Other Share your worst experience with a teacher/professor

[SilverBlack]

The topic popped up a couple times among my friends, and everyone always seem to have a story to tell. While survivng our way through the education system we're bound to have a couple teachers/professors we hate--or worse, have horrible experiences about. A lot of these rise up during online learning too in this period of the pandemic.

I'm curious about what you guys' worst teacher/professor experiences are? I've heard so many complaints nowadays on different kinds of feeds of people sharing about their horrible teacher/professors. What type of teachers/professors do you hate the most? Why? What did they do? Let me know!

 

[Stone Cold]

I don’t think I’ve ever had an awful experience with a teacher in person. But we did have this one terrible teacher for online classes.

She basically scheduled a lecture time for two hours and everyone was mostly there when the time started. But she didn’t show up. Because we have a group chat set for that class, all of us decide to wait in case she’s late. We waited 45 minutes up to until almost an hour and a half before we called it quits. She, apparently, turned up 15 mins before the class was scheduled to finish and was disappointed that no one was there to meet her. She wrote us all an angry email and deducted participation marks, despite the fact that she was the one that didn’t show up in time. Everyone was upset and we all complained to the program director (the person in charge of that professor) that it was an unfair deduction and our teacher apologized to us. Never seen that happen before.

 

[Emotional Enigma]

OMG DO I HAVE A STORY FOR YOU.

It's a really long read so uh... enter at your own risk.

Its less about the professor and more about my "partner". So I am a psychology graduate. During my last year when I was creating my own study we had to be divided into groups. No one wanted to partner with this one girl we will call "Leslie". So the professor put Leslie with me and one other girl we will call "Patty". Leslie barely did any work and Patty would take all of our assignments and do them without notifying us so we were constantly in the dark about where we were in our work. She'd take our assignments and actually do them with another group. In every lab we had I'd ask her questions for clarity and she gave me curt answers or just ignored me altogether. Eventually I got fed up and slammed my fist on the table and told her I was asking because I have trouble processing information so I need her to tell me exactly what she's doing so I can contribute. She ended up crying, literally crying in the lab. She's a mother of 4 apparently and she's always pressed and stressed but she NEVER asked me or Leslie for help or even told us what she was working on so we could never actually contribute. Then she rallied against us for her to leave the group. I didn't care, I let her. I was angry however because the professor listened to Patty about how me and Leslie never helped with the work and she's a mom and basically she's the only one struggling. But the professor wouldn't even let me and Leslie have a word in. When we tried to speak she cut us both off and said she didn't want to hear the drama.

Okay so after this, apparently our prof was pissed at us because we were the only group not working well together. I then had students in the class chastising me during my lab time, saying unwarranted comments like "How's your group now huh?" and "I bet you're not citing correctly." Just weird, kind of petty shit and it was from these sorority girls. These girls had been in my classes before and I had a run in with them because last time I had to work with them they had a really bad attitude. I asked them what the deal was and if there was a problem because I could just leave. They cut me off and talked over me the whole time and according to Leslie who was also in the sorority, they were just mean girls - they talked shit about everyone and iced girls out. So they were constantly just being rude af to me in my classes in my last year of college.

So I'm left with this girl Leslie as my only partner meanwhile the other groups have 4-5 partners. Leslie never did much work; every day in lab while I was trying to run statistics she'd be talking about some girls on Facebook. She was always talking and always talking about such irrelevant stuff during a time when I was trying to focus and do work. I'd set a deadline for us to meet certain goals on our study and she'd either just not do it or do it super late. Like a whole day late. I wrote out just about everything and all I needed her to do was to find some studies to provide evidence for our hypothesis, mind you I had already found 4 of them myself but I wanted her to contribute SOMETHING to our paper. She did it and I noticed there were some details about the studies she provided that were odd. I didn't question it though and sent in a rough draft of our paper which was a huge part of our grade. We go through the whole semester where I'm doing most of the work myself. I wrote essentially the whole introduction and styled our title page, all Leslie needed to do was write about the studies she provided into the first few pages of our paper. She didn't do it on time so we couldn't send it in to be graded. After 3 months of her not helping the IRB application and proposal and questionnaire and scoring, I eventually just started doing everything on my own without asking her for help anymore. Come to find out at the end of the semester she plagiarized the only part of our paper she was responsible for, providing studies. She literally faked the studies... She used someone's scoring but then went in and added additional scoring and questions herself and thus it made the scoring incorrect for obvious reasons. And I only found out because when I writing the last few pages of our paper and talking about the studies she provided, I noticed the same missing details as I had earlier and couldn't write without them. I hounded her for them and when she sent me the original copies there a lot of differences. I had to walk up to our prof in the middle of lab in front of everyone and tell her that our whole study that we spent 3 months on didn't mean anything. All the results we captured and the months of running statistics on them was pointless because it was all based on a fake scale.

