Teachers really make or break a class—and if you happen to get stuck with a bad apple, your school year might just become an interminable nightmare. Here are the worst teachers around: the clueless, the unprepared, and the downright mean. Buckle up, because education never hurt so bad.
1. Seething Through
My biology teacher asked me a question, but the answer was projected onto the whiteboard. I looked at it, and then she did the most idiotic thing imaginable: She held her hand over the board to hide it. Snickering, I told her that I could still see the text on her hand. She was visibly upset, so she used her other hand. I couldn't hold back. I laughed so loud.
She kicked me out and called my parents.
2. Say It Ain’t So
On the first day of third grade, my teacher pronounced my name wrong during attendance. I didn't realize that she was calling me at first. After she repeated herself, I responded and said my name how it’s pronounced. She told me that she pronounced my name correctly because it was French and that’s how it’s pronounced. I told her that I was not French and that was not how my name was pronounced.
She said my name incorrectly again and told me to go to the principal's office. I just stayed put. She asked if I heard what she said. I replied that I did, but I didn’t know who she was talking to since that wasn’t my name, which I repeated. She told me again, and I just sat there. She left the classroom and came back with the principal.
The principal called me by my correct name. I responded. The principal asked me why I was disrupting class. So, I explained about my name. The principal told the teacher that she was indeed pronouncing my name incorrectly. I could see her going angrier by the minute. My teacher then told the principal that they were incorrect and that only she knew how to properly say my name.
This went on for a little bit, and my parents ended being called to the school. They corrected the teacher. The teacher finally gave in but gave me nothing but trouble for the rest of the year. What a dummy.
3. Missed The Shot
My wife and I were in a birthing class, and the person leading the class wasn’t aware that we worked in the medical field. What we heard that day shook us to the core. She was actively advising parents not to get their babies vaccinated against Hep B as newborns. Her reason was that Hep B exclusively comes from eating contaminated foods, which newborns don’t eat.
It's one thing to be wrong, but it's another to be wrong and advising a room full of first-time parents with your ignorance.
4. Speaking From Experience
When I was little and took karate, my teacher “taught” us Japanese words since he was stationed there for two years. Recently, I started learning Japanese on my own. After I befriended native speakers and learned the grammar structure, spelling rules, and the counting system, I came to a horrifying realization: I realized that he’d been making it all up.
I’ve embarrassed myself so badly trying to speak, and it’s taken a lot of effort to unlearn what he initially taught me. He should have just labeled the classes as boxing lessons.
5. Color Me Pink
In second grade, our teacher colored in some printed pictures and hung them. She explained that she did very well because she stayed within the lines and used crayon strokes in the same direction. She kept mentioning how fantastic the pictures of fruit and vegetables were until some of the kids began complimenting her.
Very pleased with herself, she smiled and told the class that she was accepting praise very well and that it’s okay to be proud when you did something as well as her. Then she told us to draw something about ourselves. When we were done, she picked up one kid’s drawings and criticized his artwork in front of the class. When he started crying, she explained to the class that while she took praise well, he was taking criticism poorly.
This was the first hour of the first day of second grade. Unfortunately, I didn’t tell my parents how unreasonable my teacher was, and I got stuck with that dummy for one of the longest school years ever.
6. Teaching Style
In fifth grade, I had a teacher for mathematics that had no patience for people who struggled with math. My father was cruel and barely literate but understood math inside and out. He saw me doing some homework and pointed out that the method that I was using provided the right answers for all the problems on the page. But the method only worked with those numbers.
So, he taught me a method that worked in all cases, and everything clicked for me. But when I used my father's method on a test, I failed. My father went in to talk to the teacher bringing me along holding my test. He pointed out that every question was answered correctly. He said that I showed my work and that the teacher’s method didn't work with all numbers. My teacher's response was terrifying.
He said, "We're not teaching mathematics for them to learn how to do arithmetic. We're teaching them math to get them to follow directions and not to question authority!” And after that, I stopped attending public school.
7. Heated Debate
My parents put me in a Christian preschool, and I remember coloring in Moses and the burning bush. Well, in addition to the usual fire colors in the bush, I decided to put in just a little bit of blue. I remembered looking into our fireplace at home and seeing little bits of blue in the flames. The teacher walked over and began shaking her head.
