suspect you're not actually teaching them anything - for example, if they know that both parents work full time and there's no tutor, then they can demand proof of education. Exams can be entered through local schools and it's pretty easy to set up.
Home education is perfectly legal in Australia too, though I believe in Queensland parents have obtain permission from the state Dept. of Education. The issue with the HSC in NSW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_School_Certificate_(New_South_Wales)) (and similar certificates in other states) is that it is not just based on the external exams taken at the end of Year 12, but also on coursework that is continuously assessed over (typically) the two school years leading up to the exams. This, in effect, requires home-ed parents aiming at the HSC to sign up, not just for exams, but for a complete "distance learning"-style package in which coursework is submitted to teachers for assessment by post, e-mail etc. over two years.
The BoS does not, I think, control the curriculum for home-ed generally, but it certainly does if the student is aiming for the HSC. The only element that is compulsory for everyone is two "units" of English, but there is also a requirement to complete a minimum number of BoS-developed course units. I don't in any way hold up the HSC system as an example of perfection, incidentally. Among other failings, it has an anti-science bias (the number of science units you can take is capped), and its rules on modern language study are racially discriminatory in effect, if not (ostensibly) by intent.
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The science cap is not really a problem. There aren't many science courses so it's odd anyway for someone to go after more than 6 units (3 courses) and you can take a total of 3 or 4 Math subjects. The real issue is that Humanities get scaled better by the UAC sausage makers than Sciences (incl. Math) do.
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There aren't many science courses so it's odd anyway for someone to go after more than 6 units (3 courses) and you can take a total of 3 or 4 Math subjects.
Of course there aren't many science courses. What would be the point of creating curricula if you can't take them? And the science courses that you *can* take are restricted to two units (except for Mathematics), whereas you can take three-unit History, four-unit English, music, French etc. Basically scientists are second-class citizens in the NSW school system.
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Hey, just wondering, for people who aren't from the States, what's involved in being licensed to teach? Does anyone know anyone who moved from the States and taught? I know this is slightly off topic, but it'd be really helpful.
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On the exams point - in the UK home education is completely legal and all you have to do is be able to explain to an inspector (should one contact you) what you're doing. The government have no right to demand curricula, learning plans, inspections, interviews with the children etc unless they suspect you're not actually teaching them anything - for example, if they know that both parents work full time and there's no tutor, then they can demand proof of education. Exams can be entered through local schools and it's pretty easy to set up.
Works much the same way here (Finland). When my kid got diagnosed with CFS (or Asperger or a combination or whatever) we opted for home ed to get him thru comprehensive school (roughly equivalent to U.S. junior high). As my wife is a (qualified but mostly unemployed - my work keeps us at a college town, so the job market is kinda difficult for her) physics teacher, getting the paperwork done was not too difficult - the school principal helped. Also they arranged for the exams at school, so he got his diploma from the school all right. The kid's very bright (must come from Mom's side)but he hasn't fully recovered yet - wish us luck.
The chances of getting TB living in western europe/the UK now are distinctly slim is what I meant. The very fact that it made the BBC site pretty much confirms that :P
The shadow on that piece of good news is that TB has not been rooted out of Russia, and they still lack the political stability/discipline to get it done. The somewhat alarming news were a few reported cases of a slightly mutated TB resilient to some of the old antibiotics. Our health authorities didn't sound awfully concerned. May be another antibiotics worked or some other solution came, because it dropped out of news. The UK is an island, I realize, but that may not help much these days.
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To put this into a world-wide perspective, some quotes from Wikipedia (which is notably reliable on medical matters):
One third of the world's population is thought to be infected with M. tuberculosis, and new infections occur at a rate of about one per second. The proportion of people who become sick with tuberculosis each year is stable or falling worldwide but, because of population growth, the absolute number of new cases is still increasing.
[...]
Currently, there are more cases of TB on the planet than at any other time in history
To understand the first startling fact, note also:
Most infections in humans result in an asymptomatic, latent infection
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That is why physicians get a PPD test (TB test) once a year. And those that get a positive result, due to vaccinations, or prior infection, or any number of things, have to get a chest x-ray to check for it.
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Works much the same way here (Finland).... getting the paperwork done was not too difficult
You mentioned paperwork - what paperwork were you required to do? Here, providing you haven't ever sent your child to school before, you don't have to do any paperwork at all. The baby is born, they register it, the health checks are done as usual, so the government knows the child exists, but there's no requirement to register your choice to home educate. You just don't register them at a school. If you have registered them at a school then changed your mind, you obviously need to tell the school so that they can fill the place, but you don't have to tell them why you're withdrawing them - you might be going to a different school instead. Basically, providing no one raises any concerns (neighbours, family or health visitors) about abuse or neglect, you are left to your own devices.
