October 27, 2022 | Eul Basa

Traumatized Students Share Stories Of The Worst Teachers They've Ever Had


From kindergarten to college, everyone has come across a teacher they are not a fan of. Usually, it has something to do with the amount of homework they gave out or how they seemed to be void of fun. And then there are the people who have a legitimate reason to hate a teacher because that teacher came straight from hell. These stories from Reddit really make you look back at the teachers you encountered and second guess whether you truly hated Ms. P simply because she always gave homework over the weekends. At least she was doing her job...whereas some of these teachers' behavior makes you question how these people ever got the job in the first place.

And the Award for Worst Teacher Goes to…


1. Books Are for Everyone

During quiet reading time, teacher brought me to the front of the class because I was reading a book for girls, and he asked me, “why are you reading a giiirrrrrrls book? Are you a GIRL?” Then made me chose a book for “boys” to read. I was maybe 10 or 11? The book was Matilda by the way.

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2. Might Be a Hemophiliac

When I was in high school I got a lot of nosebleeds. Like, a lot. So I got one in the middle of class and I asked the teacher for a tissue, she said she didn’t have any so I asked to go to the toilet to get one and she said no. Soon, I asked again when blood was dripping from my hands and she yelled at me for “repeating myself,” which is apparently bad.

Soon, a puddle of blood was on the table and then I got sent to isolation for “disrupting the class.” I was then suspended for “acting inappropriate during class.” She was then fired for putting my life at risk. I gotta say, when you get a nose bleed like that, you really see how much blood is inside of you.

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3. F for Effort

I was bullied really bad as a kid. Kids kept drawing awful ugly photos and leaving them on my desk with profanity towards my appearance. I had enough one day, after dealing with a lot of abuse at home and the bullying at school and when I saw another I broke down crying and brought it to my teacher. She just grabbed it, looked and asked if I wanted it back. Did nothing to help, wouldn’t listen to me about the constant bullying and did absolutely nothing.

I was in seventh grade and still remember it to this day.

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4. Old School Mentality

Mine is more of a light-hearted “traumatic.” In fourth grade, I collected Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and I had gotten the—at the time—new Three Egyptian God cards. Well, I was caught playing with them during class and my teacher took them from me and threw them out. I was devastated after all the packs opened and cards traded to acquire them. I never forgave her.

Did they ever end up being worth anything before all the reprint boxes? I would’ve loved to see her face if she found out they were worth some coin. The teacher was an older Southern lady in her 60s, so she was definitely in that mindset that she had 100% say in whatever she did with our personal belongings. Pretty sure if corporal punishment was still allowed I would’ve gotten the paddle on several occasions.

I wasn’t the only one who lost cards that day. Buddy who sat next to me had his Black Magician of Black Chaos and Blue Eyes Ultimate taken from him.

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5. Looks Can Be Deceiving

Teacher told me I was a liar in front of the whole class, as she didn't believe my grandmother was a World War II evacuee. She refused to believe me as she assumed my mum was younger than she looked at the time, and therefore my grandmother was younger as well. She thought my mum was in her late 20s when in reality she was in her early 40s at the time.

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6. Encourage Don’t Discourage

Didn't traumatize me personally, but I had a first-year lecturer in classics who went out of his way to terrorize the class. His first words to us were, “I suspect as many as half of you cannot read.” He then administered a test, which two-thirds of the class failed. He was not shy about voicing his rather gleeful displeasure. I did well enough to avoid his wrath, and, annoyingly, get singled out for praise.

He would routinely throw questions at students who weren't paying rigorous attention—in a three-hour lecture on Friday morning—and then berate them for not knowing the answers. His comments on papers were beyond trenchant—“Are you illiterate?” “Do you imagine this makes sense?” “This is childish.” etc. The unfortunate part is that he was a superb classicist.

A close second was a novelist-turned-writing-professor who hurled a girl's manuscript out of his office door—nearly hitting me in the hall—as he shouted, “THIS. IS. NOT. WRITING.” She came out to pick up her magnum opus moments later, weeping. Great writer, self-confessed terrible teacher.

