I have noticed that ZooChatter seem to have a high level of education. And we seem to love to tell stories as well, so does anyone have story about a really bad teacher (for this thread's purposes we will define teacher as someone who teaches at any level, from preschool to graduate level)? You know, someone who just isn't good at their job. Not necessarily a hard teacher or a mean one, just incompetent.
I don't think I have ever had a very bad teacher. I got along better with my teachers than with any of my fellow students.
Last year I had a math teacher who didn't teach very much, usually just reading problems from the textbook and often not even working them out on the board. If you came to him for help, it was often a "figure it out" situation. I passed his class because most of the grades (and even some of the tests) were merely completion grades. However, any cumulative math this year is starting to become a struggle for me because I just wasn't taught it well. Thankfully, friends and current teachers are helping me along quite a bit.
My second grade teacher was the worst. She would grab your arms and dig her nails into them. As you can guess this was many years ago. Couldn't happen now.
I had an English teacher who would just ignore hands when she didn't want to interrupt what she was talking about, or when she didn't like the student raising their hand. I once had my hand raised for half an hour and she never called on me (as you can probably guess, she REALLY didn't like me ) I got along with most of my teachers, but if I didn't like them, I wasn't afraid to trade barbs with them. Honestly, most of my issues were with administrators and librarians rather than teachers.
I would not want to be a teacher in the United States today with the absurd standardized tests they are forced to give. If you want to see how absurd they are, read this: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems Or for another example, a friend of mine has a PhD in mathematics and he could not understand some math questions on his middle school daughter's test.
I don't have any extreme cases. I didn't like my high school World History teacher. She wasn't mean or stupid or anything, but apparently she thought that "world" meant "Europe". Literally the only non-Europe stuff we learned: early on, ancient Egypt, and then in WWII Japan shows up to get bombed. She claimed that if we didn't miss a week of school due to hurricane evacuation she would have covered the middle east, but I didn't believe her. Wasn't a fan of my physics teacher either. She wouldn't call on me when I raised my hand to ask a question, and then she wondered why I was failing. The class was mostly sophmores and I was one out of two juniors, one time she decided to have us juniors do a separate project while she taught everyone else something. Then when it came time for the sophmores to do a project, she decided to have the other girl and I do it too. Problem was, the project revolved around what she taught while we were doing our separate project, and the other girl and I had no idea what to do, and it was a group project so the other girl in the group got really mad at us. This teacher was all nice and stuff and everyone liked her, but I didn't.
Bizarre, it was my physics professor that inspired me to start this thread. Hand down, the worst professor I have ever had. Not a mean person, just...clueless. I like him as a person but...everyone has room to improve I guess.