She told me that I couldn’t do that there's no blue in a fire. I tried to say that the blue was actually the hottest part of the fire, to which she responded by taking the crayon away so I'd be forced to only use the reds and yellows. I think it was stuff like this that led to my overall disdain for organized religion.
8. Learning A Lesson
One teacher from my high school tried to game the system to get the best grades for the least amount of work from his class by using past test questions to plan out his lessons for the year. So, he taught about half of the course, and his plan backfired. The kids in his class were walking out of the exam hall in tears. They had no idea about anything on their test.
My sister was in that class and came home absolutely distraught, crying that she didn't know a single thing on the exam. Those kids were at the top of their year and all expected to go to university. That exam brought their grades so far down that all of them were rejected.
They had to go to a community college two hours away for a course because no local college around the school taught the class outside the high schools and they were too old to re-enroll. At the end of the day, many parents complained to the school. And then, finally, justice was served: By the end of the school year, the school removed him from his position.
9. Just So You Know
Our teacher told us when we finished, that the quiz and test had a combined grade, and missing just one question meant getting a zero. Many students raised their hands, but she didn’t let anybody ask a question. And then she said something that I'll never forget: “You want to know one thing I hate about kids? They never listen until the end and always interrupt in the middle.”
So, we let her finish talking. When she was done, students raised their hands again. She told us that she didn’t want to listen to what we wanted to say. The same literature teacher also told us that she was okay with us watching the movie adaptation of the book that we needed to read for a test to receive our diploma. Brilliant.
10. Close Enough
In fifth grade, the teacher docked points from my homework for defining magma as, “lava before it reaches the surface.” I hated her after that. She taught us that sea turtles lay eight million eggs a year, mispronounced hyperbole (one of our vocabulary words), and said that bulls differ from cows because of their horns. She was dumb, and that's that.
11. Starting With The Basics
In tenth grade, our shop teacher was away for a year on medical leave after having surgery. So, we had a permanent substitute. The class was split with one section being a small computer lab. At the beginning of the semester, the new substitute teacher tried to teach the class what a computer was, and he picked up the keyboard.
He told us what it was called, and the entire class started laughing. I thought it was because the teacher thought that we'd never used a PC before, but it was really because the computer he was using had been sabotaged the period earlier. The keyboard’s wires were slashed, and he spent a few minutes finding a new one.
When he tried to turn on the PC, he was unsuccessful—it wasn’t plugged in. By this point, he could’ve picked another PC or just moved on since we all knew how to use one. He took another few minutes behind the desk and plugged it in. It booted it up and released a mini, yet substantial, explosion. But it wasn’t fire. Someone had filled the tower and power supply with glitter.
The computer’s hardware failed and shut down on the spot. However, the teacher took another few minutes to realize that the PC was vandalized and gave up. He was a nice guy but just had a few loose screws in his head.
12. Limited Rendition
I was six and drawing pink trees that were supposed to be magnolias. I was too young back then to remember the name, but I did know them from the annual blossom viewing that my family did each year. My neighbors even had one in their front garden. My teacher saw my picture and sneered at me. She pointed to my creation and gave me the most disheartening critique.
She said, "There's no such thing as pink trees." I tried to explain that, "even my neighbors have one," and I saw them every year, but she cut me off and told me to stop lying.
13. Tick, Tick, Tick
She spent the first month of school explaining the curriculum. The moment when I lost all faith in her was when she took 20 minutes from our exam time. We had an hour and a half, but she spent her sweet time being demanding. She expected us to have three devices for our online exam. One device was for writing the exam.
The others were for the camera to show our faces and to show that we were doing the exam on the right device. She told us this last minute. And not everyone had three devices, so many of my classmates had to borrow their family’s devices to start the exam. Then she rambled on until 20 minutes of our exam time was gone. It ended in disaster.
I didn’t have time to finish the all questions and failed since we started late. Later, she brought this up during a parent-teacher conference, and I told her that she didn’t give us enough time. She denied it and blamed me for not studying. It was okay because my mom was aware of how terrible of a teacher she was.