The UK is an island, I realize, but that may not help much these days.
I think the outbreak in Birmingham was believed to be due to a high percentage of the students being first- or second-generation Pakistani immigrants, who returned to visit their families during the holidays. Pakistan doesn't innoculate as robustly as the UK against TB, so children were bringing home infections and spreading them. In light of Paul's post, though, I suspect there is something more to it than that. As far as I know it stopped being compulsory to innoculate children against TB a few years ago, so herd immunity is slowly falling. I got what we referred to as "the six needles" and "the jab" when I was about 12, but I don't know if my brother did.
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I got what we referred to as "the six needles"
I watched everyone else queue up for that; as I'd just had the disease, obviously I was not tested!
Just to confirm what you've said anyway, here is the UK government's info on home education (http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/parents/schoolslearninganddevelopment/choosingaschool/dg_4016124). Some local authorities might be a bit more proactive (http://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/wps/portal/publicsite/councilservices?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=http://apps.oxfordshire.gov.uk/wps/wcm/connect/occ/Internet/Council+services/Education+and+learning/EL+-+Home+education) in checking up on you (and offering help, too).
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My dad always tests positive for the TB skin test whenever he does his biannual physical exam so that the FAA knows he's healthy enough to still hold his private pilot's license (I swear to god that is the only reason he lives a healthy lifestyle at all). He always skin-tests positive, because his brother had TB as a kid, and they shared a room with bunk beds. But the chest x-rays have never once grounded him. Always freaks him out though, he remembers what it was like for Fred.
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A large percentage of the physicians I work with test positive all the time. Many grew up outside of the US, few actually had the disease at any point. They bitch and whine about getting a chest x-ray though. Admittedly they are radiologists, so they have to deal with a lot of radiation exposure, but still. I think an x-ray has one of the lowest doses of any radiological scan.
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You mentioned paperwork - what paperwork were you required to do? Here, providing you haven't ever sent your child to school before, you don't have to do any paperwork at all. The baby is born, they register it, the health checks are done as usual, so the government knows the child exists, but there's no requirement to register your choice to home educate.
Here children are obliged to go to school starting from the Fall of the year of their seventh birthday and ending after the Spring of the year of their 16th birthday. The kid is assigned to the school of the district you happen to live in, but reasonable changes to that are fine, if for example the district border happens to split a newly built neighborhood, and all the other kids in the area would be going to a different school, or for some such reason. After the early years some choices on the curriculum are made, and based on your child's elective, a switch to another school may be needed (and relatively common, but somewhat taxing). Anyway, the law gives the obligation to educate a child for nine years. If this is to be done outside of the official system, then there is paperwork to be done, and a degree of control as to the quality of the education is exercised. Sorry, I'm not quite familiar with all the details, since I wasn't worried about the quality of the curriculum in our case. The local school provided the textbooks and such.
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Hmm - it sounds a reasonable system in terms of which school the children go to (the ridiculous farce we have here is getting worse every year, parents have to enter a kind of lottery for local schools and often take the council to court if they don't get the one they want) but it sounds unnecessarily complicated to home educate. Maybe your schools are better though. Actually, no maybe about it, I think that's an accepted fact from what I remember.
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Maybe your schools are better though. Actually, no maybe about it, I think that's an accepted fact from what I remember.
I don't know about that. They get the three Rs about right, but a few decades ago our ministry of education was infiltrated by people with bright educational theories and beliefs that math has been taught wrong for the last couple of centuries. Consequently nowadays the beginning students in a math (or engineering) program in a college are complete strangers to logical thinking, proofs and such. The system has been going downhill for some time, and it is beginning to show. In spite of all the university level math departments crying in despair these psychoeducational geniuses have the gall to point out some international tests, where our kids do well. It's just that those tests are about basic arithmetic, reading pie charts and such. No real math... Did I say that these geniuses also idolize the East German educational system (but won't take note of the fact that over there they actually taught some real math to the kids)?
Sorry, this one hit a nerve.
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I'm at one of the top universities in the UK and I can add up, multiply and divide up to three digit numbers, deal with simple fractions and work out percentages by trial and error. I'm not sure we're any better! Things are also going to get very interesting soon when universities lose all their funding for arts subjects because the government doesn't believe they matter.
