Teachers tend to make a lasting impact on their students. The implication is always that the impact is positive; however, that isn’t always the case. Some teachers are just plain jerks, making their students hate a subject, treat them unfairly, and leave them with a lasting grudge. These Redditors shared their experiences of some of the nastiest educators they encountered that left them unable to forget or forgive.
1. Llorar a mares
I had a Spanish teacher, and in order to gain other students' sympathy, she would make fun of one of the students for the entire class. Of course, other students would sometimes laugh because the class was super boring so it was like a show. However, I HATED the whole thing. She would pick the students that didn't reply to her provocation, the low-profile type, and she would say "Oh, it's just a joke!"
One day, she chose the guy that never caused trouble for her next victim. She used him as an example to describe a homeless guy in a picture. After 10 (long) minutes, he stands up and leaves the classroom crying. And when she stops him before he leaves, he turns around the drops the mic. He says his dad passed the previous night and pushed her away.
Once the door closed behind him, she paused for a second, pretending to be crying, and mocked him saying, "My dad just passed cry cry, poor baby" Before I realized it, she had my Spanish book flying in her face, and I called her an "ugly witch". Yeah, yeah, my insult level isn't great in Spanish, but it got the job done!
2. Never Too Late
In 11th grade, my English class was discussing a new late policy. Everyone was asking questions, and when I asked what would happen if someone was late for reasons out of their control, the teacher spent two or three minutes mocking and belittling me, all in an effort to get in with the popular kids. I rarely ever lost my cool at school, but I remember forcefully slamming my chair at the end of class and storming out.
3. The Old Switcheroo
My high school Latin teacher was a jock when he was in high school and college, and most of the people in my class were also jocks. However, I was not. I was a short, dumpy guy. As a result, my teacher was always ragging on me, putting me down, and generally being a low-key jerk to me. The worst was when I signed up for AP Latin for my senior year.
Over the summer, he blatantly transferred me out of his class and into a lower class taught by someone else. I'm sure it was purely because he didn't like me. I talked to him, and when he couldn't come up with an actual reason why I shouldn't be in the class, he begrudgingly let me back in.
4. Creature Teacher
I was in a digital illustration class, and our project was to illustrate a monster. I decided to draw the parasites from the movie Cloverfield. We posted all of our pictures in class, and my instructor went one by one, giving detailed critiques. When he got to mine, he just looked at it and said, "That's a creature, not a monster", and moved on to the next one.
I got a C on that assignment. This was the same teacher who accidentally pulled out the plug on the back of my computer after I had spent five hours working on my final and refused to give me any extra time to complete it.
5. On An Ego Trip
My English teacher gave me a 99 on a paper. I flipped through it, curious about where my error was. She had marked "egomaniacal" for word choice with the note saying "not a word". I asked her about it, and she insisted it was not a word. I insisted it was, and then I got detention for being insubordinate. I asked her, "How do you know 'insubordinate' but not 'egomaniacal'"? Then, I got more detention.
6. Lost In Space
I had a teacher for kindergarten who I absolutely loved. I always compared my other teachers to her, and she always stayed my favorite. I also LOVED space. From kindergarten onward, I made it no secret that I wanted to be an astronaut. When we studied the planets, or anything space-related, I was enraptured. In fourth grade, two of the most amazing things happened.
My absolute favorite teacher moved up from kindergarten, and I got her again for fourth grade, and NASA announced the Young Astronauts Program. Not only that, but MY teacher was going to be starting the first ever Young Astronauts Program at our school. The day she handed out the applications, I was in heaven. When I sat writing out my "theme" on why I wanted to join the Young Astronauts, it was a scene straight out of A Christmas Story.
I wrote, and I wrote. I remember going over to the back of the paper because I had more to say than would fit. The following week they were announcing who made it. It never once even crossed my mind that I wouldn't get accepted. Well, I was setting myself up for the biggest disappointment of my life. MY teacher—the one who was my favorite—the one who knew me for five years—who knew my love of space—praised my drawings of the space shuttle—encouraged me in science and math—accepted just about every single other kid in that school that applied, except for me.
I was devastated. I watched my best friend, my first crush, and the kid I hated most in the class all make it into the group I wanted to be a part of more than anything else. She absolutely refused to say why I wasn’t selected. I asked, even begged to know what I did wrong, but I never got an answer or any reassurance of any kind.