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7. Take a Look in the Mirror

Just because you are a genius, does not mean that you are a nice person. My advisor in graduate school was notorious in his field for being a massive jerk. However, he has one of the best facilities in the world for what he does and is damn good at it, so people often have to bow down to him to get the highest level of data. Needless to say, every one of his graduate students suffered under him.

I started my graduate degree with another student under him. Took me four years to finish and took the other student three years—MS—and we suffered during that time. She often ended up crying with the dean of the department, and I even ended up getting into a horrible argument with our advisor that had to be resolved by the Dean and other department heads.

During that time, a third student joined the team, but dropped the program after half a year because of problems with our advisor. All this time my advisor would complain about how his students were never any good. For people so smart, does it not occur to them that they may be the problem?

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8. Learning Another Language Is Hard Enough

God, this sounds like a professor I had. She was the only Spanish professor at my college and I had to take two of her classes to finish off my Spanish minor. She literally told me that because I wasn't a native Spanish speaker, I would fail her class, even though she was whiter than I am and learned Spanish in high school just like me.

She ridiculed me in class for having one or two errors in my responses, and then started giving me zeros in participation for not talking. She said that I was “mediocre at best” and that I should've never taken her class because I couldn't handle the academic level it was at. I had a 4.0 GPA. She reported me for plagiarism twice and accused me of having my boyfriend—who is Hispanic—do my homework for me because I couldn't possibly know certain phrases in Spanish.

She's the only reason I didn't graduate with highest honors. Still pissed about it.

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9. Could Use a Lesson in Manners

This sounds like my linguistics teacher. Like, I'm not really traumatized or anything but she's proud that 70% of her class fails, and she points at people with her finger to say you and your neighbor will fail and I won't see you next year. This year I barely came to her class because of stress so I don't know if she does it every time but once was enough.

When someone asks a question and answers wrong, she basically says they're dumb and should have known that since middle school. The worst part is that she's a brilliant researcher who got the highest grade at her PhD. She came in second at a national teaching exam somehow, and she wrote a huge book about something in linguistics.

She's undeniably skilled but she puts students down on the basis that their lives should revolve around class. Well screw you, what about those who suffer from anxiety, depression, or other mental illnesses, and who have to get a job on the side to pay for their studies, or who've had family members die or struggle at home.

Get some perspective. Even if some students don't, give them the benefit of the doubt. You don't know what's going on with them.

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10. Teaching Is More Than Being Knowledgeable

Ugh, my university’s engineering program was filled with professors who were incredible engineers but terrible teachers whose lectures covered a fraction of the materials we were expected to know and beyond poorly organized. I recorded lectures and studied them in and out but it was useless. We were basically expected to teach ourselves, and I can accept that for graduate-level courses but this was undergrad.

Very few of us had the chance to attend high schools with good technical classes to prepare us for this, and those lucky few were the only ones who could keep up. One professor also gave us a textbook assignment on the first day, which was before a number of students’ online orders had arrived, as the overpriced school store had run out. He had tenure so there was nothing we could do about it.

Once you get a high enough degree the university lets you teach classes. I think you should be required to take a teaching course beforehand. Why? Well, I got a tech job through a program where they give you a coding course beforehand. The teachers weren’t coders, but they were certified and trained instructors with lesson plans.

They covered an entire semester’s worth of material in half the time and it was so much more efficient and organized in a way that actually facilitated learning!

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11. A Student’s Only as Good as Their Teacher

This sounds a lot like the professor I took second-quarter physics—electromagnetism or, as we called it, Emag—with. He regularly told us he could teach our grandmothers and small furry woodland creatures better than he could teach us, which, in retrospect, brings into question his teaching methods. Any student who asked a question in lecture was berated to the point that most were in tears.

He had no office hours. His tests were four or five multi-step problems, which were all multiple choice with no partial credit given. Getting more than five test questions wrong during the quarter meant you couldn't get an A. He was the only professor who taught this class most quarters and it was required for almost every major.