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That's ok, for in many a university program you won't need more math than that. My complaint is more about that we used to teach things like Euclidean geometry at the junior high level (in the 70s). Complete with proofs. Not to all and sundry, but the students were split into separate math classes according to their aspirations. That stopped. Then the invitable happened, and we no longer have enough teachers who could be trusted with that job (damn computers are sucking kids from the same talent pool). These idiots at the ministry all chant the mantra that teaching kids a little bit extra math at junior high level is leading to elitism and such.
I am aware that many (if not most) citizens can function well in the society without knowing a thing about proofs, but the attitude that it is elitist to teach more to those kids who could learn more makes me squirm. All the more so because there is no shortage of schools spending (I guess I'm moving to the high school level at this point) extra hours in sports, arts, music, acting, et cetera. All these have their place, but why is that not elitist, but teaching math is!!!?
Did I say that you hit a nerve?
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When I went to university in 1965, to read physics, there was a surprising variation even then between how much maths people had been taught at different schools. Some of this was because half of us had done maths as a single subject at A-level (typically called Maths for Science), and the rest had done double maths (Pure Maths and Applied Maths as two subjects), and some was variation between the syllabuses for the equivalent exam set in different places. As a result, for example, half of us had a grounding in vector analysis and matrices, and half had never heard of it - that lecturer assumed we had done it, and grudgingly gave over half of a single lecture to summarising the basics (up to dot and cross products) after which we were assumed to be up to speed.
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It's funny, I had the same experience with upper level economics courses. I started out in a math heavy program so my upper-division courses were no problem, but the kids who transferred in from theory heavy schools had a look of horror as the professors assumed we all knew advanced econometrics and had at least gone through Calc. 4.
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Hey, just wondering, for people who aren't from the States, what's involved in being licensed to teach? Does anyone know anyone who moved from the States and taught? I know this is slightly off topic, but it'd be really helpful.
To be licensed to teach at schools here (Nurrway), you have to take a three or four year uni course (not quite sure). I found a page about home education in Norway, it's fairly interesting. You don't have to have any special education, but you have to report to the local autorities that your kid is being home schooled. They'll give you a supervisory teacher from your school (every kid is automatically assigned to a school), and they'll check up on your kid once or twice a year, with talks and tests. If he or she decides that your kid are not being taught well enough, you will be forced to send your kid to school.
Because of the Pisa-tests, the Finnish system is always mentioned at least once a year as "the system we should take inspiration from!". Of course, the international tests checks basic skills, and those are quite ridiculous as they give no real indication of how good you are at these things (I just aced an uni maths exam, but I would have to stop and think for a while if you asked me to multiply 11 and 13). It's still worrying how little people know after the first 10 years of school. My biggest problem with the system is that the teachers are required to give everyone teaching at their own level of competence, but with 1 teacher for 25 students being the standard, that's not going to happen. So they'll have to dump everything down to the lowest common level that still gets us through the curriculum.
EDIT: oh, there's a law about what the education should contain! The things you have to teach your kid, even if you teach from home is:
RLE (the religions and ethics course), Norwegian*, maths, "foreign languages" (English + one more is common), gymnastics, "knowledge of the home" (a cooking course everyone has for one year), "knowledge of society and nature" (nature and social science), aesthetic, practical (painting and woodworking) and social education.
For the social part, the home education thing recommends sending your kids to the SFO, a kind of "stay at school after school" thing where kids basically can hang out with other kids until their parents gets home. Sounds like a brilliant idea, really.
*I could make a whole other post about how they've rammed so much down the troath of this that you don't really get anything covered properly.
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Do they have a set curriculum for those subjects? Or just subject areas you need to be able to show you're covering? Because actually that list pretty much covers what I think everyone needs to know anyway. I'm particularly impressed that there's a requirement to teach knowledge of the home and of society, because I'm not convinced we're actually taught that in schools here! My cookery lessons taught me the many and varied skills of making tea, toast and fruit salad. And I know not everyone is religious, or even most people, but a basic understanding of the major religions makes it much easier to understand the news and current affairs, for example.
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Re: TB tests, I got one of the standard tests and tested positive when I volunteered at a hospital when I was in high school, but they realized I'd always get false positives (and this was one), just like the earlier poster's dad. So they gave me a form that gets me out of taking the test (because it'd be worthless). The most recent example was when I got my sub license, I showed them that form (a few months ago), and they didn't make me take an additional test, they just waived the requirement.
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Do they have a set curriculum for those subjects? Or just subject areas you need to be able to show you're covering? Because actually that list pretty much covers what I think everyone needs to know anyway. I'm particularly impressed that there's a requirement to teach knowledge of the home and of society, because I'm not convinced we're actually taught that in schools here! My cookery lessons taught me the many and varied skills of making tea, toast and fruit salad. And I know not everyone is religious, or even most people, but a basic understanding of the major religions makes it much easier to understand the news and current affairs, for example.
