Everyone remembers their favorite teachers and professors; people who make a lasting impact on who they are. But sometimes, a teacher can be just as memorable for all the wrong reasons. These 50 Redditors share stories of teachers who were disrespectful, vindictive, or just weren’t fit to teach.
1. The Elite Chemist
My chemistry teacher in high school was totally awful. He would tell us if we didn't master chemistry, we should start picking out bridges to live under, and that we’d never get another job outside of chemistry.
He would call people out in front of the class that had failed an exam, making several girls cry. But the icing on the cake?
One day, a larger girl asked him if she could go across campus to grab her notebook that she left behind. He said, "Yeah, sure, you could use the exercise". He went on personal leave for the entire year and never came back.
2. A Few Minor Issues
When I was in the 12th grade, I had an English teacher who was horribly picky with essays. Everything else was fine, but essays were very hard to get good marks on with him. I spent 15 hours writing a simple three-page essay and finished it a few days before the due date so I could have him check it over.
He took it home and said he spent about 15 minutes reading it and only checked off a few grammatical errors. He said the essay was fantastic, but if I fixed those, I would get a very high mark. So that’s what I did. And I failed the essay...
The same thing happened for the whole year for every essay, so I had to take the course over again in summer school.
3. One Fish, Two Fish
In 4th grade, my biology teacher was giving us a lesson on fish and how there are Osteichthyes and Chondrichthyes, two types of fish. Anyway, she makes a mistake and says that sharks are Osteichthyes, meaning that they have bone skeletons.
I, being the adorable nerd that I was and having read the material in advance, corrected her, saying that they have cartilaginous skeletons, which makes them Chondrichthyes. Her reaction made my blood boil.
She argued with me and gave me a failing grade. So, I went back home, told my mom, and we both spent the afternoon researching, so I took a ton of encyclopedias and scientific articles proving me right—this was in the days before the internet. She didn't even look at what we found and scolded me for being disrespectful.
A class later, we were doing an activity in the computer lab, with an interactive CD that had a very confident narrator say that sharks have cartilaginous skeletons, in front of the whole class. She agreed to remove my failing grade but treated me terribly for the rest of the year.
Now that I think of it, I'm not sure why she was teaching scientific terminology to nine-year-olds in the first place...
4. You Do It Instead
The teacher said all kinds of weird stuff about Greek mythology, for example, she said that Zeus was the god of the sea. After I corrected her a few times, she gave up. She simply sat down on a chair in front of the class and told me that I should teach the class instead.
I actually did do that for the rest of the lesson, which somehow managed me to score an A in her class!
5. Such Disrespect
I had a college professor who never once showed up to class on time. It was a short class, so it was only 50 minutes long. She’d regularly show up 30 minutes late, then refuse to dismiss us until her 50 minutes were over. This class was right before lunchtime, so no one had another class to get to, but still.
So, after the first week of this nonsense, another student snapped—and said something to her right after she arrived late as usual.
The teacher got so furious and personally offended that she kicked the girl out of class and told her to drop the course, because she wasn’t going to teach someone so “disrespectful”. Umm, what the heck do you call showing up to your own class 30 minutes late every day? Because I would absolutely call that disrespectful.
6. A Strong Start
This was a university class where a TA was responsible for grading the papers; he was clearly overwhelmed and just reading introductions, grading the papers based on that alone. I had a two-part introduction that fully addressed the prompt, but as he only read the first part, I got my paper back with a big "C" at the top.
I ended up getting full credit after I challenged the initial grade.
7. A Simple Reason, Really
My first large college paper for a pre-civil war history class in freshman year came back with a giant red 'D' written on it with practically no feedback. I was in a writing program, and I had always excelled at essays, so I was sort of shocked.
I went to the professor and asked him about the grade and lack of instruction. I never saw his response coming. He sighed, looked down, and said, "Well...I don't like you". He went on and on after that about some non-reasons, but apparently, the big issue came from the first week of class.