I never worked so hard nor was so excited to get a C in a college class.

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12. Crossing a Line

We were discussing Jean Vanier and L'Arche. For context, Jean Vanier decided to invite two intellectually disabled men to live with him and started setting up homes for them so they wouldn't be in asylums. The teacher looked right at me—I'm disabled—and said, “Oh yeah, Vanier created those homes so you people wouldn't be bothering people because the handicapped don't function in society.” My friend and I left just to talk it out.

He got fired a few years later because he did not have his license up to date. Cherry on top—his wife was the vice principal.

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13. Punished for Doing Something Right

When I was growing up, it was unheard of that girls could have ADHD so I wasn't diagnosed until I was an adult. So I was constantly late for school and classmates teased me for it, which made me anxious about being at school in general. One day, I left for school extra early to avoid being teased about being late, got to school and walked into class a few minutes early. The teacher made me wait at the door until all of the students were there and decided to single me out. Keep in mind I was 11 years old.

“Oh look, Coffee_and_Cats_Life graced us with her presence on time for once!” He started clapping and got everyone in on it and completely ignored the fact that everyone was laughing at me and some people were calling me names. I wasn't able to tell my mom about it because she decided that I was just lazy and irresponsible rather than bothering to see that I had similar symptoms as my brother who was diagnosed with ADHD because “girls can't have ADHD.” Mind you, she also refused to get him treatment since she thought mental illness and neurological disorders were fake.

Not the most traumatic thing that a teacher has done to me but it still stands out as a hurtful memory even 15 plus years later.

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14. All This Over a Piece of Paper

In middle school—seventh grade—I was in band and we had a concert on a Saturday that was with a lot of other schools so we had the option to leave with our parents when we were done or we were to stay until the end and take the bus back to our school. The permission slip was due the day before the concert and I forgot to get mine signed and ended up turning it into my band teacher the day of the concert instead.

When it came time to leave, my teacher pulls my mom and me out of the auditorium and proceeds to literally yell at her for letting me be so irresponsible and says he shouldn’t let me leave with her. The biggest thing that stood out to me was when he said I would never make it through high school. I never thought anything of it but when I look back at how I finished in the top ten percent of my high school class and how I graduated with my bachelors in engineering, I chuckle because he was dead wrong.

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15. Making a Mess of a Mess

When I was in first grade, I was a fairly disorganized kid. My teacher didn't like that, and would repeatedly dump my whole desk out onto the floor, in front of the whole class, right before the bell rang to leave, and wouldn't let me leave school until I had cleaned it all up. That demon-teacher is the reason I still have issues approaching/talking to authority figures to this day.

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16. Could’ve Made an Exception

One time while taking an exam in my Calculus II class, I got a random bloody nose that dripped right on to the test. After explaining what happened, she said if I leave the room to go clean up I wouldn't be able to retake the test. My options were to grab another test and start over halfway through, without being able to copy my previous answers, or leave and fail the exam.

I walked out of the classroom and withdrew before I got to my car.

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17. Just Wipe It Off

I was in the fourth grade. Found a dry erase marker on the playground. I wrote my initials on the tire swing. Classmate rats me out. I get yelled at for like 20 minutes straight about vandalism of school property. She starts going off about how it's the first step to becoming a criminal. Being a little kid, this scared the crap out of me.

It was probably another two years before I believed that I wasn't going to become a criminal as an adult.

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18. Better Ways to Handle That

In sixth grade, I was 11. I hadn't been diagnosed with ADD—now ADHD—yet. The only way I could pay attention in class was if I doodled in the margins of my notes, and bounced my legs. My history teacher noticed I did this, and if he caught me he'd rip the page out of my notebook, show it to the class, and marvel at what a bad student and unintelligent person I was in front of everyone.