"knowledge of the home" is just a poor translation, it's basically cooking class. The society thing is more... I guess it didn't leave a lasting impression, but at least I know we got through all of the political parties and what they stand for, a lot of stuff about multiculturalism, and such. I think history is showed in there until you get to high school, so that's a pretty big part.
There's a curriculum that's more exact than that. I think the idea is that you go to the local school and loan all the appropriate books for the classes your kid would've taken (they are free for everyone until you're finished with high school now), and use them either directly, or as a way to know what stuff your kids are supposed to know.
I think I'm one of the last generations to get the shot against TB here, they've stopped giving it to you unless you have family in risk areas.
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Australian NSW HS curriculum covers multiculturalism and such in geography. There's a bit about politics and the electoral system but that's part of a Commerce elective so it's not covered or known by many other students (the only friend I have who knows as much about this as I do just got naturalised in the past year or so). HS technology courses have a "food technology" component which is basics of cooking, safety and hygiene. They also have a wood and metal work component but some schools (mostly private girls schools like KRB, where my sister went) don't have it at all.
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"knowledge of the home" is just a poor translation, it's basically cooking class.
We used to call that Domestic Science.
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It's called Home Economics on this side of the pond, or at least it was.
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They call it Family and Consumer Science now (at least in Massachusetts)
There was this one day when I was in like fourth or fifth grade that was really cold in the morning when I walked to school, but by the time we went out for recess it was warm enough that I didn't need my coat when I was running around chasing things. So, naturally, some teacher who didn't know me told me to put on a coat. I told her that I wasn't cold and thanked her for worrying about me and ran off.
She chased after me with my coat and told me that I'd get a cold if I didn't put on my coat.
I was kind of a snotty and over-educated elementary school-er, so I informed her that being cold doesn't give you colds, germs give you colds, and people get colds when it's cold out because they're inside with other people and it's more likely that they'll get sick.
She made me put on my coat anyway.
So I wore the hood but nothing else and when I ran around it flew behind me like a cape. I felt like an anarchist rebel, she gave me the stink-eye, but she couldn't do anything to me because I actually was wearing my coat.
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I'm particularly impressed that there's a requirement to teach knowledge of the home and of society, because I'm not convinced we're actually taught that in schools here!
I had Physical Health and Social Education (PHSE) in school. I don't actually remember much from it, but we were taught a bit about condoms and STDs, and some discussion about society and philosophy and stuff (as much as 11-14 year old boys can manage). Although it had one of my favourite teachers, I hardly remember anything from it.
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I remember learning a lot about drugs in middle school health, but what I remember most about high school health was a video my senior year of kids our age giving birth...complete with close-up of the final moment. Not a fun thing to view.
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I think that somebody here just more or less translated "home economics" to Finnish, for that's what it was called (30 some years ago, when I had the pleasure of attending such a class). I love the term "Domestic science", though.
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They should change Domestic Science to "Science for Hungry People"
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+1 internet
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Let's see...
1) In 10th grade I had a biology teacher who was a creationist, tried to sabotage lessons on evolution, refused to acknowledge several students when they wanted to avoid dissections for moral reasons, even though state regs require him to provide them with an assignment of equal workload and credit, to the point where I confronted him in front of the class and told him that if he didn't change it I'd notify the head of the schools department as well as report him for violating state regulations. Not to mention that he rarely carried his gradebook with him, frequently neglected to record information, rarely looked at what was handed in, and every class was him reading off of premade overhead gels or putting in a video.
2) In 7th grade I had a social studies teacher who would rarely mention assignment due dates except on the day assigned and the day due, even if the assignment was a 2 month thing or something similar. She also saw a student reading in class, tore the book from his hands and hurled it at the wall, someone else shouting 'Duck' is the only reason why said book didn't hit me. She also offered tutoring to students who had trouble, however she put them on a lower priority than talking to people on the phone and other things, then, after the time had passed and the student was still having trouble would say 'well I helped you in tutoring' no, no she did not.
3) I had a HomeEc teacher in 6th grade who was a militant vegetarian, not only did she insult anyone who ate meat she put up stuff from PETA in the classroom but she also put up graphic pictures of animals being slaughtered and stuff written from 'the animals perspective' in a means to make us go to a 'more moral' position and if anyone said anything she became self righteous and said that we had no right to judge her behavior.
4) In 7th grade I had just had someone grab my hands and empty two hot glue guns onto my palms, causing them to become giant blisters, my math teacher told me that I could either take the test with hands that could barely hold a pencil without the plisters popping or me turning anything I made into illegible scrawl or I could get a 0 for the test, please note that she saw my blisters, she simply said that it shouldn't matter.