7. There Was No Escape
My second-grade teacher was nasty and mean. She directly harassed me both in and out of class. Even when I wasn't in her class, and she couldn't humiliate me in front of my peers by making fun of my mistakes or things I didn’t know, she continued picking on me as long as I was at the school. She also supported the other kids in harassing me by denying it even happened, then punished me for "telling lies" or whatever tales the others invented.
8. She Broke Us All
I had a teacher who was exceptionally controlling in her classroom and used that on everyone. The worst was that she enjoyed picking out actual good students and trying to break them. She would nitpick at everything, snap at them, and find any made-up reason to belittle them. I once watched her take the kindest, most well-behaved, and studious girl in the class into the hall and berate her until she was a sobbing mess.
After graduation, I found out that she was just as condescending to most of her fellow teachers as well. I graduated over 30 years ago, and I still simmer in anger when I remember her.
9. Public Enemy #1
I still get a little angry when I think about how my first-grade teacher treated me compared to the rest of the students. I was public enemy number one in her class, no matter what I did. She would randomly punish me by not allowing me to join the kids for recess for yawning. I would be called stupid for getting an answer wrong, while other students who answered wrong got a simple "Nope, incorrect". I had a test taken away from me and was given a zero on it because my pencil broke. The list could go on.
10. True Flu Jerk
My 10th-grade science teacher tried to fail me and dropped my grades--all for the most ridiculous reasons she could find. Like when I wrote, "I put the magnet on the envelope" rather than "I approached the magnet to the envelope" on a lab report. That year, I missed a whole week of school because I had the flu. I did all the missed homework and caught up on the missed classes on my own.
However, when I went up to her with questions about things I couldn't figure out, she refused to answer them and said I should've just been there. In the next class, she decided there was going to be a surprise test. Halfway through, she noticed I wasn't writing much down, so she interrupted the exam to lecture me on the importance of taking responsibility when you miss classes. Luckily, the final was graded by someone else, and I got 100%.
11. Grudge Master
My fifth-grade teacher had previously taught my older sister and just transferred her grudge over to me. My sister wasn't even that bad; she just didn't turn in all her homework assignments since she had just immigrated over to the US and was having trouble acclimating. I needed a recommendation letter to go to an advanced middle school, and she went out of her way to write a letter saying I wasn't smart enough to go.
The guidance counselor saw it and got all my previous teachers to write recommendations as well. She was so petty. She even confiscated my books because I would quietly read after finishing my work. After that, I thought, "Hey, I'll help my classmates out instead", but then, she gave me detention for being disruptive. To this day, even my mom has no idea why she hated me so much.
12. This Teacher Was A Real Headache
I would get terrible migraines with auras since elementary school. One day, in seventh grade science class, I started to get a migraine and asked to go to the nurse’s office so I could get my medication. The teacher declined and said the nurse wasn’t at school at the time. There was a rule that students couldn’t take medication without being supervised by the nurse. It sucked, but technically, it wasn’t her rule. That was just the first part of my ordeal.
Then, I had to take a test. The test was long, and by the end, I was nauseous. My head felt like it had been coated in fire ants, and my vision looked like the psychedelia scene in Phineas and Ferb. I asked to go to the office so that I could call home. She declined, said I was just “trying to disrupt test time”, and sent me back to my desk. I sat there with my head down for a while before I finally got nauseous and threw up next to my desk.
This was apparently enough to send me to the office. I asked if someone could accompany me since there was a double flight of stairs, and I was dizzy. The answer was “No”. I stumbled down the stairs—somehow avoiding breaking my skull— and went to the office to use the phone. As I sat down in the office to wait for my parents, the front desk attendant asked if I had seen the nurse.
I told her that the nurse wasn’t in the building. That’s when I found out the disappointing truth. The desk lady said, “Well, she only left a few minutes ago. Really sucks that you couldn’t catch her”. It turned out the nurse was in the building when I had asked previously. When I came in the next morning, I found out I had tanked the test. I looked through the answers and didn’t see anything wrong, so I went to the teacher to find out what I had missed.
Apparently, my work was “sloppy” and “hard to read”. I pointed out that I could barely see, which only served to get her to mark it up to a C- instead of an F. That class, despite my best efforts, gave me the first B that I ever had—all because of that test. I had terrible anxiety at the time, so I never even brought it up to my parents. I still mentally go through all the extremely choice words I could have said to her.
