Tell us about the best/worst teacher/prof you've ever had to this date.

Bologo

Bologo

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Alright, so this is going to be a thread about your best and worst teachers/profs. Tell us about the best and worst teachers you've ever had, regardless of whether you're still in school, and tell us all why. Y'know, were they particularly cool, did they hate all their students and show it in their work, etc.

For me, this is how it goes:

Best

This is a hard choice, but I'd honestly have to say that my grade 11 Math teacher right now is the best teacher I've ever had, and I don't regret saying that one bit.

His teaching is tremendously good, as in, whenever I need help at all with any kind of math problem, he's attacks the problem with me and takes me through it. He doesn't do the entire problem for me, and that's another thing that I really like, because he truly does believe that we should give the problem a try if we truly want to understand it. Also, pertaining to understanding of math, he always makes sure to teach us how a certain formula comes to exist so that we can understand the origin behind it. For example, he derived the quadratic formula completely for us, and it then made perfect sense. His teaching isn't the only thing he's good at though.

His personality is also extremely awesome, because his insane personality just makes class all that much more hilarious and that much easier to understand. Yeah, he does like to talk a lot, but that's only because he's high in his years, so he's got lots of experience with a crapload of stuff. He's awesome to talk to and just downright great. My only gripe with him is that he doesn't call anyone's name on the attendance, so it's hard for me to remember anyone's name who I don't already know! I wasn't sure whether I still wanted to teach math later on in life, but now that I've had him, I sure as hell want to.

Worst

Oh lord, I'm not even going to hesitate for this one, as it's evidently my grade 6 Math teacher. He was one of the worst excuses for a teacher that I've ever seen in my life. First off, he hardly ever got up off his chair because he was too fat to be walking around, so we always had to be coming up to him for help and he'd yell at us if we didn't. Then, there's the fact that he's a very spiteful man. For example, I was handing in an assignment and then he tells me that I stapled it on the wrong side and if I handed it in that way then I'd get a zero. Ok, fine he was being stupid enough there, but I decided to comply, and I take the staple out which is a pain in the ass and I staple the other side, and little did I know that he was counting down from 20 because he was like whispering it. Ok, so then he gets to 0, and I'm literally right beside his desk and he yells "You get a zero on your assignment!"

Yeah, there was another time where one of his classes did kinda bad on an assignment, so he decided to go ahead and READ OUT all their fuckin marks to OUR class! I uh, don't think teachers are supposed to be doing that. I haven't even started on his actual teaching yet. His teaching was HORRIBLE! He did not know how to teach at all, in fact, his way of teaching was to ask the smart people in the class to solve the problem on the board after he gave us an example, and then if no one understood what he was talking about, he'd just tell us that we were idiots, and if we'd object to his rudeness, he'd call US rude...

This man found satisfaction in seeing his students fail, and I am glad that the future grade 6s at my proud middle school will never have to see his face again because he retired, and I hope that he never comes back, because I hated his math class with a passion, and I strive to be the opposite of him when I become a teacher.


Alright, so go! What were your best/worst teachers or profs like? They can be from any time in your life, regardless of whether you're in school or not. Just tell us some stories, because I like stories. :]
 
I actually have a tougher time picking a teacher i like then who i dont like, odd as it seems....lol.

In my school the students are actually pretty close with the teachers. Heck, i actually text with my teachers sometimes, they're really cool. My favorite teacher is probably my Armenian teacher, i love her. She's awesome. I get an F, i talk to her, she bumps it to a B. It does help she taught my bro before me and she liked him too. :)

She organizes a good ammount of plays and events at our school, so sometimes we just go through a week without actually doing anything, just talking and all that good stuff. Sure, she can get mad sometimes, and im the unfortunate one of always laughing in the worst situations, but then she just smiles and we just go on.

Theres also 2 outspoken english teachers ive had, and they're awesome as well. They tell it like it is and i love that about them, they also really care about there students. I think its most probably because i go to a private school. :P

The teachers that i hate... i don't really hate any of my teachers now, but i did at the time i had them. In 3rd grade especially my teacher would call me fat in front of the entire class! And i wasn't even fat! I just ate a lot...But for some reason i would just laugh at myself, i love that about me.

And i had a science teacher in 9th and 10th grade who i hated a lot. He was favortist, i always failed his classes, and he didnt care. But now that i don't have him hes kinda chill, one of those teachers you hate in class but enjoy out of class...

Well thats pretty much it >_>

and i literally lol'd at how u guys had to assist your teacher in getting up lmfao
 
Interesting thread.