He was talking about Manifest Destiny and said something like, "Now you have to remember, back in those days there were 50-100 miles between towns out in the Western USA!" And I raised my hand and said that there were still 50-100 miles between towns in the Western US.
He said I was exaggerating, and I told him I wasn't because that's where I grew up. That paper was 40% of our grade. He refused to change the grade or even re-read it. I scraped together a C+ in that class and I was so proud of that grade even though it was the worst grade I received in my life.
At the end of the semester, I decided to ask him for his grading documentation to see if I could challenge the paper with the school, but he claimed he had already thrown it away. I found out later that it was a lie, but I didn't press any further.
8. How Does That Make Sense?
We had weekly spelling tests in my 11th grade English class, which I thought was a bit remedial by that point and probably said so in a not completely diplomatic way. The teacher even made you write any words you got wrong five times and hand that in to her by the end of the class.
I would typically get perfect scores on them, but one time I got a test back with no actual errors marked as a 0%. My teacher's explanation was truly bizarre. Apparently, she saw me talking to someone in our free period before class who ended up doing poorly and that was my fault because I distracted them from possibly studying.
9. Ordering Originality
I did a presentation in biology. The teacher told me she wanted me to do a creative introduction instead of just opening it with the standard "today I'll be presenting..." So I did. I invented a short story about an old lady going to the supermarket and worked in some early symptoms of Alzheimer's, the topic I was presenting on.
I was so invested in that character, she had a name and a backstory, and I even drew up a few comic panels so that everyone could follow along easily, then at the end of my presentation I asked my class which symptoms the old lady in the story had and hence determine what stage her Alzheimer's was.
When I got my grade back, the teacher deducted points for the intro since she "told me to do a creative intro so it wasn't an original idea". Like what the heck?! I came up with the story, I drew the comic panels, and all of that was me. I felt so betrayed.
If I hadn't done a creative intro, she would have deducted points, so I did one and she deducted points anyway?! And after all that work... It still grinds my gears.
10. Better Than Us?
This happened to a seven-year-old student I coached for a public speaking contest. She is a child prodigy, a self-taught fluent English speaker in a country where very few people speak good English. She also has a natural sense of how to structure a speech and gives all her speeches impromptu instead of memorizing them.
After she finished her speech, the first response from the judges was "Do you think you speak better English than us?" Spoiler alert: she does, I spoke to them and none of them were truly fluent. They then gave her the second lowest grade possible. She got a bad grade for being better than the person grading her.
11. But It’s Efficient
It was fourth grade, the day before Thanksgiving break. There was no work to be done, of course, so we had a busywork art assignment. We were all handed graph paper and told to color each of the squares either yellow, orange, red, or brown. And once we finished, we were supposed to cut out corn shapes to make Indian corn decorations.
I already thought this was stupid, and filling in all the squares was tedious. So, I traced the corn shape on the graph paper and only filled in the squares that would end up as part of the final product. This meant my decorations looked the same as all the others, but I didn't waste time filling in squares that would just get cut away.
When the teacher saw what I had done, she gave me a 50 for "skipping work".
12. Fun? Fun?!
Growing up, my family was pretty low-income. My Dad was a bus driver, and my mom worked as a social worker for HHS. My Dad's work hours were late at night and my mom's early morning, so they hardly got to see each other. We also could never go on vacations because of money and schedule problems.
Finally, one day, after years of saving, we bought tickets to Disney World. It was my first official vacation. I was so excited...that is, until I told my teacher about it.
I still remember to this day how my third-grade teacher yelled at me that she didn't know how I could have a good time with all the homework she was going to give me. "Who goes on vacation during the school year?" she was saying.
She wound up giving me multiple assignments, including a daily two-page diary, and daily homework that was way more than what they were even doing in class. My parents were really angry...They wound up having to get the principal involved.
In the end, I still had to do my daily diary, but all of the other homework was not assigned.