13. It Was Snow Joke
It was the end of November in Minnesota, and I was in sixth grade. My home economics teacher gave me detention for something I did—or more likely just got accused of—and didn't let me leave for home until after 7:30 PM. It was snowing and unbelievably cold outside and this woman refused to let me call my mom. I had to walk home three and a half miles in the snow and the cold.
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14. His Memory Failed Him
During a class test in high school, my classmate included a lengthy quote as part of one answer. He was super intelligent and had a great capacity for memorizing facts, details, and the like. Some of us included bits of the quote, but no one else but him could recall the whole spiel. The teacher didn't just award him no points but docked him points for cheating.
The instructor believed that no one could possibly remember that whole quote, so the student must have had it written down somewhere on him. There were protests all around. The poor kid threw his arms up in defeat. I still remember the injustice of it many years later.
15. Vocabulary Vexer
A history teacher I had during my sophomore year would dock points if you used words she deemed too advanced for you. The only way to get the points back was to recite the definition of the word off the top of your head. She said it was to stop cheaters, but it was probably just her way of feeling smart by calling her students stupid. Some examples of words I remember being interrogated on were “apothecary”, “lurid”, “acclimate”, and “decrepit”.
16. This Imitation Was Not A Form Of Flattery
I had a terrible drama teacher in eighth grade. He was a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian and would lecture us about it every day. He also targeted me to pick on and would ask me things in front of the whole class like, when was the last time I washed my hair, etc. I was 13 years old, and my hair was greasy regardless.
He also gave other students extra points for imitating me in a negative way. But the worst moment of all came on the last day of class. That was when he pompously said that he thought the class was “a little hard on me”, as if he hadn't been encouraging them every step of the way. Years later, I ran into him at the grocery store with his kids. He said hello, and I just grunted at him.
17. Too Cool For School
During the eighth grade, I had this English teacher who was about 30 and was one of “those” teachers—characterized as cool by my classmates and other members of the faculty alike. He told me to “shut up” for correcting him on something he misinformed the class about in front of everybody. He laughed at one of my friend's interests and also embarrassed them in front of the class.
One time out of nowhere, he made fun of how I walked and said it was fine because we were “friends” and that all of this behavior was appropriate because he was our teacher. He was a 33-year-old man tormenting a then 13-year-old girl. It was despicable.
18. There’s No Work Like Homework
A bunch of bad teachers in 10th grade ruined school for me. The worst was my math teacher, who didn’t teach. They just gave busy work such as solving 100 equations every day. Then the same for homework. I couldn't manage to keep doing it, so I got a terrible grade. When the final exam came, I got a 98 on it, but they refused to pass me even though I clearly knew the material.
Their reason was that "doing the work is the most important part of your grade". I’m not sure why they thought I needed to repeat a class I already knew the material for.
19. An Irrational Obsession
I needed a college elective in a certain area, and one of the classes was about how to conduct research. I signed up for it and started asking other students how it was. Their answers were seriously terrifying. Apparently, the professor was obsessed with formatting papers and would fold papers in half to see if the titles were exactly centered on the page. If it was off by a millimeter, it was rejected.
People told me they spent hours printing out dozens of pages, trying to ensure everything was correctly positioned to her specs. They told me about crying in frustration. No one in the real world is that insane, so I dropped the class and signed up for Textiles and Culture, which was ultimately useless but was at least fun.
20. She Turned Into Dr. Jekyll And Mrs. Hyde
In sixth grade, I had a teacher who taught my brother a few years prior. My brother wasn't a great student, often goofing off in class and not handing in homework. I was the exact opposite; I always handed in homework and was quiet in class. Most of the year was fine, but during the last month of school, my teacher flipped a switch for some reason and started treating me like garbage.
My behavior hadn't changed, but I was suddenly getting in trouble for the dumbest reasons. To this day, I have no idea why she decided to treat me so badly suddenly. A few years later, I went to pick up my sister from school, and that teacher was teaching her. She smiled at me, but I refused to acknowledge her. I don't know what was going on in her life at the time, but I didn't appreciate being her emotional punching bag.
21. Adios Español!
My Spanish teacher in high school would force the class to run laps around the building because it was a Monday morning, and we weren’t responding quickly enough for her. I was very overweight at the time, and it was humiliating. She liked to play a game she invented called “conjugation boot camp”, in which you’d have three seconds to conjugate a verb she gave you.