14. Healthy Denial
My “health” teacher was overweight and lit one up whenever she could in the parking lot. She drank coffee every day too and was the walking epitome of acceptable addictions. We were only in junior high, so not many of us had much experience with drugs. But someone brought up how her habits were far more fatal than pot. It was a fair point. But she made him leave the class.
The worst part was that he was actually on the topic as we were discussing the fatal rates of these addictions for a project. We were supposed to discuss the deaths related to certain substances, but when he brought up pot, he was immediately sent out of the classroom.
15. Quiet Defiance
One of my high school teachers had a class full of rowdy boys. They were loud, disruptive, and high-energy. Luckily, this teacher was intimidating. Then unluckily, he had to be away for a week and left lesson plans for us. Minutes after the first bell, the substitute teacher had already lost all control of the class. My little group worked and chatted as quietly as possible despite the pandemonium raging around us.
By the middle of the week, the sub finally called for help. The nightmare of a vice-principal came in with a little entourage of security guards and, without talking to the sub at all, arbitrarily blamed the people closest to the door. Those people were my group and I, the only ones not causing a ruckus, and all the real culprits were left with the sub.
The vice-principal would not listen to any reason and expected us to copy out of the dictionary all day. I was so angry that I, a goody-two-shoes, disobeyed and worked on my actual schoolwork instead.
16. Shaping Up
I thought my eighth-grade Geometry teacher was not smart because he didn’t seem to understand it. Then I stopped by his office and discovered the disappointing truth. I found him studying the subject and trying to figure out the problems in the next chapter. He was the football coach and health teacher and didn’t teach math. Someone just told him to do it.
I ended up working with him to help teach the class, and he really appreciated it.
17. Not This Time
We were in biology class when someone asked how a concept that the teacher had just explained related to what we had learned in the previous unit. Straight-faced, the teacher replied that she didn't know because once she finished the unit, she forgot the material and just memorized it when she needed to teach it again.
She'd been teaching virtually the same material on basic biology for years and memorized the material one unit at a time each year. Later that year, a kid dropped a jawbreaker on the floor. She told the class that the dropped candy constituted an attempted assault because someone could be injured if they trip and fall. Several of us were sent to the dean when we questioned this claim.
The dean just rolled his eyes and sent us to our next class.
18. Apple Of My Eye
My teacher is far from educated on modern technology—and behind her back, we make fun of her relentlessly. Whenever she discovers a basic function on her phone, she announces it as if it was a conference for the latest smartphone. Once, she went through the maps app and every possible feature on there. Now, we joke and introduce each other to basic apps all the time.
19. Free Period
One of my high school history teachers was not a teacher. I remember thinking that she looked familiar when I first saw her. Then I realized that she’d had a show on the local public access channel. It was a classic public-access general talk show. Well, we never actually learned in class. There were never any lessons. We didn’t have any assignments either.
So, the scramble that came from the first days of school lasted the entire year. Once, I went up to her desk and asked her a simple question any history teacher could answer. She told me, "Now, you know I don't know something like that. Just go back to your seat and quit playing." The saddest part is that one day she kicked me out for talking too much and sent me to sit in the back of another teacher's room.
Even though I was being punished, I learned more from sitting in on that teacher's lecture in that one day than I did all year in my actual teacher's classroom.
20. Hot Topic
In second grade, our teacher had us list the hottest things that we knew existed. The obvious, sun and fire, came up. So, off the top of my head, I thought of lava. My teacher made a face and told me that, “lava wasn’t real,” and let the whole class laugh at me. I felt stupid for years until I learned that I was right.
21. Stating The Facts
When I was in ninth grade, there was a teacher who always had something stupid to say. If anyone questioned her, she got upset and shut you down. Like she thought that anemones were animals and 70-90% of your heat is lost through your head. I asked if that meant a person would survive in a snowstorm wearing only a hat. Another thing that she said was that cells were microscopic due to oxygen diffusion.
So, I asked how chicken eggs survived if that were true. She brushed me off angrily as usual and threatened to kick me out and told me to stop wasting everyone's time. These were genuinely curious questions that I had in science class.