The next lab day I ran statistics on my own and didn't say a word to my partner. She cried and a girl in the lab walked up to me to tell me she was crying in the bathroom. I was so out of emotional energy that I literally didn't have any left to give two flying F's about her crying. I had done so much work and had to flush it all down the drain... When our presentation day came I didn't say anything to her. I completely iced her out and yes I know it's terrible, I became the villain of my own story, but I was so exhausted. I was soooo exhausted, I spent months working on this paper day and night and all the applications to do the study and staring at statistics trying to get them to make sense to support any hypothesis. I was drained and on top of this class I had 4 others, one of which was a high level bio psychology class. I will link a study guide for that below just so you can see what I was already trying to shove in my head on top of this class - he had tests every week and we only a had 1 minute per question and there were only like 15 questions so if you got 1 or 2 wrong you pretty much screwed.

Presentation day came, I went to present and my prof told me, "I don't want to hear from you, I want to hear from Leslie". Leslie straight up told my prof she didn't know any of our paper and she didn't run any of the stat because it wasn't her job. Then my prof told her it was her responsibility to know everything about the paper she put her name on and Leslie left to go cry again.

The great ending to all this is that that prof was my college adviser so I even after the class ended I still had to go see her for scheduling every month. I wanted to quit, it was the worst year of my life.

 

[Lorsh]

she gave me like thirty something percent, yet i worked hard!

fugin bidg

 

[Prince Lutin]

I remember once when I was in high school I had an English teacher who was a real jerk. One day, I lost control of my temper, threw myself on the floor, and kicked him in the leg. I was very upset about it, especially because that's what got me sent to an alternative school for the remainder of my high school years.

 

[Reid]

Honestly, I've never been great at math. Never understood it, never liked it. Absolutely despised it. When I was in 9th grade, I had this teacher that seemed especially interested in targeting me for some reason?? Like I dunno what the fuck his problem was but he especially enjoyed acting nasty to me and giving me extra homework and I could barely finish it because I just didn't get it. Whenever I asked for help, he made me feel like I was an inconvenience. More than once I cried in that class because I felt stupid for not getting it while everyone else did. He forced a senior to sit with me in class to "help me" but they barely knew what they were doing (although they were nice) it was humiliating.

I hope he's not teaching and antagonizing some other poor 14 year old honestly.

 

[mcjuggie]

ok so,

it was a basic english course, required by my film program to complete our degree. it was one of the few courses outside of the film program we "had" to take, or an equivalent course. we were assigned into the english course without our consent, and it was labelled as 'Contemporary Issues in Media' and it was entirely actually about sexual assault. I'm talking every, single last resource this cis white man chose was about a person (usually a woman) being assaulted in some way.

I had been assaulted a few weeks prior to the course, and was having daily panic attacks and meltdowns in my car every single day before class. he would repeatedly call on me, even if my hand wasn't up, in order to use me to make one point or another because i'm unfortunately naturally quite well-spoken and I love to engage usually, but not about this. I had meeting, after meeting, after meeting to try and get him to stop and yet his behaviour never changed. even when I sat down with just him during office hours to explain my needs in his class, he would go right back to calling on me and demanding my participation above even anyone else's.