If you couldn’t, you’d have to do ten push-ups, sit-ups, or squats, increasing by ten every time you were wrong. She was incredibly short but had a massive ego and looked down on people when they were sitting at their desks. She had an overall demeaning way of speaking. Hilariously enough, she used to wear very tall high heels, and I was still taller than her when I stood up. I could tell she was annoyed that she had to look up at me.
She called me a loser with no friends when I said I was interested in a class trip to the Dominican Republic. She questioned my speaking ability and said, “It’s really hot out all the time, and we do a lot of walking on this trip”, essentially calling me a bad student, anti-social, and fat. She loved picking on the shy students and forcing them to speak in front of the class. She made me hate learning Spanish so much I didn’t take it senior year.
22. This Class Was A Write-Off
In my 12th-grade creative writing class, my teacher said I must’ve plagiarized my assignment because there was no way I could have ever written something that good. When I asked for proof, she couldn’t provide any and said it was just a gut feeling she had. I went to the principal. Their reaction blew me away. They didn’t do anything and said we had to work it out between ourselves.
This same instructor would post students' work on her personal website without their consent and where she also wrote salacious soft-core stories. As hard as I tried, it was very hard to loosen the chip on my shoulder from that whole experience. It really shaped how I expressed myself creatively and trusted others.
23. This Teacher Put Me To The Test
At the end of the fourth grade, I was tested for the gifted program but didn't get to start the program until the beginning of fifth grade. Our gifted program pulled you out of class once a week for an entire day, and you spent that day in the gifted classroom. My day in the gifted program was Thursdays, and my regular teacher scheduled all of our tests for that day.
So on Fridays, when we started new lessons, she had me sit out in the hallway and take all of Thursday's tests. I never had a teacher schedule all their tests on one day like that before, and I was essentially spending half of Friday out in the hallway. I was really embarrassed about it, because our school used to pull the rowdy kids out of the classrooms and have them sit in the hallways. I didn't want anyone to think I had misbehaved.
One day, my teacher came to me and said that she didn't think this was working out because I had to miss so much class. She thought we should see about getting me removed from the gifted program, but for me not to tell my mother about it. I agreed with her—but then I took my chance to get revenge. I went straight home and told my mom, who called the principal.
I stayed in the gifted program, the teacher had to stop giving all her tests on Thursdays, and she had to stop putting me out in the hall. Later that year, we had an annual Easter egg contest. We were given a piece of poster board about a foot long that was cut into the shape of an egg and had to decorate it. The class voted for the winners, and then the eggs were hung in the cafeteria for everyone to see.
I had been wanting to win since I was in first grade but never had. That year, I was determined and came up with a plan. I ruffled lace around the edges, made crepe paper flowers, and I had some wire butterflies with mesh wings that I attached to it. My teacher held the eggs up one by one for the class to vote on, and when she got to mine, she said, "This really doesn't look like an egg". I won first place anyway.
24. Read It And Weep
My English teacher was the worst. I'm dyslexic, which he said was not a real thing, and I was lazy and stupid. He spent three years destroying any confidence I had in myself, ridiculing me on an almost daily basis, and encouraging the other kids to pick on me. Twenty years later, I left my first published book on his grave.
25. Detained For No Reason
In sixth grade, I had a science teacher who didn't like me and would give me detention almost daily. I didn’t know why. I was a good student, did my homework, was on the honor roll, and rarely got into any kind of trouble. Even so, she would find a reason to give me detention. She accused me of having a girl do my homework for me because I had good penmanship for a guy.
She also would call me out in front of the entire class for talking when we were doing a group project. After weeks of my dad getting mad about having to make two trips up to the school for my brother and then myself, he demanded to know why I was getting in so much trouble. I couldn't give him an answer because I didn't know why the teacher had such an issue with me.
So, my dad called the school. As it turned out, the teacher couldn't give much of an explanation as to why I was receiving detention either. My dad proceeded to curse her out, and I never received detention from her again. I think she just liked having some sort of control over me, and having me sit in her empty classroom and checking on me every 10 minutes or so was just for fun.
26. Language Barrier
In seventh-grade science class, we had to watch a video on wildlife and then write a short paper afterward about what we watched. I was in advanced reading classes and read my thesaurus and encyclopedia for fun, so I had a slightly better grasp of the English language than my classmates. My idiot teacher knocked 20 points off my paper for the most ridiculous reason. She said it was because I "did not use grade-appropriate language". I got a lower mark because I used words she felt were beyond my grade level. I'm still salty about it 25+ years later.