22. All Work, No Play
I was in the first grade and the first to finish my exercise. I looked around and noticed that everyone else was still working, so I turned my paper over and started coloring. The teacher marched over and berated me saying I wasn’t allowed to “play” during work time. She made a big enough fuss that she called to meet with my mom.
After about twenty minutes of complaining, my mom finally heard why she was called in, and her face got this scary, stony look. She chewed my teacher up one side and down the other. My teacher wasn’t happy with me for the rest of the year.
23. No Time For This
I was in a demanding college program while my mother was recovering from a debilitating stroke that left her paralyzed on one side. While I attended school, I also had to look after my mother's property, take care of her affairs, and find quality rehab care for her out of a facility, not to mention visit her regularly.
When it came time for my keystone project, I saw the head of the program because I had trouble finding a professor to oversee a project. Pleased, the program head believed that I didn't deserve help as it was my fault for being, “too busy socializing,” which justified why all of the professors were not willing to help.
24. Acting Correctly
I took a sociology class at a community college. While he was lecturing, my teacher mentioned that human beings did not in fact have instinct, but instead, culture taught us how to react and behave. It didn’t sit right with me, so my hand flew up, and I proudly argued his point and raised a few questions about fight or flight.
He just repeated that animals have instinct and humans have culture, ignoring the fact that humans are animals. I kept challenging him, annoying the class with my questions. The professor became flustered and wouldn’t have it. I hated that class because of him. He was arrogant and always mentioned Japan’s unique culture.
25. Sounds About Right
A professor was going through a handout that mentioned "Acmeism." She stopped to ask the class if anyone knew what that meant, but silence followed. Disappointed, she said that she was hoping that someone else knew. This showed me that she never looked things up. So, I made up words in my assignments and got A after A.
26. Expecting The Opposite
In third grade, I got in an argument with a teacher about magnets. She claimed that the same poles attract and opposites repelled. She even did a demonstration with magnets that she had without labels on the poles. So, she held them up, and if they stuck, she said, “oh, that must be north and north or south and south.”
I had a magnet set at home with everything labeled so brought it in to show her after I couldn’t convince her that she was wrong. This was third grade, and I never had real faith in my teachers again. But thankfully, she wasn't all bad. This teacher was actually willing to acknowledge and correct her mistake to the whole class, which some would never do.
27. Getting Flushed
In middle school, my teacher was yelling at me because I’d asked to go to the restroom instead of the bathroom. Her explanation was, "You don't go in there to rest, so it’s not a restroom." I had the best comeback: I said that you couldn’t bathe in them either. That was when she threatened to kick me out of her classroom and have me suspended.
28. Down Write Unnecessary
One teacher made us handwrite all our coursework. If we needed to edit it based on her feedback, we had to rewrite the entire thing. The department head forced her to let people use computers as many students who had special needs misspelled words often and, as a result, ruined their papers by using so much white-out.
One kid who was swamped with work from his other classes almost didn't hand in his assignment and just had to submit the first draft. She’d wavered on letting him submit it. Then the IT teacher lost several people's course assignment folders on the day of the submission deadline meaning that our only copies were gone.
29. Perfect Tip
I switched between different majors during the first two years of college until I settled on Political Science. My new academic advisor, an associate professor of my new major, tried convincing me that it would not only be impossible to graduate in four years as a full-time student since I lacked credits for the major, but he also suggested that I drop out entirely.
So, I proceeded to graduate in four years with honors while also getting 100% grades on both the midterm and final exam in his International Relations class.
30. Art Of Misdirection
A teacher was discussing compass directions. He introduced the directions other than the main four to us. My father had shown me a 32-point compass, so I mentioned that there was also "North-North-West" and "Northwest by North.” My teacher said I was wrong and that there was no defined direction in-between “N” and “NW.” When I insisted, the teacher called me a liar and told me to stop being disruptive.
I was 11, and from then on, I saw teachers as fallible. The next day, I brought the compass as proof, and the teacher refused to look at it. He said that the teacher was in charge of the class and I should always just listen and accept.