13. Repent!
In 1960, I was in fourth grade in a public school. As in many schools during this era, we had nuclear drills and had to sit under our desks as if a desk would protect us from an attack or nuclear fallout. My teacher had her own bizarre methods.
As a bonus, she would make us repeat Bible verses and have us repent our sins as part of the drill. To my nine-year-old self, this was terrifying. Well, I'm 62 now and still have nightmares about this.
14. The Wrong Subject
I had a teacher in high school who had one of those "think-as-yourself-and-only-yourself-you-special-snowflake" mentalities. Which is fine, to a certain extent, but she took it way overboard.
She also taught science, a subject that didn't often support her outlook. For instance, in an effort to get us to think outside the box, she turned the poster of the Periodic Table upside down. Which was great except that I couldn't read the dang Periodic Table. We'd also turn in reflections about our labs.
For instance, “How did mixing these solutions make us feel?” Then, we'd have to connect the experiment to a current event. She's an English teacher now and much happier.
15. Are You Okay?
I had a biology professor who was a former marine. She barely spoke any English and just seemed crazy. She flipped out on the whole class because she was angry that she was getting emails at midnight when she was sleeping. It was an introduction course and she taught it like we were medical students.
The class average on the midterm was 32%. I dropped it after that.
16. Absolutely Uncaring
I was a senior in high school, and I had to retake my 10th-grade English class in order to graduate. I had a rocky start my freshmen and sophomore year, but I got myself into gear for my junior and senior years once I realized how important it was. The sophomore teacher was atrocious because she clearly hated teaching kids.
If you were confused, and raised your hand to ask a question about what she was teaching that day, she would yell at you to put your hand down. If you waited until after class, she would yell at you to get out. I was so confused at the stature of this woman. I couldn't even fathom how she became a teacher in the first place.
I desperately needed this class in order to graduate, but my final straw came when we had to do a book report on the importance of poetry. I received my book report back after a couple of days, and she graded it as an F. I spoke to her after class about it, and she said that I was in a 10th-grade class, and I needed to write like a 10th grader.
She literally gave me an F because the paper was too well written. I took my paper down to the guidance counselor, explained what happened, and demanded that I be transferred to a different 10th-grade English classroom and that I wanted her reported.
To this day, it still infuriates me why someone would choose to be a teacher, and yet not care about their students in any way.
17. Too Good To Be True
When I was 14, I had a teacher accuse me of plagiarism and threaten me with all sorts of stuff when I denied it because—I quote— "No one your age could sound so smart". He refused to believe I could write that good of an essay, called my mom, and everything. My mom gave him a firm “No, my child did not steal her essay”.
I Finally get a grade: 83%...I don't even think I want to know what was going through that man's brain. This essay seems too good to be written by someone her age, but the mother says it is, so I’d best give her "okay" but not great... Other kids in the class scored a 100% too, so I was extra mad.
18. Screwing With The Stats
In my first-year stats class, I had a professor who was in his last year before retirement, and extremely senile. When it came to his lectures, he spent the majority of them talking about fish, and fishing. Not statistics. But that wasn't the worst part.
On his exams, he took the answer key to a multiple-choice test, where all of the correct answers were colored red, and proceeded to print it out as the exam on a black and white printer.
Obviously, you could see which answers were correct without doing the work, and as a result, everyone in the class ended up with 100%. Sounds awesome? No. It was scaled so we all got a B- and learned absolutely nothing.
19. Off On A Tangent
My math professor would always say, "It's not my job to teach you; it's your job to teach yourselves". He'd constantly complain about the textbook he had us buy... and that he chose to use.
It was absolutely a terrible textbook, but it was far better than his lectures which consisted of him going on about bug procreation, the Golden Gate Bridge, and starfish migration patterns in the Atlantic.
He'd get angry whenever anyone asked him a question, and I don't think throughout the entire math class he went through a single full problem.