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19. First Impressions Are Tough

I remember my first day of a language class—I was around 10 years old—I fidgeted with my name tag and ended up poking a hole in it. The teacher came up to me, took my name tag and showed it to the entire class, saying, “This is the only thing TheAbominableBanana has accomplished in three hours.” Then, I had to stand in the corner for an hour or so.

All on my first day.

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20. Just a Smart Guy

I remember having this awful English teacher in fifth grade. First of all, in my country, no one speaks English properly so we had two English books—literature and grammar. I used to love reading a lot and my grammar was pretty good so when she would be solving a particular page with us, I would be on the other three pages and waited for the teacher to come to my page to check my answers.

One day she saw me not writing and asked me why was I not writing to which I replied I had already finished, so she asked me to erase all of the three pages and solve at her pace. Not only that but the worst part was we had a very difficult lesson in literature once and we had questions on that the next day. When I submitted my book, she outright said that my parents had done it for me.

It kept on going like this until once during a test she accused me of copying and when I told her that I would be happy to take the test again in front of her she told me I was arguing. When she took me to the principal's room to take another test, she gave me the toughest paper for a fifth grader but I still got 18/20 on it and she finally believed that I didn't cheat.

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21. Childish Teacher

I had a teacher in eighth grade who obviously didn’t like me. She was awful. I was kind of having a hard time fitting in and getting emotionally bullied. Then my parents got a divorce, and I admit I was off at times and it probably showed that I took it out on other students. So before class started, I was goofing off with other children and she turned to me and said, “You realize nobody likes you right?”

I was taken aback and it just kind of reinforced what I already knew, that I didn’t and probably would never fit in.

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22. Everyone Has a Breaking Point

I had a religion teacher in high school named Mr. Nguyen, who was working on becoming a Jesuit priest and was a really cool guy. He always had a smile on his face and did his best to make class a fun experience for everyone. There was a kid in my class who was a really annoying smart ass, but Mr. Nguyen was always really patient with him, until one day he pushed him too far.

I forgot exactly what the kid said, but it definitely crossed the line. Mr. Nguyen slammed his fists on his desk and shouted, “Why can't you EVER shut the hell up!” He then picked up his stapler and chucked it at the kid, missing his head by a few inches and leaving a huge dent in the wall, and then stormed out into the hallway.

Even though I wasn't the one that got the stapler chucked at him that was still something crazy to experience. I had never seen a teacher blow up like that and I definitely never expected it from him.

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23. That’s Just Rude

I had a teacher who, when she went around giving tests back to students, would call out every grade as she handed it to the student.

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24. Don’t Mess With Her Grandkids

In grade one, I had the worst teacher. There are a few times it was really bad. One time I went out for lunch with my grandparents who were in town visiting. After we ate, my grandma took me to a store. She bought me new pack of coloring pencils—I was obsessed with drawing and coloring. So she drops me off at school and I'm late.

I'm not sure how late—I was 6 or 7—but all the kids in my class had gone to gym. I put my new pencils in my desk but quickly opened them to look before I left. My teacher came in the class and started yelling at me for being late. I didn't know and she didn't realize but my grandma had followed me and was actually in the hall listening.

So my grandma comes in and starts getting mad at her. I can’t remember what was said but it was upsetting and I was bawling by this point. My grandma told me to get my stuff and took me out of school for the rest of the day. That woman was horrible and should have never been allowed around young kids.

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25. If Hell Had a School

One school I went to was awful. I had a teacher who yelled at me regularly. One of the worst times was when I didn't have a worksheet, which I knew was in my locker, so she freaked out about my messy desk, pulled it into the hallway and dumped it on the floor. The gym teacher was equally as bad if not worse. This school was very athletic and students’ treatment was based on athletic ability.

I am not at all athletic, never have been. We had to run around the football field and baseball diamond at the start of every gym class. If you slowed down, even to catch your breath, you had to go around again. I spent many gym classes just walking the field because I can't run that far so why bother. Honestly, there is so much more. That school really messed me up.