31. Big Brain Thinking
My first-grade teacher was demonstrating how the water temperature matters when washing hands. She had a bowl for hot, cold, and lukewarm water. The argument was that lukewarm eliminates more germs than the other two. She rubbed Vaseline on three students’ hands as the “germs.” The kid with the cold water bowl started.
After washing for ten seconds, his hands were still gross. I had the hot water bowl and washed next. My hands came out better than the first kid but still gross. Lastly, the student with the lukewarm water bowl went and washed his hands. They came out clean. I told the teacher that the experiment didn’t prove anything.
Sarcastically, she commented how I’d know better even though she was the grown-up.
32. One Way Not Another
My teacher wouldn’t accept that there are multiple ways to do mathematics. Even if someone wrote what she thought should be “6 * 3” as “3 * 6,” she blew up and ridiculed them in front of the class. This happened so often to one of my friends that it got to the point when he had to switch schools. We were only in second grade. But that wasn't all.
And she played favorites a lot. I was one of her favorites even though I wrote “4 * 7” as “7 * 4” a lot. She also took away recess if you got something “wrong.”
33. Making It Work
My teacher projected the calculus questions onto the screen and copied the first onto the board to use as an example. She gave us a page full of equations and said to start. While we did, she worked on her example question. Ten minutes later, we looked up and noticed that she had copied the question wrong on the board.
It was late into the semester, and we were all tired of her constant mistakes, and we just stayed silent. But then the next equation required the answer from the previous question. So, we watched her carry over her incorrect answer and use it. The new equation fell apart because of her mistake. She stared at the board. And after a good thirty seconds, she finally realized what she did wrong.
So, she changed the equation on the projection slide to make her answer right. That meant that we all had a page of useless calculations because she didn’t want to correct her mistake.
34. Broadly Specific
My English teacher asked when Woodrow Wilson was president. I raised my hand and stated that his election dates were 1912 and 1916. She shook her head and told me that I was incorrect. So, I’d thought that I was just a few years off with my answer. A girl raised her hand and said that it was in the “1900s.” The teacher nodded.
35. Apples To Oranges
When I was in kindergarten, my “art teacher” instructed us to color an apple using colored pencils. So, I started coloring the apple red and partially with a little yellow because that was how I remembered the apples in my house. Then she came around, picked up my paper, and made a loud announcement to the whole class. She exclaimed that apples are all red or all green only.
I tried to explain, but she was having none of it. I swallowed my tears and told my mom who was livid.
36. Sound Right
A lady who barely qualified to be a teacher and even less qualified to be a science educator taught the Environmental Science class. I was a jerk, already knew where I was going to school, and just needed to pass the class, so we often butt heads. Then she’d tried to make a point about how disgusting septic tanks were. I lost it.
I was not kind in explaining that was exactly what a septic tank did. In tears, she took me into the hallway and said that I couldn’t correct her in front of the rest of the class like that. But she wasn’t going to correct herself and didn’t have any concerns over the incorrect content that she was teaching. She just said that I couldn’t correct her.
It still bothers me that her issue wasn’t being completely wrong in a position of authority. It was that someone embarrassed her in front of others.
37. By Chance
My teacher accused me of taking a practice test 237 times and said that I was dumb for thinking it’d help my academics. This was absurd. First, I did not take the test 237 times. I took it exactly once and got a perfect score. Second, the test only took about 10 minutes. 237 times would take 2370 minutes or 39.5 hours. The test had come out the day before.
There was physically not have enough time to do the test that many times unless I was speed-running and guessing every question. And finally, the correct answers to the test were revealed right after you finish. If I wanted to redo it for a perfect score, I had the correct answers.
38. First Try
In our first class, the teacher spelled “physics” wrong on the board, losing us for the rest of the year after that. On our last day, he told us that he was glad that he didn’t have to teach us next year. Well, on the first day of the next year, we walked into chemistry class. He turned around and almost lost his mind. He promptly stood up and aggressively wrote “chemisry” on the board.
I’ve never seen someone look so close to physically imploding in my entire life.