5) In College I was in a humanities course where the professor (oh and this is a non religious school btw) spent most of the classes talking alternately about what a wonderful and kind and great person she was and all that and how Christianity was the only true religion and any other religion in the world was made up by demons. Also that all Muslims needed to publically apologize to the citizens of the united states and that all atheists are amoral monsters who would murder the moment they got the chance. She also banned recording devices in class, for those wondering why she was still teaching.
6) In a different college, after transferring from the former one, I was in a political philosophy class where one student had to miss a week because her mother had died and she went back to attend the funeral. The professor does not accept papers by email. Well, the time she (the student) was gone the papers were due for an assignment, she got it back as soon as she returned, the professor told her "You get half credit, and be grateful that I'm generous enough to offer that' in front of the class. Oh, also if someones cell phone went off she would dock everones grade 5 points, and she did a random spin wheel to determine if there would be a pop quiz, and if she felt we went too long sans quiz she would say 'too bad, you get one anyway' the last one is more weird quirk, but still.
These are all the ones I can think of off hand
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Either you grew up in a brutal dictatorship or you made half of those up.
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Either you grew up in a brutal dictatorship or you made half of those up.
Nope, all are true, I can tell you each school and can name most of the teachers too.
Edit: I'm guessing the last two are the most suprising, but if a professor gets tenure they're hard to remove and unless you can get proof IE a recording or something similar it's nigh impossible to have them fired for anything short of criminal action. I actually support tenure and keeping professors, even if it does mean that some barnacles get to hang on.
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I choose number 4, for most bat-shit insane. Though number 6 isn't far behind in that race.
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I choose number 4, for most bat-shit insane. Though number 6 isn't far behind in that race.
Yeah that was not a fun day, the teacher where the glue incident happened got me to the nurse quickly, the guy who did it to me was expelled about two weeks later after he tried to bring a gun to school. It was not the teacher herself that did the glue to the hands thing (or himself in the case of the tech-ed teacher where the gluing incident happened). The teacher argued that my hands looked like they could still hold a pencil and that she wasn't going to just give me a pass since it wasn't bad enough for me to be sent home. In that view I guess I can sort of see her logic, but it didn't make it any less problematic, then again I didn't care much anyway since I was barely passing the class as is.
Number 6 was...yeah she was a real piece of work. She did a little patrol walk while she spoke, I think to make sure that none of us had tape recorders or anything else out that could record what she said, this was back during the infancy of cell phones so all the fun stuff where you can just rig them to record what's said wasn't available. I haven't checked to see what's become of her, though I did tell the department head and was told that there were other complaints about her but that they couldn't take action without evidence and when I mentioned the recording ban the department head cringed. My hope is that someone with a cellphone caught one of her rants.
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5) In College I was in a humanities course where the professor (oh and this is a non religious school btw) spent most of the classes talking alternately about what a wonderful and kind and great person she was and all that and how Christianity was the only true religion and any other religion in the world was made up by demons. Also that all Muslims needed to publically apologize to the citizens of the united states and that all atheists are amoral monsters who would murder the moment they got the chance.
Oh my god you were taught by my mother
number four terrified me until I realized a student did the glue gunning, not a teacher.
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I don't know, my first secondary school had stuff like that happen and the second one sometimes did. At the first one, one of the teachers snapped and started hitting a student (who I would also have quite happily hit, and did in fact slap in the face once - she was at my primary school too and the fact that I remember her a decade later is testament to how much of a misery she made my life). I vaguely remember a group of us going to the head of year to complain about him and I think he was fired in the end. From talking to the kids in my church choir, I think there's always a teacher in every school that snaps with the stress. There's been at least one in every school I've been to. Not an easy job.
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6) In a different college, after transferring from the former one, I was in a political philosophy class where one student had to miss a week because her mother had died and she went back to attend the funeral. The professor does not accept papers by email. Well, the time she (the student) was gone the papers were due for an assignment, she got it back as soon as she returned, the professor told her "You get half credit, and be grateful that I'm generous enough to offer that' in front of the class. Oh, also if someones cell phone went off she would dock everones grade 5 points, and she did a random spin wheel to determine if there would be a pop quiz, and if she felt we went too long sans quiz she would say 'too bad, you get one anyway' the last one is more weird quirk, but still.