20. The Substitute Teacher
In high school, my favorite teacher, who taught grade nine biology, fell ill and was forced to miss the rest of the year. So, we had a substitute for three quarters of the school year. Now, this lady knew absolutely nothing about teaching or biology.
She also had a thick accent, so it was impossible to understand what she was saying most of the time. The class was out of control. Like a zoo. I remember one class some guys in the back broke open a bunch of glow sticks and threw them at the front of the class spewing neon liquid everywhere. As for me, she hated me.
I have no idea why. I wasn't the best student; I didn't really care about the class or subject...but she just despised me. She would always call me out for things I wasn't doing and kick me out of class for whispering to my friend next to me. All the while the maniacs in the back are setting fires to the desks. It was insane.
During a test one day, my pencil became dull, and I started fishing in my school bag for my sharpener. She sees my hand rustling around at the bottom of my bag and promptly stands up to walk toward me. This lady swipes the test off of my desk and writes a giant '0' on the paper.
I protest but she shuts me up and tells me that I was caught cheating. The students around me all interjected, telling her that I wasn't cheating. But I'd had it with this dumb teacher, so I gave her the finger and walked out of the class. I just couldn't handle another class with her. I stopped going.
I told the principal what happened and explained that until I was able to retake the test I wouldn't be going to the class. My parents got involved and it was a whole brou-ha-ha that was caused by my entitled piece of trash teacher.
Eventually, there was a meeting between the principal, vice principal, my mother, father, and I. The teacher didn't say anything. She just sat there with her mouth closed, glaring at me, hoping the principal would back her up. The principal didn't, and I re-took the test.
21. An Aimless Assignment
I had a college prof whose textbook consisted of a binder filled with power points, photocopies of two old textbooks, and other random papers. I was doing a homework assignment one night, and one question told me to refer to a chart on a specific page of the book. The "book" ended 20 pages before the indicated page number!
It also references page "y", which turned out to be a power point that had nothing to do with the assignment. I emailed that prof that night, asking where the chart was and explaining that the directions were wrong. An hour before class on Monday, there was no response, so I did the best I could from my notes and turned it in.
Three hours after the class was over, I got a reply email from the prof. I literally gasped. He calls me an idiot, saying I should have known it anyway, and also saying that he knew the assignment referenced pages x and y. I ended up getting those questions wrong, along with a good majority of the class.
22. I Just Don’t Get It
I had an AP chemistry teacher who was teaching that level of course for the first time. He was horrible, and he even had the other AP chemistry teacher come in and teach us a few lessons he couldn't explain properly.
He would take off points on my exams because I did the math in a different way than him; he said he couldn't be sure I wasn't cheating because he didn't understand how I did my work. I eventually just started mailing it in for the rest of the year when I had gotten accepted and enrolled in undergraduate.
One day, he said to me, "You are going to fail out of college after your first semester". I decided to play the long game—and get some petty revenge. In April of my senior year of college, I sent him a copy of the letter I had received from a law school that offered me a full scholarship.
23. Nasty Mr N
I had a teacher called Mr N in elementary school. I was a hyper kid, I'll give him that, but he was awful. He was about 28 and a brand-new teacher. He was super nice to all the girls and awful to the guys. I was his most hated kid by far though. In grade 7, he made me put my desk in the cloakroom.
I was only allowed to move my desk when he wrote stuff on the blackboard, and he'd give me detention for just about anything and everything. That man cost me watching more GI Joe cartoons after school than any other teacher in my life.
One day at recess he decided to play touch football with us. I caught a pass in the open field, and only had one man between myself and the end zone. Mr N. There was no way in the world he was going to let me beat him and thought I was an easy tag.
Well, I put the move of a grade 7's life on him, and I actually caused him to stumble. I took off running down the sideline, but he caught up to me again pretty quick, so I hit the brakes he flew right by but was again between me and the goal line. I went inside outside on him right on the line and took it to the house! Touchdown!! In your face Mr N!!!