39. Look, Listen, Learn
My physics teacher spent class lecturing us, not doing any labs for practical work, and making us take notes all year long. It was painful for me to go into this class and just sit and take notes for an hour every time. I didn't even understand everything well. It was almost incoherent and straight out of the textbook. When I tried to ask him questions and to clarify what he was discussing, the only thing that he told me and the rest of my class was, "Oh, just look it up online."
40. Cold Strike
In first grade, we had a book with pictures in it where we had to write the name of the object. One image had two penguins, so five-year-old me wanted to make a good impression and write the word in the plural, penguins. So, I showed my teacher but got reprimanded for writing “penguins” and not “penguin.” It got worse.
So, I erased the word and rewrote it in the singular. But I misspelled it. When I went to the teacher, she got even madder and made me sit by myself in another room.
41. Show Of Force
My teacher decided to send me to the principal over some tiny slight. It was in the middle of a stranger danger scare, but he tried to insist I go alone even though this was against the rules. I refused. So, he told another classmate to escort me to the office and then come right back…Alone. We pointed that out to him.
So, he told both of us to stand outside the classroom for the rest of the lesson. My classmate had literally done nothing but was in trouble for the teacher's own stupidity. Then after class, he just apologized to both of us and told me that I hadn't really done anything wrong and he had just punished me as an example. Well, we told absolutely everyone, and he was never able to control a class again.
42. Take My Word
My sociology teacher is a bit radical. To prove a point, she told us that single mothers are unable to register their child due without a father, which is completely false. We had an essay exam discussing a social problem and a possible solution. The topic this year was about the problems with applying for citizenship. A lot of people, unfortunately, used the teacher’s example as an argument.
It’s safe to say that they probably might not get the best results.
43. See You, Calculator
I remember a math teacher who came straight from university and had just replaced another teacher. I was 16 and not very good at math. On her first day of class, she borrowed my textbook to copy it. I got it back in disarray. She told me that she’d dropped it and asked me to put mine and hers in order while she taught. Later, I heard her say something about it not being right, and I looked up.
The teacher made a mistake, so the answer to the formula was incorrect. She’d been laboring over it for several minutes. I took one look at the board and pointed out where she made an error. She couldn't look me straight in the eyes after that. She was fired for ruining another class' exams by asking questions about things they never learned.
The class invaded the vice principal’s office and demanded appropriate actions.
44. Looks That Way
I took a class with my twin sister when we were in college, and we sat next to each other. The teacher told us that she couldn't tell us apart because we talked too much during class. After we brought up that it might be because we were twins, she said no. It was just because we kept talking to each other during class. And then said that she didn't have trouble telling “Rob” and “Mark” apart, not because they weren't twins but because they didn't talk to each other. But here's the kicker.
We didn't even talk to each other in class. It was an 8:30 am course twice a week. We were basically sleeping.
45. Time For Mayhem
My tenth-grade geometry teacher had no control over the class. The class was not in the main building, and something was wrong with the intercom. We couldn't hear the bell to leave class. So, she went by the clock time to let us out instead. That class was the last period of the day. After her class, we got to go home.
So, when her back was turned while she wrote on the board, someone in the front quietly zipped up to the clock and set it ahead 15 or 20 minutes. Early dismissal! She caught on after the third time and started going by the time on her watch. But she'd take her watch off and put it on her desk. So, it took two students.
One set the clock ahead, and another one grabbed her watch and set it to match the clock. Bingo! Some of the guys in the back row passed a joint around. Everyone in the class was looking around waiting for her to notice because the room reeked. She did not. One weekend, the portable building with our class burned down.
So, they moved us to a third-floor classroom. So many things were thrown out the window. The class before managed to toss a desk out. My friend was in gym class and said that they were standing there, a safe distance away, and suddenly, a desk came down. The desk stayed out there, and the gym coaches used it as a seat.
46. Hear Me Out
In the ninth grade, we were learning about the properties of sound. We were discussing how radio waves travel faster than sound waves. She asked us the question, “If someone is listening to a live concert performance on the radio, would they hear the sounds before or after the people in the audience?"
I raised my hand. I said that it depended on how far away the person is from the radio and which audience she was referring to. She told me that I was wrong. She was absolutely sure that the radio listener would hear it first, no matter what. So, I drew a picture on the board. But she still wouldn’t have it. She hated me after that day.