Eventually I had to ask my male best friend to join my crusade, as he too wanted out of the class for similar reasons and I felt like I wasn't listened to. Of course immediately as he joined our meetings, he noticed it this too, and tried his best to parrot things I would say to attempt to get the prof to listen, and the sadder outcome was that he did in fact listen to my friend repeating me, and never just what I had to say the first time. It was one of the first times I had encountered such wild, vicious sexism in such a vivid way.

After speaking to a councillor, several professors in my program, and then finally the program director, I was taken out of the course along with my friend and placed into a different course. This teacher no longer instructs the film program I went to, as far as I know.

It was simply the worst experience though, and ultimately the reason I decided to not continue post secondary.

 

[WolfSol]

I've had quite a few nasty teachers and professors alike, whether it was toward me or their general personality. However, one such teacher always comes to mind when a question like this is asked. He was my elementary mathematics teacher who had a knack for literally making fun of children for asking questions by telling them they are stupid, should know that, that it's "common horse sense." He also had the habit of making the student write out their question and then humiliate them in front of the class, read the student's grades to everyone in class, etc. He found out my father had gotten a job as a math teacher for high school, and one day when I could not grasp a concept because I was afraid to ask questions that would help me understand, he told me in front of my entire class that I was stupid, my father should be ashamed of me. I remember crying then which he'd often humiliate you more if you did that. Mind you, I was in 5th or 6th grade. A wee bab.

Another fellow was one of my computer programming professors in college. He'd often tell us how we were all lazy, privileged, because we didn't have to work while going to college because everything was paid for by scholarships, by the college, etc. Most of my classmates were like me, full-time job and full-time student and no tuition aid. He also had that unnerving knack for not keeping up with a grade scale or point system for tests. One test, a guy asked why he got a problem wrong and why it was -15 points when he'd just said it was -5. Professor laughs then says, "oh, well I guess I made that unfair for those who got that problem right. Everyone who missed it, change the 5 to 15." I quite nearly flipped a table. Especially when learning only a small handful got it right. Even had the nerve of not reading all of our code when a problem asked us to write actual code. He told us he was so fed up having to read or mistakes when he never actually paid attention to see how we envisioned it so as to help us improve, or if we did it differently than what he would've done yet still got it to work. Granted, he was one of those old fellows which believed autocorrect/intellisense in code was the devil, asking Google or your classmates for help was a sin, and that professional programmers know everything off the top of their head.

Oh my, mcjuggie , I'm so sorry you had to go through that!

 

[Lucyfer]

I haven’t been in school since 2015, but I have a few stories to tell from my time as an Undergrad and Grad.

1. I went to a large state university. Although it was common for professors to take time out for research, our astronomy professor seemed to be taking every other week to go to a telescope in Chile. What this ended up meaning was we were left with subs – and not the same sub, mind, but different ones each time – who taught things differently, or didn’t cover subject matters that ended up on the tests. It was kind of a mess, and I’m still bitter over how little “teaching” was respected there compared to research.
2. This didn’t happen to me, but a teacher did abuse his authority and got into a relationship with a student that was very non-consensual. I found out about it because said student was my friend, and the teacher had been one of my advisors. I didn’t learn about it until after I’d left. I hate that my name is on a paper we worked on together.
3. “Would you dress that way to a conference?” – this is part of the straw that broke the camel’s back, part 1. I understand the importance of being dressed for events, don’t get me wrong, but addressing THAT and not the subject matter of my paper I’m presenting, when we’re in a freezing basement and I’m wearing my hat which – yes – looks like a penguin – is atrocious behavior and once again focuses too much on the problem I had with this college atmosphere from the beginning: all about research and events, not about teaching. Maybe if you turned the heater up I wouldn’t have to wear the hat.
4. This wasn’t the professors so much as, well, general academic disdain that this was even considered a viable conversation (I studied Religious Studies, secular; I'm personally an atheist): “A Shakespearean play is a Religious Ritual”. When we take subjectivity, out of the study of religion, we get shit like this. It’s not a question, it’s a statement of fact, as the professor in charge engaged this subject and seemed wholeheartedly behind it. Like…I’m sorry but no.