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26. Hush Candy

In grade school, my teacher had me and two other students stay back during recess so another teacher could come in, drag our desks into the hall, tip them over and rifle through everything. I was so confused as to why this was happening and why that teacher was so maniacal. In the end, we got to put our desks back and my teacher told me that someone stole the other teacher’s candy bars earlier that morning and they thought it was us because she put her bag down in the hall next to us when we were waiting to go to our first class.

Lo and behold, that teacher found her candy bars and “rewarded” each of us with one candy bar. To write this and think back on it, it’s so weird and a bit scarring.

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27. Not Fun for Everyone

My fourth-grade teacher played a “game” in math class where we’d have to write the answer to the problem on a whiteboard, hold it up, and if you got it wrong, you’d have to do a “consequence”—dance, sing, anything embarrassing. I struggled with the math we were learning, so I was always getting questions wrong with a few other students and I hated the game.

It only made me hate math more and I fell further and further behind. I thought I was just terrible at math until I finally got a great teacher sophomore year.

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28. Sassy Comeback

This professor giving a pointless class in college. My phone accidentally rang because I was waiting for a medical call. I interrupted him because of that. I apologized and said, “Sorry.” The jerk said, “Sorry for your parents that pay your college fee, they’re wasting money.” He said it loud too, in front of everyone in the class.

I had a huge urge to punch him but remained silent because I was changing my career that semester and would not see him for another course anyway. He always got away with humiliating students with those types of comments for petty things. Everyone hated that jerk.

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29. A Serious Condition

I was pretty sick with an eating disorder in high school and consequently had to stop taking gym classes. The gym teacher cornered me in the hallway and said, "So how long is this going to be a thing?" to which I replied that I didn't know but I would be out of the class for at least a semester. His response was something along the lines of, "I thought it would only take you a week or two/I didn't think it would take you that long."

Looking back on it, I hope maybe I educated him a bit on the subject so if another student is in the same situation he can act with a bit more compassion.

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30. Take It Down a Peg

In second grade at the end of school one day, a few of us were up getting our backpacks on earlier than the end of day announcement and my teacher—Ms. Grayson from HM Pearson—decides to pull on the back of mine and another kids backpack handle in an attempt to aggressively get us back to our seats, but instead, we tumbled to the ground on our backs.

We both went to the principal after that but nothing ever happened to her.

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31. Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

I had a math teacher who was also the track coach. One day during practice she was assigning people to events during an upcoming track meet. Kids were saying what event they wanted to participate in and she’d write their name/event on an index card then put it in her folder. Well, she left her folder open and you could clearly see that on the back of each index card she’d written either fast or slow.

A lot of kids were upset to see that they were considered “slow” and a bunch left the team after that because they felt bad about their efforts. The worst part is this was middle school and the stakes clearly weren’t that high, so she essentially ruined it for us for no reason.

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32. Lost My Appetite

I went to a private school during my middle school years. I missed a few days due to illness and when I returned all of my friends explained that I was lucky because while I was gone, our psychotic Bible class decided to show an anti-abortion video from the early 90s. Later that day, I was told to bring my lunch to her room.

Unfortunately, our teacher decided that it was so important for me to see the video that she was going to have me watch the video with her as I ate. It was basically 15 minutes of close-ups of bloody pieces of fetuses being removed and examined. It was incredibly awkward watching such disturbing things while sitting next to my teacher as she munched on a salad. The video had no impact on my opinion of the morality of abortion.

It also didn’t help that our lunch for the day was taco meat.

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33. Oh the Irony

In fourth grade, I was accused of cheating on a test after being sent to the library to finish it. Me and another kid got bored and just started talking, forgetting about the test. Teacher walked in, saw us visiting, and assumed we were cheating. She marched us BACK into the classroom where the rest of the class was watching a movie to rip up our tests, yell at us, and tell us we were getting zeroes. I was—and continued to be—a goody-two-shoes who never did cheat on any test.

The kicker? The test was on the Ten Commandments.

