Who has been/was your hardest teacher in school?

[mvd]

This topic covers first grade through grad school.

Meanest were:

Mrs Schieble in 2nd grade (once yelled at me for accidentally going on to the next punctuation mark! I wasn't even talking)

Mrs. Naughton, Spanish teacher, in high school (spoke demeaningly at you when you forgot your homework, and even made kids cry. I considered her like the wicked witch. But she wasn't the hardest: I got an 89 for the final grade.)

Mr. Cullen in high school (had a smug superiority complex)

Hardest were:

Mrs. Heusser in grade school (no penmanship was good enough for her)

Sr. Charles in grade school (perfectionist; gave me plenty of As and Bs, but some Cs)

Mr. Cullen, math teacher in high school (certainly didn't mind kids failing. But I did ok - 83 at year's end.)

Fr. McLaughlin in high school (kids cheated behind his back)

Professor O'Neill in college (just plain difficult and hard to understand. But she gave me Cs at least.)

Professor Bowers in college (didn't teach, and gave exams on what was supposed to be taught)

Professor Wait in college (math teacher - took off points for everything)

The winner is: Professor Wait! Gave me my only D in college outside of a first semester course that was over my head.

[grannylib]

1. Hardest was Tom Collins (seriously!) for Psych classes at MSU...

TOUGH grader, and at first meeting would strike one as a major bastard...
but he was really a total marshmallow with a heart of gold, he just didn't want anyone to know it...
not a marshmallow as far as grading went but as far as caring about other humans (he did a lot of work with the mentally disabled and you could see in his eyes how much he loved them and his work)
Learned more in his classes than in anyone's...child psych, abnormal psych, and the real killer, intro to neuropsychology...(got one of only two As in a class of 27)
Loved that man.

[mvd]

3. Yeah, hard doesn't mean bad

Mrs. Pritchard in high school really made you work, but I did well and learned a lot. The hard teachers I mentioned happen mostly to not be that good.

[mvd]

11. BTW

Sister Charles and Professor O'Neill were good teachers. Sister Charles wasn't your stereotypical Sister in school - she was just kind of stern, like most. But, she liked me. O'Neill knew her stuff, but I was lost.

[Broken_Hero]

2. easy

Mr. Akins, themes and issues in literature...hard ass teacher...got a B...I went against his way of thinking 100% of the time, and I thought for sure I would get a C...but, I guess he didnt' hold my views against me...

[Broken_Hero]

9. as far as a-hole mean teachers

Mr. Hughes, photo teacher, my senior year of high school...he would just start blantant attacks against me for no reason. Say for example, a lid was off some developer...."petersond!!!! I know you did this, you smug kid, why did you leave the lid off!!!"

Crap like that, and I stood up to him constantly, its like he wanted to fight me physically...btw, he was exactly the same build as me, except maybe, a 20lb difference, on his part...

I think he was an egomaniac, who was pissed somebody would stand up to him, I always baited "Go ahead and hit me old man, you will lose your job, and half the school will throw me a party, the other half will look at me as a hero"....always fishing, but he never did anything physical...

[WritingIsMyReligion]

4. Okay. I can do this.

Easily.

Meanest so far was definitely my fourth and fifth grade math teacher. She could be such a bitch. And a close second goes to my seventh grade math teacher, whom our class dubbed Kim Jong Il. What is it with math teachers? They all seem to have severe personality disorders--so fucking black-and-white.

Hardest so far was probably my anal-retentive science (Earth) teacher this past year. I managed to get B's and A's all year, but even so, I found some of his work extremely weird and quite difficult. Oh, and the English teacher I had for a month before I was transplanted to sophomore English was a real pain, too, with her work. I'm glad I didn't have to bear out the entire year with her.

[LadyoftheRabbits]

5. Mrs. Schnipple

No, I shit you not, that was her name. At any rate, she drove us fourth graders up a wall That was the year I remember asking someone what happened if I didn't pass fourth grade...