 

[FloofWhispers]

So, for my worst experience, I had a teacher who would send kids to the principle's office for YAWNING TOO LOUD. BY THE WAY, THIS IS NO FUCKING JOKE.

 

[Motti-chan]

My worst experience was with my seventh grade social science teacher. She, quite literally, would send you outside for anything. If you stretched too far back in your chair, you'd go outside. If you yawned too loudly and interrupted her or someone else with it, you went outside. If you hurt yourself and was too loud about it, guess what happened? You want outside.

 

[fairyfawn]

Oh boy do I got an experience. So I was in the 11th grade and I was taking art class. So, my table was in the back and I sat there with my friends and we would laugh and joke about scary urban legends. So, my art teacher was very very weird... like really really weird. I'm a quiet shy genderfluid person and I have a hard time speaking up for myself. That's the majority of my personality. Well, I went up to the desk with my two friends and he [the teacher] looked at me and asked if I'm scared of him. And I said "No." rather awkwardly. Then he started telling me that I need to stop being quiet. He even had the nerve to tell me to "grow a backbone". He apparently has a problem with my personality. Hell, he even told my friend that when she confronted him. My art teacher... said that I'm "problematic" because of how quiet I am. And he purposefully lost my work and gave me a zero for it, I'm not joking he would take my art work and hide it from everyone and be like "Hey, where's your work!?" to me and all that. He's a hypocrite because he wants me, a quiet person, to stop being quiet and yet he tells the other students to be quiet. He was arrested one day and I haven't seen him since, luckily I graduated highschool last year so I don't have to worry about him anymore.

 

[Motti-chan]

Oh boy do I got an experience. So I was in the 11th grade and I was taking art class. So, my table was in the back and I sat there with my friends and we would laugh and joke about scary urban legends. So, my art teacher was very very weird... like really really weird. I'm a quiet shy genderfluid person and I have a hard time speaking up for myself. That's the majority of my personality. Well, I went up to the desk with my two friends and he [the teacher] looked at me and asked if I'm scared of him. And I said "No." rather awkwardly. Then he started telling me that I need to stop being quiet. He even had the nerve to tell me to "grow a backbone". He apparently has a problem with my personality. Hell, he even told my friend that when she confronted him. My art teacher... said that I'm "problematic" because of how quiet I am. And he purposefully lost my work and gave me a zero for it, I'm not joking he would take my art work and hide it from everyone and be like "Hey, where's your work!?" to me and all that. He's a hypocrite because he wants me, a quiet person, to stop being quiet and yet he tells the other students to be quiet. He was arrested one day and I haven't seen him since, luckily I graduated highschool last year so I don't have to worry about him anymore.

Dang, that's definitely one helluva experience.

 

[fairyfawn]

Dang, that's definitely one helluva experience.

haha, yeah. And what I just wrote was only the tip of the iceberg cause I have a whole lot of bad experiences with that certain teacher.

 

[Motti-chan]

haha, yeah. And what I just wrote was only the tip of the iceberg cause I have a whole lot of bad experiences with that certain teacher.

I wouldn't doubt it.

Also random but aww your avatar of Himiko is adorable!

 

[FloofWhispers]

Oh boy do I got an experience. So I was in the 11th grade and I was taking art class. So, my table was in the back and I sat there with my friends and we would laugh and joke about scary urban legends. So, my art teacher was very very weird... like really really weird. I'm a quiet shy genderfluid person and I have a hard time speaking up for myself. That's the majority of my personality. Well, I went up to the desk with my two friends and he [the teacher] looked at me and asked if I'm scared of him. And I said "No." rather awkwardly. Then he started telling me that I need to stop being quiet. He even had the nerve to tell me to "grow a backbone". He apparently has a problem with my personality. Hell, he even told my friend that when she confronted him. My art teacher... said that I'm "problematic" because of how quiet I am. And he purposefully lost my work and gave me a zero for it, I'm not joking he would take my art work and hide it from everyone and be like "Hey, where's your work!?" to me and all that. He's a hypocrite because he wants me, a quiet person, to stop being quiet and yet he tells the other students to be quiet. He was arrested one day and I haven't seen him since, luckily I graduated highschool last year so I don't have to worry about him anymore.

