my calculus teacher did little senior year jokey biographies of people as a big powerpoint on the last day. he was well loved, venerable, yet also slightly … odd. sharp, but vaguely weird. he separated people into basically informal friend groups [with multiple people on the same slide] and people who were the sort of weird alone people. i was one of the alone people. and he said i slept all the time for some reason, i was very sleep deprived but very anxious.
i was sleep deprived all of school really, it started so fucking early, terribly unfair to anybody’s sleep schedule
upon typing this I suppose it isn’t the Worst but it’s still not a fun way to end
I had a gym teacher who was not really interested in being a gym teacher. He was the varsity football coach and that was where his main focus was. Gym/Health class was basically the bare minimum health information required by curriculum, and then the rest of the time was spent in the weight room. Not even doing like, fun games or anything like that, literally just ‘weight room’ so that his athletes could just use the hour for their workout time.
One day, after ‘weight room’ another student who was held back a bit (he had reached maybe 20 y.o. at this point, and hadn’t graduated) made a joke about wanting to shower with people. Nobody thought it was funny, we all ignored him. He takes offense to this, and decides to vent that frustration on me. He grabs me by the side of the head, and slams my head into the locker next to me. He does this within full view of the teacher, maybe ten feet away if that. I walk over to the teacher, holding my rapidly bruising face, and repeat to him what happened, literally what he just witnessed.
He looked me in the eyes and said “Yeah, and?” and refused to do anything about it.
I went to the Principal, who didn’t do anything. I went to the Vice Principal, who didn’t do anything, and then I went to the Dean of Students, who got that kid pulled from class for three days total. The next week I had a sit down with the Principal who apologized for what happened, but was oh so thankful that I was such an understanding kid, and could empathize with my assailant’s mental handicaps, and this didn’t need to go any further than it did, right?
Shoulda sued.
That’s your story about the worst a teacher has treated you? Man, I’m stoked to hear how much better things have become!
When I was a kid I had a teacher who used to slam kid’s desks against the wall with the kids in them. He also used to throw chalk and erasers across the room at kids if they were talking.
I had another teacher who would smack the back of your hands with a yardstick if she thought you weren’t paying attention.
Oh, and then of course there was the teacher who would grab our hands and bend our fingers backwards until it felt like they would break.
I had a shop teacher who let kids physically batter each other in class.
Everyone I know that’s my age or older has experiences like this.
That’s your story about the worst a teacher has treated you? Man, I’m stoked to hear how much better things have become!
I’m sorry you went through that stuff, but it’s not a suffering competition. Frankly, I’ve had both teachers that used sticks and rulers to punish us, and teachers that screamed at me constantly, and it’s the second one that I remember most frequently and the one that gave me paralyzing test/performance anxiety. That’s the one that took years of self reflection and some therapy to make some progress on. Fuck that teacher.
I had a teacher of German (my native tongue) who had serious problems with the concept of logic - his argumentation in one case was hair-raising stupid. I tried to reason with him and show him that the “logic” construction he had built, well, wasn’t. Well, you can try to teach a pig to sing…
When we got our next tests back, he gave me the local equivalent of an ‘F’. With a grin on his face and a stupid remark.
I reported harassment from other students to teachers. They ignored it and did nothing for 8 years. I stopped asking for help.
I failed my maths exam. For every mark out of 100 we lost, we get 1 rattan whip on the palm. I got 6/100.