I was dancing around, and my team went crazy! They all ran down while I was doing the shuffle or something in front of Mr N, taunting him as he was trying to walk back to his team. He was soooooo mad and I wasn't dropping it, so he shoved me to the ground.
My entire team just stopped running and stood there, open-jawed. Awesome! 10 witnesses! I held that over his head all year. I got to move my desk out of the cloakroom even. Nothing like a little physical shoving at a 12-year-old to even the odds and put them back in my favor. I didn't get detention again either.
24. Out Of My Depth
In elementary school, before religion was removed from the curriculum, I had a teacher who repeatedly gave me detention every time I asked a "stupid" biblical question during religion class.
My parents are atheist Chinese immigrants, I had no idea who Moses was, how it was possible for him the part the Red Sea, or how Jesus was able to turn water into wine and resurrect himself. She looked at me as if I were the antichrist. Eventually, religion was removed from the curriculum and ethics made much more sense to my 10-year-old mind.
25. To The Last Minute
I had a history professor in my first year of college who could come to class late every day and show us movies every class. I learned absolutely nothing and when he did actually lecture, he made no attempt to hide his political biases.
For the grand finale: Our final for the class was a 15-page paper due to him by email, about two weeks before grades were due to the university. I didn't do the paper. Purposefully. Instead, I sent him a blank Word document.
This professor emailed me literally two hours before grades were due a whole two weeks after I 'submitted' it, telling me he's having trouble reading the paper. Clearly, this guy didn't even plan on spending time reading or grading our work, so I didn't respond.
I still got a B in the class, with that final paper being one of two assignments we'd had during the entire semester.
26. It’s Storytime, Twelfth Graders!
I despised my 12th-grade English teacher because she was one of the worst speakers of English I'd ever encountered. She would routinely read aloud to the class. These are high school seniors, and Ms Collins would read aloud to them at least twice a week for the entire class.
We all bristled, but I was probably most annoyed at having to sit through it. So, she's reading a book about some village in Africa, a children's book really. Folks in the little village didn't have enough to eat. Ms Collins didn't slow down one bit after pronouncing the word "underfed" as "un-derfed," two syllables, like these people did not have the required amount of ‘derf’. My hand was up pretty fast.
"Ms Collins, maybe we should do something for these people. Maybe we should take up a collection of derf". At least there was no reading aloud in the principal's office.
27. Kind Of Our Fault
Our class conditioned our math teacher to teach on the left side of the room. When he would walk to use the right side of the whiteboard, the entire class would look uninterested and bored.
Eventually, we trained him to use only one side, he finally caught on at the end of the semester when he walked to the right side of the board to get a marker and saw everyone change their posture.
28. A Snooze Fest
My art history prof from freshman year was easily the most obese person I've ever seen. Ever. That's not the bad part. Obviously, he can choose to live his life however he wants, but it made him slow and inactive. The entire class would be spent in the dark, with him not moving from his seat, and going through slides of art.
He would get really upset with us when we didn't know the answer to his poorly worded questions, but the worst of it was that, because he was so heavy, he would get winded from talking. Every few words were broken up by this drawn-out hissing inhale. "And this piece is...HISSSSSSSS...From the...Renaissance era...HISSSSS".
It would take him forever to get through a sentence. Needless to say, I slept through most of the class. Happy ending: all our tests were take-home!
29. A Very Serious Problem
The worst teacher I ever had was when I was in grade two. She whacked my knuckles with a ruler because I was left-handed. She insisted I absolutely could not write left-handed. If I handed in anything that was written anything left-handed, I would get a zero.
The very first parent-teacher meeting we had that year, my teacher took my parents aside. She very seriously told them that I needed to be sent all the way back to kindergarten to have my entire educational process started over from scratch, because the teachers before her made the mistake of allowing me to learn left-handed.
My parents just waited for her to stop talking, then they said, "You're a crazy person. He's left-handed, and he's going to stay that way. And you have a problem with it, we're pulling him out of the school".