27. Speed Reader
I took a speed reading course in high school because I lived for reading. I also read extremely fast. I read faster than this teacher before the course even started, and she swore I cheated. She quizzed me for 30 minutes on what I had read. When I answered every question correctly, and still tossed me out of the class because “I must have cheated”.
28. Final Exemption
In ninth-grade biology class, the teacher told us stars reflected sunlight. I told him they don't, and the dude laughed at me. He told me if I could prove it, I would be exempt from finals. I came back the next day with $20-worth of printed proof that started with "Stars are gas-based celestial bodies", just to rub it on his face.
When finals day came, I was there to cheer on my friends and mock our dumb teacher. He told me, "Sit". I said, "What? I'm exempt. You said so before and after I handed you proof of stars being gaseous bodies". He replied, "No, I said I'd give you an extra point. Now sit". I told him I didn't study because we had an agreement. Nobody in the class backed me up, so I sat and did the test. I still aced it.
29. Lack Of Support
My 11th-grade math teacher wouldn’t allow me to go to a support group for bereaved students at our school once a week after a car I was supposed to be in crashed and ended the lives five of my closest friends. She persistently called me out in her class, and one day, she asked me insincerely, “What’s wrong”? I couldn’t hold back anymore. I instantly started crying and yelled, “All my friends are deceased ”. I think she got the point after that.
30. She Was A Manhater
When I was eight, I had a teacher who was easily over 50—maybe even 60—and used to wear these tight revealing outfits all the time. It was so gross. She would sit up in the front of the class and read books to us in a short skirt with one of her legs up sideways, resting on the other, while all the kids were sitting on the floor in front of her.
It was virtually impossible to miss seeing her underwear. Then she'd yell, "Are you looking up my skirt" to eight-year-old boys. She would get the boys and the girls to line up in separate lines outside her classroom in the morning, and she would always let the girls in first. She would go out of her way to help any girls with questions in class while being as short as possible with the boys.
She had a massive chip on her shoulder. On days when she was in a bad mood, I recall her going on huge rants about how all men are good for nothing losers and how her son Drew was the only good man in the world.
31. He Was A Bad Choice For A Teacher
I had a teacher who assigned us an essay where he had to approve the article we used to analyze. I took mine to him, and he told me to go ahead. They weren’t the best articles, but he would accept them for the assignment. He was known to be very picky, so when I asked him why I failed after writing it, editing it, and taking it to the writing center three times for review, he told me that the article I chose was a bad one.
I had to rewrite the paper and got a D as an improvement. I was a student who was a perfectionist and hated even getting a C. As and Bs were fine, but I could not stand getting low grades. To this day, I still can’t stand that teacher.
32. Share And Share Alike
In eighth grade, we had these sharing circles at my school, so we would get to know each other better. I don’t recall the subject we were talking about, but during a share, a student said she wanted to marry a rich dude and divorce him for money. When I said, “That’s messed up”, the teacher sent me to the office for not “supporting” my classmate.
33. For Crying Art Loud
Back when I was in second grade, we were usually given some drawings to color. I always loved painting and was very imaginative in my color applications, mostly because I had close contact with nature. One day, we were given a sketch that was a house on a hill with some clouds and a sun. It was nothing extraordinary. Most kids painted the entire hill green, but I thought it needed some flowers.
I grabbed my markers and started making flowers of all colors, including blue. That's when the problems started. The teacher came to my desk and began yelling at me and telling me that blue flowers don't exist. She said that the assignment was to paint what was already drawn. It broke my spirit. I argued that I picked many blue flowers—the natural wild kind—for my mom. She ripped my drawing apart, threw it in the trash, and punished me for talking back. I hate her with all my guts, and I will never forgive her.
34. Mocked For My Manuscript
I had a teacher in the third grade who basically made fun of my writing. I wrote a short story from the first-person perspective. She read it and ridiculed me out loud for writing in the first person. She kept asking why I would do that and, for some reason, made me feel really dumb for writing it that way. I was a shy kid and blushed very badly. Writing my thoughts out was difficult enough. It turned me off to writing and made me self-conscious about expressing myself.
