The impact of a good teacher can stay with you for the rest of your life . So can the impact of a bad teacher , even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.
I’m sure we’ve all had a teacher or two throughout our years of schooling who did some pretty uncool stuff. And like the Redditors who shared their stories , I’m sure most of us still have some lingering grudges from our school days.
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Spoiler alert: “egomaniacal” is a word.
“My English teacher gave me a 99 on a paper. I flipped through, curious where my error was. She had marked ‘egomaniacal’ for word choice with the note ‘not a word.’
“I asked about it, she insisted it was not a word, I insisted it was, and then I got detention for being insubordinate.”
Getting blamed for something you didn’t do really sucks.
“I remember I had a very nice teacher and we were putting pens and stuff away when the kid next to me threw pens into the pot instead of just putting them in. I got shouted out for throwing them when it wasn’t me. Yes, I cried and it still annoys me to this day.”
Mocking kids, how classy.
“She mocked me in front of the whole class. I corrected her on I.Q.’s meaning as she kept saying it stood for Intelligence Quota. When I said, ‘but my mom told me….’ She cut me off and said in a snarky tone, ‘bUt mY MOm ToLD Me.’ It was the first time I got so mad I wanted to punch a teacher.”
For the record, IQ actually stands for Intelligence Quotient (not Quota).
Pretending learning disorders don’t exist doesn’t make them stop existing.
“My English teacher… I’m dyslexic, which he said was not a real thing and I was lazy and stupid. He spent three years destroying any confidence in myself, ridiculing me on an almost daily basis and encouraging the other kids to bully me.”
Imagine being a teacher and not knowing what a shard is.
“We were calling out words starting with the ‘sh’ sound in primary school, I shouted ‘shard’! (Which I learned from system shock 2). My crusty old teacher asked me to repeat it several times, then admonished me in front of everyone, saying it wasn’t a word at all.”
A tip for any aspiring teachers out there: don’t mess with your kids’ self-esteem.
“I had a 4th grade teacher tell me ‘I would have more friends if I wasn’t so weird.’
I have carried that phrase my entire life and it still affects the way I act around people to this day.”
Imagine thinking someone who reads fast must be cheating.
“I took a speed reading course in high school because…reading. I live for that… I read faster than this teacher before the course even started, she swore I cheated, quizzed me for 30 minutes on what I had read (I answered every question correctly) and still kicked me out of the class because I must have cheated.”
Did that teacher… literally steal from a kid?
“My grade one teacher told me I was ‘fired’ because I didn’t do my homework. She also took my birthday toy that I brought to class after Christmas break and said ‘Nice, now I have a toy for my grandson.'”
Teachers should be stopping bullies, not encouraging them.
“I had a gym teacher that effectively created and spread the nickname that bullies would use for years to come. He did nicknames for everyone but I had asked him to stop multiple times, and he only stopped when I broke down crying in front of him and his colleagues.
“I didn’t get to enjoy it at the time because he was super mad at me but I’m glad I accidentally beamed him with a Frisbee.”
This teacher was wrong (especially since she lives in the Northern Hemisphere).
“6th grade talking about astronomy which I found out I loved (and still do). She corrected me saying the sun is closer during the summer and farther in the winter. Which is NOT TRUE… the earth is TILTED away during the winter and TILTED toward the sun in the summer ….”
No words, just a facepalm.
“Had a science teacher say he didn’t care about climate change because by the time it really had an impact he’d be dead and it would be our problem. He wasn’t joking either.
“The whole class went from really liking him as a teacher to completely disengaging after that.”
Imagine how she reacted when she realized it was real.
“4th grade in Houston, TX. Teacher sent me to the school office to retrieve something for her. Staff watched the space shuttle Challenger launch. It was a big deal, particularly in Houston. Challenger exploded. Blew to pieces.
“So, I told the teacher and classmates upon returning to the classroom. Teacher yelled at me for saying / making up such a horrible thing.”
This kind of thing proves why some people shouldn’t be teachers.
“When I dropped out of high school one of my teachers told me he couldn’t wait to see me homeless on the street and he would not give me any money when it happened. I was 17 at the time. Funny part is that his salary was open information and I ended up making more than him by age 22.”
As a former messy kid, I empathize so much.
“When I was in 1st grade my Teacher opened up my desk in front of the class to use me as example of how not to keep your desk by admonishing me very loudly in front of the whole class. I was not the neatest child I admit. I was so embarrassed and horrified.”
Did this teacher not have a sense of humor or…?
“In grade 9, we were allowed to name our classroom group (our class and three others) but our teacher forced us to choose ‘The Millennial Prodigy’ instead of our preferred choice ‘The Fighting Banana Slugs.’
“It’s been over 25 years and I’m still salty about it.”
Success is the best revenge.
“Seventh grade math teacher was terrible. She knew I had bad anxiety and picked on me regularly. My friends in other sections of her class told me how she would talk about me all the time while the class laughed. This is the same teacher that told me I wouldn’t even get into high school.
‘Jokes on her now though, I have a biology degree and graduated with a 3.9 GPA. Screw her.”
Nothing like getting in trouble… for saving someone’s life.
“I was choking during lunch and a former friend of mine saved me by doing the Heimlich maneuver. The teachers claimed to have seen it all and then yelled at me and the girl for not getting help the right way. I still hold resentment over that.”
Why is it that teachers never seem to punish the bully?
“I was bullied almost every single day by a group of football players in a class freshmen year and the teacher never did [expletive]. The one day of the year I decide to stand up for myself and tell them off (nothing physical, no swearing) I get written up and assigned detention.”
Is it so far-fetched to believe someone wrote something on their own?
“A teacher in university accused me of plagiarism and said she spent the whole night trying to find out what I plagiarized but because she couldn’t prove it she wasn’t gonna report it to the school. I wrote it myself.”
I think every teacher should go through empathy training because this is ridiculous.
“We were about 6 years old and the teacher told us to make Father’s Day cards. I went up to the teacher to tell her my dad was dead. She snapped at me ‘do it anyway.’ So I was made to sit in class making fathers day cards to my dead father.”