The teacher pleaded with my parents saying they were making a terrible mistake, that if I grew up left-handed, I was going to grow up to be a screwed-up psycho. My parents stood their ground, kicked that crazy teacher to the curb, and transferred me to another class.
30. This Is MY Class
I had this philosophy professor who came 40 minutes late to a one-hour and 15-minute class. The only reason I stayed was because I had a math class immediately after and had nothing better to do. Anyway, he shows up and is apologizing to the four of us who actually stayed.
In the next class, I walk in, and he plays the guitar for roughly 10 minutes after class should have started. He then sets the guitar down and goes on this long rant on how he cannot believe everyone had left when he was only 15 minutes late, and how come after five minutes, no one came to his office to remind him we had class.
After five minutes of ranting, some girl raises her hand and says, "So you want us to tell you how to do your job? If I showed up 40 minutes late to work, I'd be fired". He then responds, "You're a moron and have a bad job".
This roughly goes on for 20 minutes and then another student raises his hand and says, "Can we just get to the lecture?" He promptly responds, "You're an idiot, do you not realize this is my class and this is part of the lecture?" By the time he finished his rant, there were 10 minutes left in class and he let us all go.
The strangest thing was, in the next lecture, he acted as though absolutely nothing happened.
31. Not Serious Enough
When I was 16, in the middle of doing my GCSEs, my dad got into a serious car accident. He was in intensive care for about two months. During that time, we were told that he would probably not survive. Thankfully, he pulled through, but in the meantime, I hadn't been doing any coursework or going to school.
This happened in January, and my exams were in May and June. I managed to do enough revision to pass my exams, but I never managed to finish my coursework for art class. The quality of my work was worth an A, but I hadn't done enough of it.
I applied for 'mitigating circumstances' meaning that if granted, my work could have been marked on quality rather than quantity. But for whatever reason, the school refused, so I ended up getting a bad grade. That was 10 years ago and I'm still angry about it.
32. Screw The Allowances
I've got dysgraphia, which is basically a medical reason for absolutely terrible handwriting. I got a special allowance to use a device that was basically a digital typewriter. It amounted to a keyboard with a simple black-and-white LCD screen. You could hook it to a computer or printer to easily print stuff off it.
It didn't have internet or even a calculator, it only functioned to type. One teacher decided to make my life a nightmare. She wouldn't let me use it, despite her legally not being able to do that. Little 6th-grade me didn't know she was literally breaking the law and went with it.
We had a test, and I got marked down for poor penmanship. My mom asked me why I didn't use my typing device, and I told her the teacher wouldn't allow it. My mom totally lost it. She absolutely destroyed that teacher, and for the rest of the year, despite my teacher's objections, I was allowed to use my device any time I wanted.
33. That’s Too Good
I failed a literature exam in college because I answered a question too well. We were supposed to write an essay comparing and contrasting one of the books that we read that semester to a modern concept or ideal. We had known about this particular question for weeks, so we had plenty of time to prepare.
Apparently, it's possible to be too correct, because the response I got was that, though it is clear I did not plagiarize, none of my thoughts were original and matched too closely with the author's interpretation of the work. I was the only person in the class to not only fail but to get less than a B.
I got no other bad marks on the rest of the exam either, he failed me based on just that one part.
34. Limits On Improvement
I got an F the first semester in chemistry, and I was really pushing myself to get a better grade for the next semester because I needed a good grade to study what I wanted. Then, we heard that another teacher from another school would make the test, but the teachers in our classes would grade it.
So I have been doing all in my power, reading everything, writing summaries, doing the math, watching documentaries, etc...And I get my final grade, D, and I was very happy with that!
Then my teacher takes me aside and tells me that I actually got a way better grade, but if he gave me a C it would look bad for him since I got an F on his test the semester before. So, I was pretty angry after that, but he left before I could say anything. It was my last day of school as well...