35. I Had To Go With The Flow
My teacher wouldn't let me go to the bathroom when I was on my period. I was 14, had a really heavy flow, and still navigating having a period in the first place. I told her that and that I had leaked, but she didn't care. I even cried to her, but it didn't matter. Other classmates told her to let me go, and she wouldn't. I was so scared of getting in trouble at school I just stayed put.
When I got home, I was an absolute mess. My mom went bonkers.
36. The Gym Teacher Hung Me Out To Dry
I was a fat kid, last to get picked, horrible in sports, etc. For my first two years of high school, I was all Bs and Cs in Phys Ed. The summer I turned 16, I lost weight, put on some muscle, and no longer looked like the fat kid. Even so, that didn't magically make me well-coordinated or good at sports, so at best, it cemented me as a solid B in gym.
However, thanks to swimming lessons at an early age, I was a pretty decent swimmer. Never excellent, but definitely more advantaged than I was on land. Of course, that did me no good in school since none of my high schools had a pool. In 11th grade, though, my high school had made an arrangement with a YMCA for one of our gym teachers to use their pool to teach a lifeguarding class as a voluntary alternative to normal gym class.
I was excited since I had previously gotten a lifesaving merit badge in the Boy Scouts and looked at getting an ARC lifeguard certificate as a route to a good summer job. On the second day of class, as we were walking to the pool, my gym teacher talked about how much work the lifeguarding class was going to be, how he thought a few people would wash out, and how he planned on giving an A to everyone who got through it successfully.
I was very excited to hear him say that because I knew I wasn't going to wash out and that this would probably be the only A in gym I was ever going to get in high school. I didn't realize it at the time, but my gym teacher thought that I was one of the people who would wash out. As I expected, I didn't. Granted, I wasn't a top performer in the class, but I held my own.
I looked forward to getting that A on my report card, but he gave me a B. I approached him about it, and he sheepishly shrugged his shoulders and said, "Well, I couldn't give everyone an A. It wouldn't look like I was grading everyone fairly".
37. Oh, Brother!
I was not studying during my freshman year of high school and was failing my classes. My father lost his life that year. It was a school run by "brothers", not priests but some kind of religious figures. When I returned to school after the funeral, "Brother John"—the principal—called me to the office. I still can’t believe what he said to me. He told me: "You're being expelled. Your father would be ASHAMED of you. You are not leaving. You're being THROWN OUT. Get out of my office".
Unsplash, christopher catbagan
38. Teacher Was A Total Snake
I left a few colored pencils in my desk overnight, so my teacher flipped it and made me sit on the floor amidst the mess for the entire day. This was the same teacher who gave me detentions for refusing to watch her snake eat live mice. They would scream, and it was a biweekly thing. She would grab me so harshly that her "witch nails" would break my skin. My mom punched her in the face in front of the principal when she finally got a meeting.
39. Nothing Funny Here
Back in grade school, I had two really close friends named Juan and Nick. The three of us were very close and bonded over our shared nerdy interests of reading, Star Wars, and The Simpsons. We also really enjoyed drawing and ended up making this notebook that we passed back and forth between us. It was a comic about a guy named Tom and his cat.
We would each take turns doing a strip of a few panels and then hand it over. The comic was about Tom’s everyday life, and it was extremely mundane. It contained things like Tom trying to decide on a shirt or Tom dropping the cat food on the floor. It was really dumb stuff, but the three of us found it incredibly hilarious because we were weird kids.
One day, our teacher caught us with the notebook and confiscated it from us. She never said a word about it, but I bet when she looked through that thing, she probably thought it was the weirdest thing ever, especially since we were laughing nonstop when she took it from us. We never got that notebook back because, apparently, she lost it. It’s been over 20 years, and I'm still mad about that.
40. Dealing With This Teacher Was A Challenge
In 11th grade, I was taking Calculus III. I handed in my homework, and the teacher noticed one answer without work. He questioned me, basically accusing me of looking up the answer in the back of the book to save time. I told him I had done it in my head. His reaction was so cruel. He said, "Class, we have a genius on our hands! Mr. S can do calculus in his head", trying to humiliate me.
He then wrote a similar problem on the chalkboard and challenged me to answer it without writing anything down. I gave the answer after working it out in my mind. The teacher worked out the problem on the board and arrived at a solution that was different from the one I had stated. He turned smugly toward me. I told him the answer was wrong.