47. Speak For Yourself
My family is French, and I have lived half of my adult life in French-speaking countries. I was in the advanced French conversation class in college that was geared toward fluent French speakers. During a section on slang, the professor went on to tell the class that the slang we knew was wrong and that no one used it. We literally laughed her out of the classroom.
She had never even lived in a French Speaking country.
48. Out Of This World
My history teacher was just the wrestling coach who had to teach classes for budget reasons. And this guy was just plain dumb. One time, the class convinced him that Russia really had a Bear Cavalry. Another time, he forgot to freeze the projector while we were working on a writing prompt and switched over to Facebook.
When we finished the medieval unit, he posed an extra credit challenge: whoever could make a catapult out of paper that threw a tennis ball the furthest got ten bonus points. Just paper. No staples, no tape, no glue, or rubber bands. I doubt a team of engineers could do that. Thankfully, he left at the end of the year.
49. That’s What They Say
We were discussing phylogeny in honors biology. It was my first day as a new transfer student and I had no idea what to expect. The teacher listed off the defining traits of mammals, and one student asked if bats were mammals since they laid eggs. The teacher paused to think about it, and she then went to her computer to look up whether bats laid eggs.
It took another agonizing minute for her to read through the first result. The site referred to the female gamete as an “egg,” and so, she announced confidently that bats do in fact lay eggs.
50. Bring It Down
I got into an argument with my physics teacher when she said there was no gravity in space. I asked her if she meant that there was less gravity because there is always some gravitational force. She looked me straight in the eyes and said that gravity only exists on a planet’s surface. I had to be the one to teach her.
51. Scientifically Proven
In high school, my teacher told me that I wasn’t smart enough to become a scientist. 15 years later, his face was priceless when he walked into my laboratory with a group of students. I was also asked to speak and told them, “No matter what anyone tells you, don’t let them stop your dream,” looking right at my teacher. It was the best revenge possible.
52. Shaky Argument
Having epilepsy, I had a seizure in kindergarten and blacked out. I was tracing a capital D in my workbook and spiraled. When it was over, the whole class was listening to my teacher ridiculing me. I tried to explain myself, but she didn't listen. I spent the next decade with these kids making fun of me because of her.
53. Splitting Hairs
In my small-town high school, we took a History and Economics course. Our teacher was…eccentric. A few examples of his behavior include having an electric razor in his desk to shave during class. After he finished his shave, he lit a candle to rub the wax on his face to moisturize his skin. But that wasn't the weirdest thing about him.
Perhaps one of his wildest quirks was his hatred for Bill Clinton. On one of our tests, we had to write “Bill Clinton is the devil” as it was the only acceptable answer for him. This wasn’t a surprise as he was heavily biased on every subject. He was not open to discussion, and if someone challenged him, he purposely failed them or found a way to put them into detention as punishment.
Girls who got in trouble in his class were automatically sent to detention. The boys had to stand at the front of the class and massage his shoulders. This was meant to be embarrassing, but it was just really strange to see. He also had a weird thing about metaphors. If a student didn’t use one in their essay, they failed. But even more disturbing? He never actually read our essays.
When we figured out that he was just skimming our work, some students decided to test this theory. They wrote a page of metaphors, filled the middle with absolute nonsense, and then concluded with another metaphor. They all received As. And the cherry on top? He used nicknames for everyone and refused to call us by our actual names.
It’s been over a decade, and I’m still shocked that he taught kids at all.
54. Unacceptable Behavior
I was 18 in a class of 16-year-olds and felt like my teacher would give me the respect of speaking to me one-on-one. This was after I’d responded in kind when he belittled me. So, two days later, I tried apologizing to him, but he stubbornly wouldn't reciprocate. I asked him if he was aware that students had emotions. His face turned red, and I saw his eyes glowing with rage.
The veins on his head looked ready to explode when he said viciously, “No, they don’t have the right to have them.” This was the same teacher who would treat you with all of the kindness in the world when you brought him presents. He was the worst teacher ever.
Sources: Reddit,