Best for me has to be my history teacher this year. He is funny, intelligent, and actually knows how to teach, which is surprising since he's only like 28 or something, which is pretty young for a teacher. It's like his third year teaching or something like that.

Worst has to be my fucking spanish teacher. She's nice and all, but she has no idea how to teach. She doesn't know what we're doing at least 90% of the time, if not more, and tells us we have a test the day before the test. Seriously, we were walking out of class today after the bell rang, "oh yeah, don't forget you have a test tomorrow!" Everyone just hates her. Including me. With a passion.
 
Bologo, I'd have to say my math teacher in year 12 this year is opposite to yours. Its not that she's the worst teacher I've ever had, I haven't had many terrible ones, but she is the one thats doing me the most damage. She will make mistakes while explaining things on the board, have days where she is grumpy and unresponsive, and never explain the theory behind anything-apparently its a waste of time.

All this makes it very hard as I am doing year 12 maths while in year 11. We had to skip lots of things to do 3 years of maths in 2 years of time, and she isn't making this very easy. And I've had to have her for the last two years...

I have a few favourite teachers. Any teacher that can explain something well enough, and also not be so strict as to make a classroom feel like a prison cell is ok with me.
 
I would be tempted to say that my best teacher is my current english teacher, who is incredibly good looking, but it is probably actually my history teacher last year, who was really funny and made the subject interesting. That and he played practical jokes on the other teachers.

As to worst, my maths teacher in year 7 had come from Germany and spoke basicly no english. On top of that, she bhada habit of throwing small objects at people if they were talking.
 
The best is my philosophy teacher because I fell in love with him :3

The worst.. my Key Skills teacher, who really cannot seem to grasp the concept that Key Skills is an inherently fucked up and useless lesson - I'm doing A levels you retard, I do know how to write an essay - and is now threatening me with losing two weeks of my summer holiday in which he is apparently going to make me do my Key Skills portfolio. Quite how he intends to get me there I've no idea.
 
For the worst teacher i have ever had there cannot be only one, firstly i go to a grammar school (a school where you have to take an exam to enter) therefore a high standard of teaching is expected, however i found this to be the exception. As i will explain.

My first of my terrible teachers is a Physics teacher, i'm not going to insult his teaching as it is quite good however what makes him the worst has to be his hygiene. Judging by appearence he is very shabby and rarely takes a bath, his nails are long and disgustingly grubby. His trousers seem to fall with every step he takes and his shirts have the hugest sweat patches.

When he approaches the students to teach them his smell is so terrible that upon observation it is apparent that they are holding there breath, literrally. His room smells extremely bad and sometimes pupils must skip lessons or purposely get thrown out to avoid the smell. many of the other teaching staff agree that his smell has driven them to stay clear of him.

However what makes matters worse is that he either doesn't care or is painfully unaware. So there seems to be no solution.

The last teacher that I give the title as one of my worst is my English teacher. With my GCSE's approaching rapidly (national exams) I expected a very good teacher or at the very least a determined teacher, however I had neither.

This teacher is a 40 year old man who's routine for every lesson is to give us questions to answer, then sit down for 50 minutes and play on his laptop, with little effort to do otherwise. The only thing he does on his laptop is look at comic books and lego pieces. To make matters worse he does not even go through the answers but instead ends the lesson and as lunchtime approaches heads off home.

As for the best teacher i've ever had is has to go to my year 7 maths teacher, though his jokes were rarely funny and he would eat food that he confisctated of you ( in front of you) his teacher method was very thorough. He would clearly explain everything for you and if you still didn't understand what he was saying he would individually come and show you a worked example, he helped me get very far in Mathematics.
 
Worst teacher, it's between my english teacher and my old ICT teacher.

My ICT teacher was a fucking idiot and she got sacked. She told us the wrong thing and hence I had to do 2 years worth of projects in my Easter holidays. And her voice was the most annoying thing ever, she elongated any vowel sound in every word. Oh I can remember the suuccccceeesss criiiiiiteria which was all the advice she gave us and was bloody useless. I remember when someone did something wrong in their project, she made mock-orgasm sound noises, which was probably the only time I paid attention to her.

And then there's my English/Media teacher. In fairness to her she hasn't taught high ability classes like top set at my school but that's no reason to treat us like retards one minute then geniuses the next. She'll make us do ALL the work by ourselves, especially in poetry when there are some pretty abstract meanings that no one can work out without help, and then next she'll make us do something totally pointless like doing a "reading record". Fucks sake we are trying to get A*s not fucking Ds.