Apart from the professor humiliating the student publicly, none of this strikes me as all that heinous. When I was at uni, the basic policy was that ill-health of the student (backed up by a doctor's certificate) was the only acceptable excuse/reason for late submission of work. Most lecturers would cut some slack if they were approached about a problem before the deadline for submission, but were pretty flint-hearted if presented with a fait accompli after it. Mostly you were expected to put your work first.
On the mobile phone thing, students who are too lazy, selfish, or careless to turn off or silence their phones before class are very annoying, and your professor had obviously decided to recruit the power of peer-pressure since her own words had presumably been ignored in the past. Did it work?
Random pop-quizes? Nothing crazy with that at all. Spinning a dial is a bit theatrical, but many good teachers are.
If I'd been the professor, I would have covered these points with my students at the beginning of the semester. Beyond that, college students are supposed to be adults. As one of my profs put it on the first day of my freshman year, "I am not your mother. I am not your friend. I am not here to make your life easier. I am here to see that you master the course material, or fail you if you don't." He was actually one of my best lecturers, but I would not have dared to submit work to him late.
The other instances were pretty crazy, and the hot glue burns case verges on abusive. I mean, failure to treat burns, never mind the maths test thing?
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6) In a different college, after transferring from the former one, I was in a political philosophy class where one student had to miss a week because her mother had died and she went back to attend the funeral. The professor does not accept papers by email. Well, the time she (the student) was gone the papers were due for an assignment, she got it back as soon as she returned, the professor told her "You get half credit, and be grateful that I'm generous enough to offer that' in front of the class. Oh, also if someones cell phone went off she would dock everones grade 5 points, and she did a random spin wheel to determine if there would be a pop quiz, and if she felt we went too long sans quiz she would say 'too bad, you get one anyway' the last one is more weird quirk, but still.
Apart from the professor humiliating the student publicly, none of this strikes me as all that heinous. When I was at uni, the basic policy was that ill-health of the student (backed up by a doctor's certificate) was the only acceptable excuse/reason for late submission of work. Most lecturers would cut some slack if they were approached about a problem before the deadline for submission, but were pretty flint-hearted if presented with a fait accompli after it. Mostly you were expected to put your work first.
On the mobile phone thing, students who are too lazy, selfish, or careless to turn off or silence their phones before class are very annoying, and your professor had obviously decided to recruit the power of peer-pressure since her own words had presumably been ignored in the past. Did it work?
Random pop-quizes? Nothing crazy with that at all. Spinning a dial is a bit theatrical, but many good teachers are.
If I'd been the professor, I would have covered these points with my students at the beginning of the semester. Beyond that, college students are supposed to be adults. As one of my profs put it on the first day of my freshman year, "I am not your mother. I am not your friend. I am not here to make your life easier. I am here to see that you master the course material, or fail you if you don't." He was actually one of my best lecturers, but I would not have dared to submit work to him late.
The other instances were pretty crazy, and the hot glue burns case verges on abusive. I mean, failure to treat burns, never mind the maths test thing?
The thing was she WAS made aware. She was told about it before the student left, she had even asked about turning in the paper early and was told that it was unacceptable. The spin dial for pop quizzes felt stupid and frankly it was rote memorization of random bits from the reading. I learned more from debating with other students than I did from her and had to correct her more than once. Then again I am probably the kind of student that most professors hate, ones that don't have time for their shit. The professor you quoted was probably pretty good, and I have had plenty of fairly acidic professors who were competent, hell one was damn brilliant and taught a lot but the guy was months behind on returning and grading papers to the point where a few of us asked him if it was worth us handing anything in if he couldn't keep to a deadline.
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...she had even asked about turning in the paper early and was told that it was unacceptable.
See that part makes no sense to me. I won't accept late work, but I ALSO won't accept work early, even when you KNOW you'll miss class the day it's due? And from what you say, it was a paper, not some kind of presentation or peer reviewed project even. What kind of professor does that? Except the crazy ones of course...
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...she had even asked about turning in the paper early and was told that it was unacceptable.
See that part makes no sense to me. I won't accept late work, but I ALSO won't accept work early, even when you KNOW you'll miss class the day it's due? And from what you say, it was a paper, not some kind of presentation or peer reviewed project even. What kind of professor does that? Except the crazy ones of course...
I think it was that the way things were set up we either dropped it off at her department mailbox or under the door of the office area she shared with a few of the other poly-sci profs. Side effect was that it was easy for papers to get lost and she didn't want to be bothered with papers before she was ready to take them. Her whole thing was on the day, not before or after, no exceptions. It was...interesting. The class was frankly a waste as while I got a decent grade there I learned very little from her or the lectures but I did learn how to write papers in such a way as to show what the person reading wants to hear/read and get the right scores for it, so I suppose it was good training for pushing paperwork.