35. Not A Question Of Spanish
I remember I was so close to being the first person to ever score a 100% on my 10th-grade Spanish final. The one question I got "wrong" was “Qué típo de comida es el pescado?” meaning “What type of food is fish?” The options were: El carne (meat), La fruita (fruit), El pan (bread), and La verdura (vegetable)
I of course picked meat and somehow got it wrong because my teacher insisted that fish isn't meat. She's a Catholic and eats fish on Fridays during Lent. Her explanation was so dumb, I'll never forget it. According to her, the correct answer is fruit, because fish are sometimes known as "the fruit of the sea".
What the actual heck?
36. AP Is Awful
We had an AP government and econ teacher who was horrible. She would file her nails for the first half of class, mumble through the second half, and often would just stick a video in to avoid teaching... And she was the AP teacher. A lot of us complained regularly to the principal and guidance counselor on a weekly basis.
We tried to learn the material ourselves. We were, after all, smart kids, often overlapping in other AP classes—I was personally also in AP English and calculus and blew those tests away.
Well, when it came time for the AP government and econ test, every single student wrote an essay on how they would have passed the test had the school listened to the complaints of everyone about their teacher. Every. Single. Student. We had to have a "talking to".
No one got higher than a two on that test and she wasn't allowed to teach AP after that year.
37. Aiming For Perfection
I was placed into a regular-level reading class in 8th grade, instead of pre-AP like I should have been because of an issue with scheduling. On the first day of class, my teacher was telling us about all these strategies she'd be expecting us to use. I asked her if I really needed to do them since I knew for a fact that they didn't help me in the slightest.
To this day, six years later, I still remember the exact words she said. "Yes, you need to do them because you didn't get a perfect score on the TAKS test". She said that to me in front of the entire class. TAKS is the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the standardized state test in Texas up until a few years ago when they introduced STAAR.
That year, I got a perfect score on the 8th grade reading TAKS test. Without using any of those stupid strategies.
Flickr, Gobierno Danilo Medina
38. Learning Nothing
In fourth grade, I had a teacher who had only taught special education up to that point. He treated us all much, much younger than we were, and assigned practically no work for us at all. I remember we spent about two weeks in class building individual cardboard doghouses and decorating them, building furniture, etc.
He was let go at the end of the year and was hired at the school of a friend of mine. The friend told me he got fired from that school as well. I have no idea what happened after.
39. I Need Happy Vibes
This was an analytical writing course designed to teach how to write a thesis, and the teacher was one of these super hippy artsy people. Most of the "curriculum" involved just reading articles she failed to get published, so we had to do this analytical discourse on someone's work, and it was trash. I picked it apart—and paid the price.
I got an F, so I went to her asking why, because "I followed the rubric to the T". Her response was, "Oh, well the paper was good and all but it didn't make me happy, it was kind of mean and I don't like mean". I was like, "The assignment was to find flaws in the paper, and it had countless flaws".
She replied, "Yes, but it didn't make me happy so you get an F". I went to the chair, and it turns out her father was on the board of directors and she had sued the school several times, so she got to do whatever the heck she wanted.
40. Repeat After Me
I took a low-level modern literature course in college. The prof was apparently someone people knew. They had us read Dracula. Specifically, a copy of Dracula they had edited or something. I don't remember exactly what their contribution to the specific edition was, but their name was on the copy of a book originally published more than a hundred years prior.
The prof accepts no original thought, or even really unoriginal thoughts unless they were cribbed directly from them. I made the very basic connection between Dracula and The Serpent in The Garden. There's a passage in the book that straight-up makes this comparison if I remember right.
It was dismissed as unfounded because that's not what the prof had talked about in class. The prof just wanted us to parrot back what he said in class on the test essays. It was a surprise to me that there was more creativity in some of my low-level engineering courses than there was in my low-level literature courses.
41. Your Incorrect Opinion
I had a psychology teacher who would ask the most biased questions guaranteed to start fights and would argue that only her opinion was right. She would say baiting, messed-up stuff like, "Which political party is better, which gender is superior, which gender is more likely to succeed," and stuff like that.