[Left Is Write]

6. Mr. Gerlach, and thank goodness for it.

I learned a lot and worked hard in his classes (Shakespeare; comp, lit)

[LeftyMom]

7. My high school econ teacher

Now I don't have a problem with the subject, but he was doing some kind of experimental curriculum where everything, even testing, was done and graded in groups. Now, to be honest, I always hated group projects in school, but normally they were over in a week or two.

In this class every two weeks the groups that had scored lowest would get to poach students from the groups that did best. As a result, the smartest kids in the class would rotate between groups of the stupid, stoned and lazy, doing all of thier work including tests to keep from ruining thier own grades.

Also, he would not explain anything until you'd literally asked every other student in the class, believing that his worksheets were self-instructional, and the class did not follow or even use the book in any way.

He was the only teacher in my high school whose class nobody was allowed to transfer out of by counseling department policy, because otherwise nobody would have taken his class. Seems like a damn good reason to can the guy, but what do I know?

[Benfea]

8. A professor who shall remain nameless.

I really liked the guy, but he was kind of bad at teaching.

First there was the Irish accent. Not one of those TV Irish accents (I can kind of understand those), but a bizarre Irish accent I've never heard before or since, and it was thick enough that you couldn't understand a thing he said... assuming you could hear him in the first place.

To make matters worse, he was intimidated by public speaking, which made his lectures a real treat. He spoke in a whispered monotone with "uhm" and "err" thrown in every two words (I kid you not). In other words, his lectures were completely incomprehensible. Brilliant man, but I couldn't understand a word he said during class.

The course? Quantum physics. That subject is difficult enough when you can understand what the @$#% the professor is saying, much less the circumstances I was in. The Greek letter psi still gives me nightmares.

Then there was my classical dynamics professor. Again, a smart man whom I looked up to, but his classes were not made challenging by his droning monotone that could put a caffeine addict to sleep, it was that he wrote equations on the chalkboards incredibly, unbelievably fast. He had three walls worth of chalkboard and throughout his lectures he raced back and fourth across all three. Imagine a mobile cloud of chalk dust racing back and forth across three walls of a classroom with a droning monotone emitting somewhere from within the cloud.

That class was a constant race to madly scribble notes in a desperate attempt to keep up with him, but the real terror came whenever he stopped and stroked his chin. That always meant he was about to race back to another chalkboard and invalidate two pages worth of notes, starting over from the point of his mistake. I'm feeling cramps in my writing hand just thinking about it.

[Initech]

10. I got in fights with my high school algebra teacher

Really, I think the guy was mentally unstable (and I have thought this since I was in his class nearly 10 years ago). He had a rather insane amount of information he wanted put on the headings of each assignment. And if anything was even slightly off, for instance "last name, first name" instead of "first name, last name" (or even if you forgot the comma), he counted the whole paper wrong!

[ZombieNixon]

12. Mr. Jacobs...ninth grade.

Not the hardest (in fact the class was BS), but definitely the stupidest and the most hardassed. Imagine, if you will, a fundie physics teacher. My engineer/astronomer/physicist dad tore him new one at every P/T conference.

[LeftyMom]

13. Oh, I almost repressed the memory of my high school drama teacher

There comes a time in a woman's life when her reproductive organs go on vacation and she goes temporarily insane. I happened to catch this woman's class at that time. One minute she'd be your best friend, the next she was crying, then throwing chairs.

[tinfoil tiaras]

14. Okay, in my young life here are some teachers I've had

Starting in Middle School (7th/8th grade)...

7th grade:
-Mrs. Chadwick (History): hard (to most people, but not to me, I always maintained to have an A average in that class, even when I was like failing all the others...hey it's history, like my best subject!), but a really good teacher

-Mrs. Hollis (Science): Oh dear lord. Do I have to explain? Is coral pronounced like "Karl", "tornader", "wur-terr" and "aorter" enough?

-Mrs. Stupka (English)-Okay, she had to be the most fickle teacher I've ever had. She's "nice" one second and a total biotch the next.