Best teacher, it's either my history teacher or my chemistry teacher. Both are pretty cool guys and are inventive in the way they teach, I like that they rarely make you do pointless exercises nor do they try to bullshit us about backroom politics in teaching. My chemistry teacher is really dedicated and doesn't mind having a laugh, even though I take the piss occasionally because he is gay. My history teacher is pretty funny too, whenever something about Israel/Palestine crops up he always has a joke for the resident muslim who "hates" America and Israel (whilst wearing a NYC hoodie) .
 
My worst teacher was my Spanish II teacher my senior year of high school. At my high school we only needed two years of Spanish and thankfully, I did not need Spanish III; otherwise I would have failed. She didn't teach us much, and her class always seemed like one big party. She also could never get control of her class. I remember one time she was prepping for her Spanish IV class and they were going over Spanish history and she asked the class does anyone know such and such a date and I was able to blow her mind away. I just think it's sad that I knew more spanish history than the spanish teacher.

My best teacher was my hist teacher in 11th grade. This guy inspried me to teach, and he never did it directly. I was struggling at the time to figure out what to do with my life and I had ruled out teaching for so long and then i realized that I really loved history and teaching it would probably be the best way to be around it (and make $), but at the same if I ever got sick of it, I could back off and do the minimum amount of work. I'm only in my 2nd year of college though but we'll see how it works out. My 11th grade hist teacher though was really just amazing in every way though (lecture, assigning of homework, etc.)
 
my physics teacher was pretty awesome. Whenever he taught us anything he filled us in on all information preceding it, so you get to see the full picture. This meant most lessons were spent listening to the teacher seemingly go off on a tangent which bored most people.

My pure mathematics teacher was terrible. When writing derivations and shit on the board he wrote down EVERY single step, even shit like (x-2)+(x-1)=(2x-3). It didn't help that he could pronounce words properly either.
 
Best Teacher
My favorite teacher was actually not a "school type" teacher at all. Many probably won't believe me, but he is an ex ninja (yes actual real ninja from Japan in the 60s), he is an ex founder of the black panther party, ex soldier, and he is my teacher in Chen style Tai Chi, and Ninjutsu.

This guys appearance is really deceiving. When most people would juddge him by looks they would probably think he was a weed smoking, homeless guy (which he was at one point). But this guy is just a genius at the fighting arts and from living through actual wars and gang like affairs he is a very humbled man. Every session I got to experience with him was truly a pleasure, and I learned many invaluable things from him.

He is also very respectable on the old school principles of teaching martial arts in general. Out of all the sessions I learned with him, we hardly had any rules and he never asked me to pay him (or charged anyone in general). That is very rare and almost absolute in the current day of good martial art teachers.


Worst Teacher
I had plenty of bad teachers, but my worst ones actually came from the Catholic school I attended for 5 years in elementry school. The old ladies there were just bitter, and a pain (most of them). They just didn't know how to deal with young kids at all.

Going to public school was a much better experience.
 
Best Teacher

Probably my current History teacher. She's fucking good. She knows what she's talking about and all.

Worst Teacher

My stupid English teacher. He's just a pure dick. First of all, I don't know how the fuck he became the Head of English at my school, even though he's Scottish. He blames me for no apparent reason, and always gives me a B. Idiot.
 
Best: My year 9 maths teacher. She was quite nice woman, I don't think she ever gave anybody detention. She also helped a lot the students that struggled, and it was really easy to understand whatever she was talking about

Worst: All my ICT teachers, especially the current, year 10 and 11 one. Oh god, it seems that schools just kind of find a random person on the street, ask if they can use computers and hire them for the job :/ She also tells us to stop whatever we are doing and listen, almost always telling us to turn the monitors down. No wonder we are a month late on our coursework if half of the lesson time we listen to what we are supposed to be doing instead of actually doing. Not to mention she knows as much (or maybe even less) as an average pupil does :<
 
BEST (not counting college)

Mrs Lunny- Junior year math teacher...so freaking hot...and she was good at teaching i think. I would go extra help sessions with her every week until some chick looked at me and said "go fuck her for me will" and she was right behind us.

WORST

Mr. Kent- 5th Grade English teacher, touched some chick in our class. Need I say more.
 
Best: My 9th Physics Teacher - It was tough picking one here but I picked him because he was truly awesome. Just always a fun guy and would let us do what we want once we finished. Half the classes we spent watching Mythbusters on the subject we were learning.

Worst: My 7th Grade History Teacher - Ok this guy was awful. Words can not begin to describe him and he was even fired because students had started a petition and they looked at his search history on his computer. Here is a list of his awfulness...