He replied, "Ah, so now Mr. S knows better than his calculus professor, who has a Master's Degree in mathematics! Amazing"! He then handed me the chalk. I went to the board, worked out the problem step-by-step, and reached the point where he had made a simple, albeit critical, operational error. The others in the class who understood calculus gasped audibly.
I finished the problem, arriving at the correct answer, the same one that I had given after working it out in my head and answering him. The teacher yelled at me to take my seat and proceeded to pick on me in front of the class for weeks afterward. I wrote a formal complaint to the principal, the math department, and the County Superintendent of Schools. The teacher was given an official reprimand in his record. He never apologized or acknowledged his error ever again.
41. The Absent-Minded Professor
I had an English professor so spacey she would insist she assigned us stuff when she had forgotten to. The class before the final, she said she came up short for assignments, so our final—due two days later—was eight separate three-page essays on what we had read earlier, including stuff she had forgotten to assign us to read. Well, I came up with a devious plan. I took a chance that she would not have time to read everything, and three of my essays were about what a terrible teacher she was. I got an A and several ulcers from anxiety.
42. What A Bore!
My seventh-grade homeroom teacher was terrible. One morning, I was the first one to enter the classroom. She glanced at me with a flat stone cold face and said, "You are the most boring student I've ever had", and went back to her work. I was floored. I thought I was just the "normal" kid, and she liked me up until then. She was obviously having a bad morning. Fortunately, we moved the following year, and I left that school, but it genuinely hurt my feelings.
43. She Divulged Our Dirty Laundry
I had an eighth-grade teacher who everyone loved, including me. She was funny and always connected with her students. She did daily journals with us. We would write in the morning, and overnight she would write back to us. Because everyone felt so at ease with her, many of us developed friendly-style relationships with her.
She coached a lot of our sports teams as well. She was a real fixture in our middle school. Then, one day, everything changed. She sat in front of our homeroom and proceeded to essentially “air out the classroom”. She divulged every tidbit that she had gathered through our journals. She picked each person one by one to criticize and call out.
She aired details of fights between class members, home lives of students, medical choices, and decisions of others. When she got to me, she told me I was a different person with everyone. 13-year-old me did not understand where this was coming from. I had many friends from many walks of life and was an empathetic kid.
30 years later, I still don’t understand where that came from. It was something I had never heard before or since about myself. It was a messed up thing to do to impressionable decent kids who looked up to you. Needless to say, many tears were shed that day, and many complexes and trust issues were started.
44. Questionable Comment
In eighth grade, I had a math teacher who taught my brother at some point. She assumed I was like my brother and never let me prove otherwise. She would constantly find excuses to lecture or yell at me. The one I remember the most was when I was talking with my friends, and we were just insulting each other in a lighthearted way. My teacher walked past and said, "Uh, that sounds like that was supposed to be inappropriate. I'm going to have to ask you to stop".
45. Pardon My French, But This Teacher Sucked
We had this French teacher who obviously was a conservative relic from the past. He wasn’t French but had a very arrogant and smug vibe going on. A girl in class had a bad cold, and he told her to read something out aloud. She had a hard time between sniffling and trying to pronounce it correctly. He pulled off the, “No, no, no. C’est incompréhensible la, loser”, yelling at her and making her cry.
46. Flex Education
The chairman of our department in college kept flexing his authority a lot. We got delayed by a year because this guy did not want to sign a petition of ours in opening a subject because, as he said, "We are not a priority". The worst was during our last thesis year. He was on one of our panels, and I always sent the complete documentation to him and the other two members.
He had the gall to tell the dean that we had not sent anything to him. It was a good thing the messenger on Facebook actually had that “sent and seen” notification. I ended up screenshotting those along with the ones I sent through his email and sent said screenshots to the dean as proof. That got him to stop. Hopefully, I will never see his mug again.
47. Father’s Day Flub
When I was about six years old, the teacher told us to make Father’s Day cards in class. I went up to the teacher to tell her that my dad was gone. Her reaction was ice cold. She snapped back at me and told me, “Do it anyway”. So I was forced to sit in class and make Father’s Day cards for my deceased father.
48. This Sub Needed A Slapshot
I remember one time when I was 8, and I started to get a bad stomach ache at school. It was just before my last class, so instead of going home, I decided to stay. Because the last class that day was gym class, I told the substitute teacher that I felt sick and asked if I could sit it out. She said I could and allowed me to do so.