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Why didn't the girl just give the paper to a friend to hand in for her, if she was able to hand it in early? That doesn't excuse the teacher though, that's an appallingly unfair policy.
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Why didn't the girl just give the paper to a friend to hand in for her, if she was able to hand it in early? That doesn't excuse the teacher though, that's an appallingly unfair policy.
Dunno, my guess is that either she forgot or that she didn't know anyone in class. I talked to her a few times, she was in her 40's though so she didn't really socialize with most of us. From what I get she left to go home shortly after she heard about her mothers death. On the upside it did eventually get sorted out, I knew the head of the political science department and helped her get a meeting with him to get things straightened out.
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I think at my uni they are pretty much hard-arses about that kind of stuff. That said, if you apply for special consideration and you have a legit reason (death of an immediate family member counts) then they are pretty good about it. It is retarded that she wouldn't accept the paper early. Hell in my first year all my papers were due on a friday so I gave them in two days early so I wouldn't have to go in on the day (I didn't have class on fridays). Of course we just have to put them into the relevant assignment box and the lecturers' problems with organisation are not our problems.
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There aren't many science courses so it's odd anyway for someone to go after more than 6 units (3 courses) and you can take a total of 3 or 4 Math subjects.
Of course there aren't many science courses. What would be the point of creating curricula if you can't take them? And the science courses that you *can* take are restricted to two units (except for Mathematics), whereas you can take three-unit History, four-unit English, music, French etc. Basically scientists are second-class citizens in the NSW school system.
Just wait until the National Curriculum hits. Then the value placed on science education will become even more laughable.
The way it's going to work it looks like year 7 kids won't be allowed to use bunsen burners or chemicals, since in some states year 7 is still part of primary school (WA and QLD, I think?) Most primary teachers aren't qualified to teach science, so everyone has to suffer.
At least, that's the way it was going to be this time last year.
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Apart from the professor humiliating the student publicly, none of this strikes me as all that heinous. When I was at uni, the basic policy was that ill-health of the student (backed up by a doctor's certificate) was the only acceptable excuse/reason for late submission of work. Most lecturers would cut some slack if they were approached about a problem before the deadline for submission, but were pretty flint-hearted if presented with a fait accompli after it. Mostly you were expected to put your work first.
No, it's called 'Being a Colossal Dick'. Not even the instructors of my military courses were that harsh, and I never had a professor who'd pull something like that. Yeah, they were strict about lateness and absences, but they were never dicks about it.
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Hey, just wondering, for people who aren't from the States, what's involved in being licensed to teach? Does anyone know anyone who moved from the States and taught? I know this is slightly off topic, but it'd be really helpful.
In the UK you must have a relevant degree (AFAIK you must have an educational level above what you want to teach, so as a Chen grad with an English A-level, I can be a Chemistry Teacher, and also teach English or Biology upto GCSE level, I had a few teachers who were cross disciplinary and they were pretty good).
I had an RS (religious studies, now religious education) teacher who demanded the religious minorities effectively teach the segment of the class on their religion, which as the only open Jew in a school of 3000. It was pretty demeaning the way she did it, she thought she was being cultruallu sensitive, instead it was just isolating, as none of the various Christians had to do so, and atheism/Agnosticism was ignored completely.
I also feature as a teacher in this thread. I was a wood tech technician in my 1st year trying to do A-levels. That meant I got to help out in my free periods, setting up, using the equipment on my own projects and helping in lessons. I also made the tea. I once was left in charge of a lesson, the teacher buggered off and said I was covering. The lesson was stained glass cutting and setting using hot soldering irons and metal structures I'd prefabbed.
I can tutor, I can't teach a class, I have no interest or skill in holding people's attention if they don't want to learn. So I let the majority of the class (average age 12-13 I think) sit and chat and dose about. Until they got to be disruptive. I couldn't leave the class to get help, major injuries from solder and sharp implements would likely ensued on someone, no one else was around, I wasn't gonna Bally well scream for help and there were no phones. So I used the same threat I used on my you her siblings. I'll pick you up turn you and upside down. I only had to do it once, and the class quietened, on the agreement that I'd dangle anyone that wanted by their ankles, if they had kept quiet during the lesson.
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Go teach at the international school in Tirana, Albania, because it requires literally no credentials or even education. You basically just have to speak English.
I sat in on the music class a couple years ago. Mrs. Hemphill. She couldn't tell the difference between duple meter (2/2, 4/4, shit like that) and triple meter (3/4, 6/8, 12/8, shit like that). She told an entire class of 7th to 12th graders (small school) that one of Mozart's waltzes was in 4/4. I corrected her and she sent me out of the class. I responded by saying "Hey your teacher's a proud, spiteful imbecile" as I walked out. Fuck that shit, she never took a music class in her life.