- He did not teach. He gave us a book assignment or a 3 day project
- He looked up girls skirts or raise them up with his ruler
- He looked at illegal internet sites. 3 kids caught him and it turned out to be true when the school looked
- He yelled at us and was happy failing kids
- He messed with the girls.

Finally a petition was started and he was fired after 300 kids signed.
 
I have never had a bad teacher, I have had lame/boring teachers but teachers I have hated? Never. Therefore I don't think I could name a bad teacher I have had.
 
My best teacher is my current History teacher, he turned me from a shit student at history, before I had him I never got above a D on an essay. These days I get A's on nearly every test I do. It's incredible.

My worst has got to be my math teacher last year. We had so many lessons where we just took the piss the whole time. She used to say stuff like "Ok, look at number B". And she lost everyones Coursework, which she'd personally made us do by hand. Bitch.

My ICT teacher also deserves a mention, he once went on a porn site in the middle of class. And poured his water onto a keyboard whilst looking at my friends work.
 
This year I had easily the greatest and worst teachers I think I'll ever have.

I'll start with the worst. My Geometry teacher.......man what can I say. He's pretty much a brand new teacher (decided to teach math after failing in his attemps to get a degree in Engineering) and he's one of those tiny stubborn guys that you can tell got picked on a lot in highschool. He's very reluctant to help you one on one and instead of helping someone when they raise their hand up in confusion he prefers to challenge them and say their method/way of thinking basically sucks. When you ask him a question he typically raises his hands up in the air and looks helpless. He'll usually give you a really smartass response or just move on and ignore you.

A good teacher is also one that commands respect from his students and is also friends with them, IMO. This guy does neither. He gets absolutely no respect and really he brings it on himself. He has this really annoying winy voice and gets pushed around by his own students. I've tried to have conversations with him before but he'll usually act like a jerk or insult you in one way or another. Honestly he just doesn't seem like a "people person," and he seems to hate coming to work everyday. Also, it takes me a lot of effort to figure out what he's trying to teach us sometimes because the way he explains things simply don't make sense. I think a good portion of this comes from his inexperience with working with highschoolers but he does seem like an asshole by nature.

As for my best teacher this one is very easy for me. My AP US History teacher is absolutely amazing. Most influential teacher I've ever had and this guy is the perfect teacher if you ask me. He's the type of teacher that'll walk up to you and have a 15 min. conversation about almost anything.

When it comes to teaching this guy's unbeatable. He comes to school 2 hours early everyday before any test and spends 12 hours in the school TEACHING instead of 8. He doesn't use his planning or lunch period, instead he eats his meals as fast as he can inbetween tiny breaks and spends his time reviewing students for his test. We had our College Board Exams a week ago, and he spent the 2 months before the exam teaching for 12 hours a day. He'd spend a total of 4-5 hours each day reviewing us for the big test. I've called him crazy before, but this guy honestly cares so much for his students. Sad to say they don't all return the favor.

Almost every day one of his old students comes to visit him and it's usually a different one. They all make time from College/their jobs to come visit him and just have a small talk. That's called influence.

Finally, he's a friend and he commands respect. He'll help you out with anything from buying you lunch to driving you to school if you don't have a ride. He'll be the friendliest person in the world and can be the meanest to those that don't try. He'll wear anyone out who doesn't do their best and go goes to great measures to get you to do your work. He'd do stuff like call in parents, arrange conferences, give quizzes over and over again, whatever it took to get the job done. When he talks, everyone listenes because they know they're going to pick something up.

Honestly this is the only class I've ever tried hard in. He's so great you'd feel ashamed to get a bad grade and have to have a talk to him.
 
Best - AP US History teacher this year or World History teacher freshman year. Both of them are great, really smart, funny, demanding in some ways but also willing to accept that there's like 3 weeks of school left (our AP US teacher says we aren't doing anything at all for the rest of the year, and we are having a really easy final exam). He's kind of like the above poster's teacher, though perhaps not quite as devoted. Freshman year History was awesome and every other class sucked and I would pretty much just look forward to that class all day. There would always be great stories.

Worst - ugh easily ap physics teacher. This guy just plain does not know how to teach. He knows a shitload about physics but that isn't really helpful because he doesn't teach. He'd just be like "just read this packet and this packet and these 30 pages in the book", and the text we used was absolutely HORRIBLE and made very simple things very complicated. When he actually taught and gave notes, it actually made sense, sadly we only did that about 5 times in the entire year.
Then he gives quizzes and tests that are made up of old AP test questions, and are ridiculously hard. Needless to say he curves absolutely everything, which is a relief, because otherwise everybody in the class would be failing. And we did labs from time to time when he just didn't feel like teaching a unit.
And we also hardly learned anything about electricity and magnetism which was like half the AP test, fuck that I don't even care about physics i'm not gonna take it in college at all.
 