Halfway through the class, my worst nightmare came true. My stomach ache suddenly got worse, and I rushed to the toilet and threw up. I had been sitting next to her, so I told her quickly, and she knew. I came back when I stopped. A few minutes later, it happened again, and I went to the bathroom again. The sub followed me the second time to make sure I was okay.
However, she arrived after I had thrown up and when I was just dry heaving and spitting. Her reaction was brutal. She thought I was fake vomiting to get out of class and wouldn't listen to me when I said I wasn't. She started screaming at me that I was a little liar, then forced me back into the class and made me play hockey while I was trying not to puke everywhere.
49. Nothing To Laugh About
I was in fourth grade and was enduring a difficult home life. I wasn’t the most hygienic, so my hair was frizzy, and I didn’t wear underwear because I found them tight and uncomfortable, and if my parts weren’t hanging out, I just didn’t see a need. My teacher and her assistant were behind me one day during a test. They started talking—and I couldn’t believe what they said. They were talking trash about me and giggling.
They made sure they were the perfect distance away for me to hear them very audibly. They said I never brushed my hair or showered and that I was dirty. As someone already being psychologically mistreated by my parents at the time, it definitely took a major toll on me. As an adult, I cannot imagine how anyone could act like that with a child. It was disgusting.
50. Boomer Go Home
I had a professor in college who really stuck out as a grade-A jerk. He taught industrial organizational psychology, but taking his class was just a giant lecture about how lazy millennials and Gen Z were. He would devote about 15 minutes of each 60-minute class to his personal vendetta against the younger generations.
When he wasn't bemoaning the downfall of the hardworking middle class, he would be talking about college football. Eventually, I had enough of his nonsense and called him out for it in the middle of class. I just told him that I came to college to learn and not to be preached about his particular views on society. He spent the rest of the semester trying to screw me over in any way he could.
He thought his moment came when I had to submit an assignment online because I had to get my appendix removed. Right out of surgery, I submitted the assignment from my hospital bed. He had the gall to say that surgery wasn't a valid enough excuse not to hand the assignment in person. He gave me a zero on a project that was worth 40% of my grade. Well, I wasn’t about to let him get away with it.
I talked to the dean of his department. I brought in my receipts and pictures showing me lying in a hospital bed. The dean forced him to regrade my assignment, and I ended up getting a 90%. I wish that were the end of it, but he wanted to spite me for calling him out twice on his antics, so he ended up giving me a 79.9 as my final grade with points removed for "missing" class.
51. Keep Calm And Blog On
When I was in the 10th grade, I used to write a lot, including fanfiction, original fiction, and even blog entries on whatever I found interesting. I kept all this writing on LiveJournal. The first paper of the school year was a history paper. When I got it back, I was stunned. It came back with a big red zero and a note to see the teacher after class. I hung around, and as soon as the last student was out the door, my teacher started laying into me with the classroom door still open and people in the hall.
He went on and on about how he knew about my kind—the student who was lazy, couldn’t be bothered to put in the work, the one who would lie and cheat and try to coast by in life without pulling their own weight. The guy kept going on for a good ten minutes with just insult after insult. His next class was standing in the hall, and I was going to be late for my next class.
He refused to give me a pass, so I was facing trouble in my next class too. Before dismissing me, he asked if I had anything to say for myself. I asked him why he thought that I had plagiarized my paper. He said he did a search online, and two different lines had come up on a website, so he had solid proof. I was already late and in trouble anyway, so I demanded to see this proof.
Well, there was something he hadn’t realized. The proof was my own LiveJournal post. I told him that I owned the blog, so I could not plagiarize myself. He refused to believe it, so I asked if he would grade my paper fairly if I could prove that it was mine. He said he would think about it. I walked into my next class 20 minutes late without a pass, and the teacher pulled me into the hall and asked where I had been.
I explained what had happened, and she was not happy. She said—as my English teacher—she would happily take some of my papers to him and show him that he was wrong to accuse me of cheating. I thanked her and told her I would still like to prove to him that I owned the page in question. So we came up with a plan. Her solution was to let me onto her computer, so I could write a blog entry about what had happened and how it made me feel.
She even said she would count that post as my creative writing entry for the day. Ultimately, my history teacher regraded my paper but still gave it a pretty low grade. He also never apologized or acknowledged the fact that I owned the material he accused me of ripping off. My petty self would often quote my blog as a source on papers for his class for the rest of the year.
Sources: Reddit,