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34. More Bully Than Teacher

My elementary school gym teacher, Mr. Hildebrand. I was a super overweight child, diagnosed with PCOS at 14, had WLS at 19, but am now an incredibly healthy 24-year-old. I attended an elementary school with 60 children K-4, and my class had 11 including myself. I was the only one that was overweight. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

He constantly called me out for not being able to run as fast as anyone else, encouraged the others in class to pick me last for teams, asked why I was sweating like a pig when I wasn’t working very hard, would make me attempt to do sit ups and push ups while the others watched and made fun of me. It was incredibly traumatizing. The school didn’t require the kindergarten class to have gym, so this started in first grade when I was six.

We had gym class once a week, and I would get so nervous that I would throw up. Every single week. I was also a really anxious and sensitive child, so knowing that I would have to go and be embarrassed for 50 minutes was way more than I could bear. I think the school nurse figured it out after a little while, as sometimes she took mercy on me and let me stay in the office, sometimes she made me go.

But, no one ever asked why. No one ever told my parents this was an issue they were having with me. No one did anything to protect me.

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35. Not Very Lutheran of You

I was in Lutheran elementary school despite not being Lutheran. In third grade, we were talking about baptism, and the teacher asked for everyone to raise their hands if they had been baptized. I was the only kid who didn't raise my hand, and I was already kind of a weird, picked-on kid. A boy in the class said that not being baptized meant I was going to hell.

When I started crying and asked the teacher if that was true, he said that it was. I felt awful for the rest of that day and my classmates definitely did not let up picking on me.

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36. Shouldn’t Have Told Her

In twelfth grade I had been taking German as a foreign language, and was in German V. Class was small, and had AP kids mixed into it—damn near really fluent kids. Teacher was crazy. Frau H. as I'll refer to her, was strict, yelled for no reason, and absolutely would not tolerate English in her class. I understand that as a teaching perspective, but my German was so bad I dreaded that class for fear of not being able to say anything.

Anyway, I come to the realization that Frau H's class isn't worth it in the first quarter and get the counselor to switch me out for a BS elective. I go to tell Frau first thing in the morning. I pull her aside and tell her I'm switching out of her class. I see the insanity build in her eyes. She pulls me into the hallway, and without shutting the door, begins to berate me for dropping out. Tells me how much of a waste I am. How my two-week exchange program to Germany two years prior is shameful now. All well within earshot of all of my classmates.

Up until then, I had never had a teacher treat me in such a disrespectful and humiliating manner. I froze, and peered in to see my friends look at me in horror. I walked away. Apparently, she then proceeded to go on a rant for half of that block about me, and for months after. She got a few scolding emails, a slap on the wrist, and wrote a BS half-assed apology to my family.

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37. The Mad Teacher

My history teacher would kick you out of the class if you yawned without covering your mouth. He also made me stand in the corner for asking him to repeat the question he mumbled.

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38. That Was an Overreaction

The girls in our elementary school were given proto-sex ed before the boys. The basic puberty stuff—your body is starting to change, you might develop breasts, sweating, all that stuff. They made a huge stupid deal about keeping it quiet. It's the girls' little secret. Don't go spreading it around school. It only occurs to me now that that is kind of dangerous, in the wider scope of things.

Anyway, my best friend was a boy and naturally, I skipped right off to tell him why suddenly half the class had an assembly all by themselves. My teacher heard about it, got me alone, grabbed me by both arms AND SHOOK ME. “Keep your mouth. Shut.” She was my favorite teacher up until then. Totally a great thing to teach a kid.

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39. The Spanish Inquisition

Spanish teacher gave me zeroes on a bunch of homework that I knew I'd done and turned in like everyone else. My father refused to believe me and punished me in accordance with the rules about my "bad grade." I swore to him that I had turned in the work, so the next morning he went with me to the teacher's "office hours" or whatever you want to call it.

She showed up 30 minutes after the posted start time, so he was already mad because he was missing work. She unlocks the door and proceeds to tell my father that I'm a bad student, didn't do my work, and was disruptive in class. I shove past her into the room, go to her desk, and pull the four missing papers from her "turn it in tray."