Best was probably the professor I had for The American Novel, a class I took first semester of my sophomore year in college.

He picked a good selection of literature in terms of progression, and always gave helpful comments on the papers he graded. The thing I liked about his comments was that he would ask other questions for us to consider in relation to the argument we discussed, which I think should be done.

He was also fairly quirky. He once sang "Let My People Go" when we were reading Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, just out of nowhere, and it was actually fairly impressive. He's also big into Toni Morrison, but she despises him, going as far as to stop a book signing when she saw him in the line lol (at least according to him). I think it had something to do with him getting a copy of her birth certificate in Ohio, to write about why she changed her name to Toni, or something like that.

I'd also have to say that my seventh grade English teacher is one of the best. She was just an awesome lady, one of the nicest I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.

She's largely the reason why I'm planning on becoming an English professor, since she was the one who instilled in me such a love of the subject. She seemed to be particularly fond of me, and made a point of talking to me in the halls, and even went so far as to call me to wish me luck when I told her I was moving in the summer following her class. She was also British and I loved the way she pronounced my name :)


Worst was probably my Gender in Literature teacher. She made a point of making it completely clear how intolerable men were, basically trying to undermine any point a student made that was positive toward men. I think the only time I spoke in there was the required presentation. Most of the people I talked to in there (guys and girls) disliked her as well. Luckily, I haven't seen her since that class has been over.
 
Da Big Blast said:
First of all, I don't know how the fuck he became the Head of English at my school, even though he's Scottish.
Click to expand...
Maybe because your school isn't racist?


I love Bologo threads. I'll answer as soon as I can!
 
It's hard to name a best teacher for me, because I've had more than my share of good ones. One of them was my Abnormal Child Psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz, who was so immensely insightful about how to deal with children. I learned a lot from him and used what he has taught me in my work. It wasn't so much that he was charismatic, or was exciting, or anything like that... he just knew so much and was so wise.

I've also had some low quality teachers. Perhaps the most appaling was a professor I had for a History of Western Civilization class. She was frustratingly ignorant, yet opinionated, and loved to jump on people she thought was wrong. When I first took the class, I thought she was just bad at handling a classroom, rather than outright stupid. However, when we studied about the Middle Eastern influence on Western Civilization (and believe me, there's a huge contribution here), we naturally covered Islam and its origins. A student then asked about the differences between the Sunnis and the Shiites, and the teacher responds:

"Umm... well... that's not important enough for the purposes of this class so I don't really want to get into all that."

And this is about one week after we invaded Iraq.
 
My best teacher so far is probably my math teacher right now. She really knows her stuff, and just knows how to teach and explain things in such a way that makes perfect sense. She's very thorough, and always goes as in-depth as she can in the limited time she has. Sometimes I wish my math class was longer just so she could actually have a chance to teach us everything she wants to, because I get the feeling we'd really benefit from it.

She is respected by the class, and keeps them under control, but at the same time knows how to stop and have a laugh and a good time every once in a while. She's also great outside of class, just fun to talk to and stuff like a real person.

She also seriously cares about her students, and does her very best to make sure they do their very best. She even goes on rants about it in class sometimes. She's not the funnest teacher ever (it's hard to be in math), but she's definitely the one I appreciate and respect the most.

I can't really remember any particularly bad teachers in my past, except for one. My grade eight homeroom teacher. She was normally a gym teacher, and ended up teaching us math all year. . . 'twas absolutely horrible. She had to ask the smart kids in class (myself included) for help ALL the damn time, and couldn't explain stuff properly, wasn't fun, wasn't funny, wasn't cool, and she was really strict, too. Got pissed off pretty easily. Nobody liked OR respected her at all. It was just. . . ugh.
 
I think my best teacher would have to be my current AP World History teacher. It's easily to remember his lessons and his fast-paced classes are good preparation for the inevitable test. He also has a sense of humor, which is cool. He rarely gives homework too, probably just two days of homework for a week.

My worst would have to be my first term English teacher. She didn't know shit about the subject. I'm thankful that we were taught by cool student teachers for the first two marking periods before the last one. Don't get me wrong, I do well in pretty much every class. She was just so damn annoying.
 
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