Her response would always be something like, "Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but here is why you are wrong". Her tests would be the same way; you literally just had to write down her opinion or you were wrong.
42. At Least It’s Consistent?
I thought my design teacher had it in for me as he kept giving me Ds for what I considered pretty good artwork. So, to prove it, I had my professional graphic designer father do my homework, and I got another D. Then, I had my professional illustrator mother do it the following week. I got a D.
When we called him out, he didn’t really have an excuse on why he considered professional standard design work only to be worth a D in a Grade 10 project, but we enjoyed calling him out in a meeting with the head of the school.
43. I Need To Be Inspired
I had a literature instructor who refused to teach in a room in the building where the engineering school was based in because it was “boring” and “uninspiring”. She moved us to have lectures and discussion in the university art gallery.
She made the gallery staff set up and put away a circle of chairs for 20 students twice a week at 9 AM. She was an adjunct who got terrible course reviews and was not invited back to teach the following year.
44. So What Do I Do?!
I was homeschooled as a kid. I was getting my AA at a local community college and was getting my electives to pursue a degree in teaching. Several of our papers required us to write about our classroom experience as children.
I got very poor grades on those, and when I asked the professor why, she essentially said it was because I had no real classroom experience.
45. Agree To Disagree
I go to a Catholic high school, and in my religion class, we had to create a presentation around socially just situations and ethical issues. Seeing how euthanasia had just been legalized in our state of Victoria, my friend decided to create her presentation around that.
She produced an above-average presentation that was obviously well-researched and thought-provoking, but she received a poor grade on it. When she questioned the teacher about it, the teacher had the audacity to say that she disagreed with euthanasia, and therefore deemed it fair to give this girl a low mark.
After some complaining, she raised the mark slightly, but c’mon that cannot be fair. The whole assignment was based around commenting on social issues in the community. I’m still mad for my friend even though she’s over it.
46. For No Reason
My teacher just didn't like me. My marks in her class were terrible, but when given assignments to be graded by other teachers, I'd get high 90s. This raised red flags with administration and was potentially one of the many reasons why she didn't last very long as a teacher.
Also, my grades were reconsidered and adjusted to match my standardized testing scores instead of my overall assignment grades from her class.
47. The Lateness Policy
When I was in college, I had a professor walking around collecting a homework assignment that was worth about 10% of our grade. Being the unorganized person that I am, I'm digging through my folders trying to find which one has it. She walks by me as I'm still looking and meanders toward her podium.
Before she even gets to the front of the class, I find it and run up to her to hand it in. I'll never forget what she did next. She looks me right in the eyes and says, "That's late, you get a zero". I called her a string of horrible things, dropped the course, and took it again with an amazing prof the next semester.
48. Is That How Rubrics Work?
We got our philosophy papers back at midterms to find out everyone had been given mainly D’s and C’s with some F’s sprinkled in. There were a handful of B’s floating around but no more than five.
When we were audibly upset and asked what happened, we were told the rubric each week was based on C work, and we were supposed to go above and beyond the rubric to get a B or an A.
49. Color Conundrums
When I was in school, a teacher refused to accept our assignment. We completed it the day before it was due and had to print it in blue because we had run out of black ink. After we got our grade, my friend’s mom came to the school and made a scandal.
She couldn’t understand why we had failed, only to be told by the teacher that he hadn’t even looked at the content because the ink was blue. She took it to the headmistress who then forced him to accept the assignment because it really wasn’t a valid reason.
Funnily enough, after that, I printed another assignment in red ink, just to mess with him.
50. But It Wasn’t My Fault
So, we had this annoying teacher that acted like he hated his job and would always be in a bad mood and be awful towards us students. Anyways, my friend was doing an oral presentation and another student from a different class knocked on our classroom door and opened it to ask the teacher for something.
The teacher gave my friend a zero because of that one kid who came in our class! What an absolutely awful teacher.
Sources: Reddit,