My father watches all this, looks at my teacher (who has turned bright red), and tells me to go to class without breaking eye contact with her. She started failing all of my assignments from that point forward until my dad complained to the principal, superintendent, and school board. She retired the next year.

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40. Some Excuses Are Valid

This was the one and only detention I ever received. I was in third grade, and had a math teacher that had this stupid policy that every math test, after she had graded it, needed to be brought home and signed by our parents and returned to her within two days. During that school year, my mom got in a terrible car accident, in which she got hit head-on by a semi-truck. She almost died, was permanently crippled, and spent several months in the hospital.

We had a math test a couple of days after her accident. My step-dad spent the whole week in the hospital by my mom’s side, no doubt stressed out of his mind and not knowing if she would pull through. He didn’t want to bring my brother or me to the hospital, as he didn’t know if we could handle seeing my mom in that condition.

My brother and I were left home alone all week, with neighbors occasionally checking in on us to drop off meals. Anyway, I hadn’t seen either of my parents in days, and obviously couldn’t get either of them to sign my test. When I tried to explain the situation to my teacher, she cut me off and said that she “didn’t allow excuses” or some similar stupidity.

Then she gave me detention the following day. Since I didn’t have anybody at home who could pick me up, I had to walk the two miles or so home from school after the detention was finished. A week or so later, when my brother told my step-dad about everything that had happened, he showed up to pick me up from school, which he’d never done before, as we took the bus to/from school, and absolutely tore the teacher a new one, almost bringing her to tears. The teacher never apologized to me, or looked me in the eyes again, for that matter, and I forged signatures on every other test that year.

Also, FWIW, I had gotten 100% on the test that led to my detention.

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41. Front and Center

My fourth-grade teacher had a reputation for making one boy in her class an unpopular scapegoat each year. Lucky me. In previous years, I'd been just another kid in the playground, but within two months the other kids wouldn't play with me during recess. One day I refused to go outside for recess. She asked why, and I foolishly told her that the other kids didn't like me.

When they came back in, she marched me to the front of the class, and asked for a show of hands, who didn't like me. Fourth grade kids—mostly—did what fourth grade kids do. I broke down that night and told my mom what had happened and what had been going on all along. She marched into school the next day, got a meeting that included the principal, and tore the teacher a new one.

I was still stuck in that class, but the teacher moved on to a new victim. Funny thing how self-esteem influences academic performance. My school used to give us a Stanford Binet IQ Test every year. My score dropped ten points from third to fourth grade, and then rose twenty points in fifth grade when I had a nurturing teacher.

If you are still alive, SCREW YOU, Mrs. Ericson.

Olivia Wilde factsShutterstock

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42. Horrible Thing to Say

When I was in the second grade, my mom died. When I was in the third grade, the evil witch of a teacher held me back from recess one day for something. While it was just us in the room, she asked if I went to church. I said no. She then told me that I was going to hell and would never see my mom again. I hated that jerk.

Worst Teachers factsShutterstock

43. Proving Him Wrong

I enrolled in college early while still in high school and had a professor who really made me love politics and law, so I decided that’s what I wanted to focus my academic career on. I did well in all of my courses and was setting myself up to start my bachelors with political science pre-law as my major. All was going well until one professor, an older man who hated me from day one. He saw this young blonde chick in his class, which, let's be real, was an easy and basic pre-requisite at a community college, and decided I wasn’t worth his time.

He would constantly answer any of my questions condescendingly, and in an effort make me feel dumb, he would call on me to answer questions on material he hadn’t taught yet. Finally, at the end of the semester, he handed back my final paper and decided to have a talk with me after the rest of the class left. He told me that maybe politics/law wasn’t the thing for me and that maybe I should look into doing something different.

Joke's on him though, I ended up completing my major, and working as main staff on a major campaign during 2012. Then, after all that fun, I decided I didn’t want to go to law school and I now work for the government. But still, screw that dude.

Real Life Experiences Didn’t Live Up to Disney Movies factsPixabay

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