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Hey, just wondering, for people who aren't from the States, what's involved in being licensed to teach? Does anyone know anyone who moved from the States and taught? I know this is slightly off topic, but it'd be really helpful.
In the UK you must have a relevant degree (AFAIK you must have an educational level above what you want to teach
Well, I want to teach elementary education (up to 10 or 11 in the States, not sure how it is on that side of the pond), and I'm about to finish a Masters degree that'll let me do so. What I'm curious about is will this degree do me any good over there or will I have to start university over? Because there's no way I'm doing that.
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Well, I want to teach elementary education (up to 10 or 11 in the States, not sure how it is on that side of the pond), and I'm about to finish a Masters degree that'll let me do so. What I'm curious about is will this degree do me any good over there or will I have to start university over? Because there's no way I'm doing that.
It would probably depend on what classes you have taken. If I were you, I would check out an American university and see what their elementary education programs look like. If there are classes you're certain you've not taken, then you may have to take a few American classes before you are allowed to teach here.
Elementary school in the U.S. generally consists of kindergarten and grades 1-5 (which would be 5-year-olds through 10-year-olds or so), although some schools also have preschool/pre-kindergarten and go through 6th grade (and some go even further).
If you have a particular school you're interested in teaching at in the U.S., then you should definitely write them and see what their requirements are for teaching. If you have a particular state in mind, e-mail a few different ones, perhaps in different counties.
Hope this helps! :)
(Edited to fix odd formatting.)
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You shouldn't need to. If it's a degree from an accredited university any ro.
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LoliBot, I think I was unclear or you read it backwards. My Masters is from the States (New Jersey, to be exact), so aside from particular state tests if I go to a different state, I won't have any issues finding a job here (well, finding a job might be hard, but being qualified isn't an issue). I was asking how I'd go about getting certified in another country if I decided to move there (probably the UK, but maybe Australia, who knows?)
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LoliBot, I think I was unclear or you read it backwards. My Masters is from the States (New Jersey, to be exact), so aside from particular state tests if I go to a different state, I won't have any issues finding a job here (well, finding a job might be hard, but being qualified isn't an issue). I was asking how I'd go about getting certified in another country if I decided to move there (probably the UK, but maybe Australia, who knows?)
Oh, I totally got confused! Definitely not your fault--I'm just a little dumb sometimes. XD
I think the same thing would probably apply--as long as you take the equivalent classes, you should be perfectly fine.
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I hope so.
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Rereading my comment, major idiot ball moment. Where I say
In the UK you must have a relevant degree (AFAIK you must have an educational level above what you want to teach, so as a Chen grad with an English A-level, I can be a Chemistry Teacher, and also teach English or Biology upto GCSE level, I had a few teachers who were cross disciplinary and they were pretty good).
I completely forgot to mention that in addition to the relevant degree, you also need to do a 1 year post grad course (agree to teach in an inner city school, and they'll pay for you to do this). It's called a PGCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postgraduate_Certificate_in_Education), and you should be able to get on a course at an english university with an undergraduate degree from an American one. Your university may well already have a connection to an English University/exchange program for study abroad students, so that might be able to help you. You can then study over here for 1 year, then you can teach.
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I've just done a very quick Google search and found this webpage (http://www.overseastrainedteachers.org.uk/13/) which might be helpful.
I think it's important to note that degrees in the US and degrees in the UK are very different animals, and I doubt if the equivalent classes actually exist. To expand on Adlan's point, you only need to take a PGCE if your undergraduate degree was in something other than education. It stands for "post-graduate certificate in education" and obviously if you already have a Bachelor of Education (or whatever it is called in America) then you wouldn't have to do that.
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I don't have a Bachelor of Education, but I do have an Master of Arts in Teaching (Elementary Ed). So does that mean I don't have to take the PGCE? Although I'd be willing to teach in an inner city school either way.
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It sounds like you wouldn't have to, but I'd get in touch with the local authority of where you're hoping to move to (or just any local authority) and ask for certain. They'll be able to tell you exactly what you need and also whether there are any jobs available.
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I don't finish my Masters until December, but yeah, I don't know where or even if I'm moving, so this is all very early. I'll probably start looking around in January. Best case scenario, I start teaching wherever I teach by fall 2012.
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I had a teacher that everyone swore up and down was a pedophile. He coached the middle school girls volleyball team and supposedly checked them out all the time. He was generally creepy, but he never touched anyone inappropriately.