Okay, so, I'm not a psycho, but i wanna fucking rip your art teachers neck out with my teeth.

 

[StrawberryAvalanche]

Okay so I have had two.

When I was a kid I was really quiet and afraid of talking in a classroom setting. I mean like I would cry if a teacher called on me. So a lot of my teachers growing up were very understanding and if they wanted me to answer a question they'd have me write it on a whiteboard. Thank you to my kindergarten teacher for coming up with this. Because I would talk to them in the hallways and such,but as soon as we got in the room, I was scared. Anyways so I get to fourth grade. And my teacher was not having it. She yelled at me to answer her question out loud, and even took away the white board. Despite other kids even kids who teased me for other things started defending me, she didn't stop. And then she somehow was allowed to teach us in 5th grade. I was happy when she left for a time due to a pregnancy leave. But having her for two years it was a nightmare. And then i had her husband as a teacher in 8th grade. And he was the one who actually helped me get out of my classroom anxiety bc he slowly coaxed me to talk more in class. And he just fostered a warm and fun environment. But one day his wife came to visit and I got so nervous I didn't like answer any questions out loud for a few weeks. Ah fun times.

And here is my other professor story actually.
So in my second semester of college I had to take another English comp class. And I took this one professor. And of course I sent her an email saying hi my name is (Strawberry) ((not the actual name i use irl but I you know what I mean)) and I use they/them pronouns. And all that stuff. My other professors were like okay cool. (My favorite prof who I have had twice for two different classes, even corrected people if they misgendered me. He was like I will support you as best as I can!!). But this professor. Oh no! She accepted it but one day made us debate for trans* rights. .... and she told me to throw my personal views out the window. Ma'am.... MA'AM??? So I got up, grabbed my stuff and walked out of class. And I was so angry I was yelling outside bc there was like nobody out there. Did I get a 0 that day? Yes. Was I satisfied when my other classmates walked out too and caught up with me? Yes. Some of them even went to the head of the English dept. About it. Was something done? Well she was monitored by the dept. Head for every class she taught for the rest of the semester. ...I haven't seen her on the course registration since. I remember telling my fave professor about that and he was like so angry and was like how dare she make you debate your existence. He liked to pace around when mad and he did for like 30 minutes XD. But overall I actually left that college this year finally and I'm now transferring to somewhere with less instances of this.

 

[Pokeking]

I was bullied a lot in middle school. This one guy, a known troublemaker, stole my calculator and I told the teacher. She spoke with the other guy who told her that it was his. She believed him over me and when I told her that I was going to tell my Dad, she screamed at me "Don't you threaten me!" We did end up meeting the principal over this who was pretty much a bully herself. I did get my calculator back but she warned me that I would be expelled if I spoke up for myself again. Retched place and it was a Catholic middle school too.

In elementary school, a teacher said I was ADHD. There was no diagnosis. It was just her opinion. She said that unless I was medicated, she would have the school expel me.

 

[That Mystic Writer]

Ok I know this story seems really random but it really frustrated me.

In elementary school, the usual lunch monitor was a little late doing something so there was a replacement for him till he could come back. Well, lucky for us, this monitor was extremely strict and had no patience whatsoever for a room of children eating lunch. Anyways, the cafeteria apparently got too loud for her liking so she decided to give us silent lunch (meaning we would all just have to stare at each other and eat our lunch in silence.) About 5 minutes later, I dropped my spoon on the floor. As a natural reaction, I said "whoops." Once I sat back up, she was staring into my soul. She really looked at me and said "I said quiet lunch. Go to the time-out table, now." (The time out table is a extremely depressing table located in the corner of the cafeteria right next to all of the trash cans.) I was super confused, and quite honestly I was angry too. I stood up and went over to the table by myself and ate lunch in silence while all my friends looked at me in confusion. (In elementary school I was a pretty well-behaved kid, so it would be a shock to see me at the table.) So in conclusion, I was forced to eat my lunch in silence at a dirty table next to the trash cans for dropping a spoon on the floor. Boy do I love school.