-Mr. Chapman (Algebra)-Oh. My. God. Seriously? There are WAY too many things to list here about him. He wore a denim shirt with Mickey Mouse embroidered on the pocket and carried around his cell phone DURING SCHOOL HOURS...


8th grade:
-Mr. Gray (English)-Okay. WTF. He like hated me at the beginning of the year (He made me clean up his coffee because he "thought I spilled it" but I didn't) but at the end of the year I guess he liked me. Oh well. :confused:

-Mrs. Aycock (Algebra)-She was nice for the most part, but she was always a bit on the perky side (e.g. "OMG ITS ALGEBRA! LETS HAVE FUN SOLVING MATH PROBLEMS!!! YAY!!"). She told me a 72 on my semester exam was "a pretty good grade for where I was in the year" Okay, a 72 is NEVER a good grade. Period.

-Mrs. Chapman (Science)-Mr. Chapman, who isn't there anymore's wife. She was REALLY ADD and got off topic easily so it was hard to learn sometimes. She talked about California ALOT. But nice for the most part.

-Ms. Rosenblatt (History)-She was really cool. She made the class fun and got alot of kids into making good grades in her class...

Both 7th & 8th grade: Mrs. Harrison (Latin)-I love her. I didn't like her at first but when she retired this year I really liked her.


9th grade...I'm pretty apathedic as of now when it comes to my teachers. I don't love any of them but I don't hate any of them either.

Hope I entertained y'all w/ my teacher stories...

[mvd]

15. Good stories

I was entertained.

[tinfoil tiaras]

18. Aw, really?

Awesome. When I have an opinion on my 9th grade teachers, I'll be sure to let y'all know!

I REALLY hope none of my teachers read DU!!

[mvd]

20. Yeah, you have a personable writing style

I wouldn't be surprised if you have been praised for your writing. In grade school, a teacher said that I could be a famous writer - and I really impressed a poetry professor with a hockey poem. But I need to do more writing.

[tinfoil tiaras]

21. Wow...cool

I think that I'm really not that great a writer but everyone else thinks that I am a good writer. Hmm...

Well I am in journalism class where I have to write articles for the school paper and all....

Thanks!

[deadparrot]

16. My calculus professor last fall.

He was a nice guy, but couldn't teach worth a damn. Math is one of my least favorite subjects, but I've always been pretty good at it (got a 30 on the math portion of the ACT). We didn't have a textbook, just this booklet-type thing that he'd made himself, with about 80 pages. Mind you, this booklet thing had no examples. Only problems. 80 straight pages of them. No calculators were allowed-- instead, he'd use Microsoft Excel constantly without giving us any clue about how to use it (or any reasoning behind what he was doing). He taught us a lesson in class, gave us homework on a completely different lesson, then the next class he'd give us a quiz on yet another set of new material. It went like that every class, all semester.

How I escaped with an A, I have no idea. Probably because of my dad; he's a math teacher, and (sensing that the class was crap) he photocopied the entire booklet at the beginning of the semester, so I could e-mail him my homework every night. He'd do the work, scan it, and send it back to me. With all the stuff we were supposed to do on Excel, even he was lost. He kept telling me that I shouldn't be expected to know this stuff. After that, I admit, I just stopped trying and let him do the work for me. Our final wasn't a test, it was a project, so other than the quizzes, I wasn't on my own for much of the assigned work.

[MsKandice01]

17. Mr. Pryor...World Civilizations

He was hard for me because he was super laid back and cool, so it gave you the impression that the class was a breeze but his tests were fucking HARD. I've never done well with teachers who are laid-back in class but who expect you to actually study and do your homework. I need structure and pressure, lots of pressure.

[MsKandice01]

19. Oh...I forgot...Calculus II teacher in college

(I've forgotten her name at this point..probably because I rarely showed up.)

She had a MAJOR stuttering problem. It was SO incredibly distracting, especially for someone with borderline ADD such as myself. I spent more time wondering when she was gonna get caught up on a word than I did actually listening to what she said.