Storytimes: Bad Teachers I Have Had

People seem to like my storytime posts, so here is another storytime style post about some of the bad teachers I have had up until now. 

Stories from a school I went to in 2011:

I had a sports teacher in one of the schools I went to, in 2011, that I was sure didn't like me. I was terrible at sports and was a very slow runner yet he never showed me how to do something right and would make me run around the playing field more than other people, and make everyone watch me and would make comments about what I was doing to the other students in my sports class. If I could not do something or did't feel well he would still make me do it, but there were other people who got out of sport if they were ill and there was another girl who was really bad at sports too but always managed to get permission to not participate. Whenever I could I would take extra long in the changing room to get ready, so all the other girls would be done before me, then sneak off to the school library for the whole sport lesson time. 

I did actually have two sports teachers, for that class in that school, and the other sports teacher was nicer but the one who never helped or encouraged always seemed to be the one leading if we had sports lessons outside, or there would be two groups made and it always felt I was put into his group. 

I actually remember one day when I sneaked off to the library, I went on the computer and e-mailed my mum. I just looked up to see if I still have the e-mail and I sent it to her on the 16 June 2011. So, I was 13 years old at the time. In the e-mail I said, "...I do not want to do sports. People laugh, the teacher makes things embarrassing for me. I am sorry....." and then the funniest part of that e-mail is, "I hate sports so much, I would rather eat a bowl of disgusting prawns, with something else disgusting."

I hated prawns, and to be honest I still don't like them much more. I just think that e-mail was really funny and I actually remember going into the library and writing that. 

In the same school, my Maths and English teachers were not the best either. 

My maths teacher would often set work for the class to do then leave for ages, and would return smelling of smoke. He was always really slow marking our test papers and our homework. He was also really bad at explaining things, and those who needed help in maths often ended up staying silent while those who were better in the subject did all the answering of questions. 

He was really bad at marking our homework, and often would expect us just to write our answers down without showing our working out. 

There was a time he wanted us to make maths dictionaries, and it took us so many lessons but whenever we wanted help on something, he would be sitting at his desk on his phone or making lesson plans, which we never seemed to work on, or disappearing out of the classroom for long periods of time. 

I remember he said, in a teacher note card back to my parents, that he never heard my voice and that I never asked questions. This was sometimes true, but when anyone in the class did have a problem or a question he would not go over to them and help them but would just explain it in front of the class, which often led many of us just as lost and confused than we were before. 

One thing I remember him doing was nothing to do with maths at all. One day he comes late into class, when we were all already seated and ready for class, and tells us to put our books away because we are going to watch a movie. We were all confused but also excited, because movies meant no maths class, and no maths class meant freedom. So, he sets everything up and we start the movie. The film, as far as I remember, was just about snakes. And one part about it that I remember the most, was there was a man who had been bitten by a poisonous snake, and his finger had to be removed and then, goes on to show his finger which he kept in a jar. That was the worst maths class ever. And I have kind of been a little scared of snakes ever since. 

And my English teacher.

There was a lot wrong with her, in her teaching style.

She was rather nice, as a person, but I must say she was really bad at teaching.

 I was one the best at English in the class, and I was the only student from an English speaking country and had English as their first language. But she always seemed to forget this, and would then congratulate me for the smallest things which was so obvious that I would be good at. For example, the text books we were all given were on a very low level. There were two age groups in my English class, so the highest age group had one text book and the younger group, that I was part of, had the easier text book. The problem was the spelling words that came up in the book I was given were words like cat, dog, table, and chair. Really simple and easy words. And of course, I would pass all these spelling tests. But it took her a while to take in all this as I had those books for ages until she gave me the next set which had harder words but was still really easy. Too easy!

There was also a time we had to write a story that happened in our lives, and I wrote a lot. 

The girl sitting next to me decided to copy my story, and she only changed the names of the people. I realised this was going on, but the teacher would not listen and there was nothing I could do about it. When we got the papers back, after the teacher had graded it, the girl that copied me got a 5 out of 6, and I got a 1 or 2 out of 6, and I was also accused of copying. The girl who was sitting next to me always did badly in the spelling tests, so just that fact alone should have been picked up by the teacher but nope!

We did work in this English class but we did something more often in this class than we did work and that was watching moves. Sometimes we would start work and do some exercises from the textbook for ten or twenty minutes and then the rest of the lesson we would watch a movie. And most of our English lessons were doubles, which was probably why the teacher decided movies was a great option. Because she didn't have to teach. In the beginning, I loved watching movies in class, but strange enough it soon got boring. 

We watched so many movies in that class. 

Some of the movies we watched were:

-Pride and Prejudice

-High School Musical

-Hairspray

-Slumdog Millionaire (I really did not like  this movie so much, and actually asked to leave the classroom and do work instead!!)

- Night In The Museum

- Meet The Fockers

- Little Fockers

And a lot more, I just can't remember at the moment.

But, I had friends in other classes, with the same teacher and they all watched movies in their classes with her too. 

She was just a really bad teacher.

Over half the class failed the end of year tests, because of how little work we did.

Online School Teacher:

I have been to two online schools, as well as the online university course I am doing now. I am not going to say the names of these online schools but I am going to tell a story from each one.

The first online school I was part of was like a real school, with the fact we got homework with deadlines and we logged on to class at a certain time and if we clicked on the mic button we could all take turns to talk and the teacher would lead the class using a presentation document on Powerpoint. I really liked this online school but I did not like my History\Geography teacher very much. 

He was not mean or anything but he just was not the best. 

There was a time I spent so long on a History assignment, and I sent it in and got a message saying it had been received. I then waited for it to get marked. Soon after he graded it and sent it back to me and I got a really high grade. A couple days to a week later he e-mails me to tell me he never received that piece of homework. I show him a screenshot of the grade and he tells me it was a different assignment, even though there was no other assignment it could have been. Then he regraded the piece of work and gave it a really low grade, without explaining to me what I had done and how I could improve.

We did group projects with other students, and once he paired me up with another girl and we both decided we would do our project on the Aztecs. I did so much work, and she did some, and we sent what we had to each other. Then she dropped out, and asked the teacher if she could work alone. He said she could, without letting me know or giving me another partner. Which was fine, but then the girl I was working with took all my work that I had sent her and used it in her presentation, using my words and pictures and everything. Then, even when I explained to him, he accused me of copying her and again I got a lower grade.

He was also a bit weird, when us students discussed in the break time, he would sometimes stay and join in our chats and it got a little odd sometimes. Nothing really inappropriate but it was weird and sometime uncomfortable. 

The second online school was not like the first one at all. We had textbooks sent to us, and we were told the lesson plan but we were to do all our work alone and for extra stuff there was a chat part of the website and a "common room" like area where we could talk to other students about topics we found interesting.

I have no story about any teacher in particular with this online school but in general all the teachers I had on this online school were really slow grading assignments and responding to e-mails and it just got really irritating and sometimes rather hard to keep up with everything. 

In The Last School I Was In:

This story is the most recent, and took place in a school I went to about two years ago now. There are actually a couple stories from this school but they are not exactly about bad teachers but just that they were not the best in some areas, if that makes sense.

My main teacher was a bit of a gossiper and she talked about other students when they were not there. For example, I hated talking in front of the class and one day she planned to have an oral presentation where one by one we would have to stand up in front of the class and talk about a given topic. On the day it was going to be my turn I woke up not feeling very well so I messaged my teacher that I was not going in to school that day. The next day, a rumour was spreading round my class groups that I did not go to school because I did not want to do the presentation and that I faked being ill to get out of talking for five minutes in front of the class. She also encouraged the class to talk about a boy in our class, when he was not there, to discuss if we thought he was straight, gay or bisexual, which I refused to take part in because I just felt it was not very nice to talk about someone and make fun of them, especially when they were not there to defend themselves or anything. 

There was also a time when a male teacher came to our class to talk about something, when our main teacher was in a teachers meeting or something. And this male teacher made some of my classmates uncomfortable as he was either apparently winking at them or touching their shoulder or doing something that they didn't like. Our teacher came back, once he left, and some people brought it up about feeling uncomfortable and they were told to stop the talk and that it was nothing. I didn't really notice most of the things people were saying, but the fact that people were concerned and uncomfortable and that we were told it meant nothing and told to stay quit about it just didn't sit well with many of us. 

Those are all the stories that I have for this post.

I hope you liked it.

If you have had any bad teachers or any similar situations to what I have mentioned in this post, then leave a comment and let me know, as I would love to read them.