30 Adults Share The Worst Things Their Teachers Did That They Still Can’t Get Over
Interview
“Good morning, class! Everyone take your seats, please. Okay students, today we have a very exciting lesson plan! I’m going to give you terrible memories that you’ll remember for decades to come, and you’ll all hold grudges against me for the rest of your lives. Now sharpen your pencils, and let’s get started!”
Teachers have incredibly challenging jobs, and they hold so much power when it comes to shaping the youth. A caring and compassionate educator can turn kids into curious students of the world, but unfortunately, there are a few bad apples out there. Reddit users have recently been recalling their worst memories with teachers, so below, you’ll find the most unforgivable moments they experienced in school. We hope you can’t relate to these stories, pandas, but if you can, you can rest assured that you’re certainly not alone!
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My English teacher admitted to marking down all my work by a grade because “I think you could do better”.
B***h, I *was* doing better and you made it look like I wasn’t.
Caused me to stop even trying.
I had really severe eczema on my hands as a kid. I used to keep them tucked up in my sleeves to avoid 1 people seeing them and 2 getting blood on my paper - yes, it was that bad. She called me out during a test and said to take my hands out of my sleeves because “it’s not like that’s gonna help my grade.” I was a shy kid and silently cried through the rest of the test. Also, I was a straight A, gifted student, so why she was acting like I had poor grade I never knew. I’ll never forget that woman being needlessly cruel to a child who was already in physical pain
We reached out to the Reddit user who started this conversation in the first place and asked what inspired them to pose the question, "What is something your teacher did in school that you’re still salty about?” u/SparkelsTR shared that they had just seen back to school ads on TV and thought, "Holy [crap], time for months of torment with very little return."
"It's not that the teachers are bad, but the system and other students, so I decided to make a post about some [BS] things that happen at school," the OP explained.
Gave me a failing grade in Debate just because my views were different than his. He forced us to watch The Passion Of The Christ in class (went to a private school) and didn’t allow us to opt out. My dad succeeded in getting him fired.
I'm half deaf, I was in social studies class, my teacher asked me a question, didn't hear her I said " what", she yelled at the top of her lungs " will you f*****g listen!"
After that day I told her, once she dies I plan on pissing on her grave, I still plan on doing that
SparkelsTR shared that there are many things they're still bitter about that teachers did, but thankfully, nothing major. They also clarified that they don't actually think teachers are bad, at least most of them.
The OP was also quite amused by all of the stories readers shared on their post. "The responses were quite good, some sad, some bad, and some funny," they told Bored Panda. "There was a guy talking about something, and some other guy told him to pee on her grave when she died, which was [so] funny to me, so I took the opportunity to quote him while replying to another person. Over all, I think the responses and the people replying were great."
In about 91, I was starting to get into animals, specifically marine animals. I wanted to be a marine biologist so i thought. Junior year in HS we all knew we had to do a bug collection. So I went on a family trip out of state and collected bugs in preparation. I put a lot of time into it. Mr Cope, the worst biology teacher ever, failed me because “I could not have collected bugs he’d never seen”. Completely shattered my confidence and desire to peruse science of any sort. F**k you Mr Cope.
My third grade teacher gave me marks down for spelling 'a lot' which her dumb f**k a*s "corrected" as 'alot.' I will probably spend the rest of my life still annoyed with her and I'm 36.
SparkelsTR also wanted to clarify that "this thread was not an attempt to discourage people from getting an education or be [terrible] people to their peers or teachers. This thread was aimed at people who had bad experiences."
But apparently, some readers didn't quite understand the assignment. "Why would you write about how your teacher was so good and wholesome on a thread about bad things teachers did?" the OP asked. "So many who didn't have stories, didn't write stories."
In middle school I did a display with real fossils that my parents had let me borrow. The teacher was insistent that I sell the fossils to him. But I refused.
So the teacher gave me an F on the display.
20 years ago, we had to make a diorama. We all had them sitting on tables in the classroom and one day some other kid was messing around, fell into the table and smashed mine. I failed the assignment for having a smashed diorama.
I had a teach accuse me and a classmate of cheating on an exam because we had the same answer. It was a multiple choice test and she was upset we both had it correct.
At the end of my first week at a new school, the teacher handed out slips of paper with our current grade. I had a solid A at my old school, but the teacher said I had an F. I asked her why. She said I didn't hand in the quarter project. I reminded her I had just moved to the school. She said we would give me the weekend to do it. The project was to interview a longtime local resident and write a paper about their experiences. The articles were being collected for a book she was "writing." I failed the class.
Parents should have had a sitdown with both the teacher and the principal.
Tried to force me to write with my right hand...
I had a coworker who went through that kind of hell in school. When her parents saw her red knuckles as a result of getting hit with a ruler, they paid the teacher a visit. She was given a warning: if it happens again, you're fired. It never happened again.
I had left my calculator on my desk in physics class and the teacher took it. I had engraved my initials on it so it was unmistakable. My problem with this was that he always asked me during class if I had my calculator and I told him I still couldn't find it. The end of school year comes around and another student was snooping through his desk and found my calculator. All year that a*****e was giving me a 0 for the day since I didn't have it.
Middleschool gym teacher. For the presidential fitness test, i decided i was going to do as many situps as i could without stopping. Made it to 200 before he said "you know i can only mark up to 50, right?"
Couldnt have said something sooner?
When I was in third grade, our gym teacher was often mean to Dana, one of my classmates, because Dana had trouble doing a lot of the exercises. Later Dana's family learned that she had a progressive inherited neurological disease. By fourth grade she was in a wheelchair. By fifth grade she no longer attended school. She died when we were in sixth grade.
Her younger sister also inherited the disease (I don't know what it was) and died. Their younger brother did not inherit it.
High school psychology teacher ”evaluated” me in front of the whole class as ”mentally troubled” and told everyone that I’m ”an undiagnosed ADD-case with 99% certainty”. And because she was a psych teacher, everyone took her word for it.
Yeah, thanks for making everyone think I was mental throughout high school and giving me nagging self-doubts if I really did have ADD for most of my 20s, until I got that medically ruled out.
I wasn’t always the best behaved kid and even back then I understood that, but that was pretty harsh of her.
It's not just harsh, it's extremely unprofessional. If she suspected ADD or any other issues she should have called the parents and suggested they take the kid for an evaluation. This is something we tended to do as psychology students in the first years, we kept seeing diagnostics everywhere, but even as 19-20 year olds we kept the "revelations" to ourselves...
One of my high school art classes was called 3D design, which was basically clay, sculpting, and various 3 dimensional art work. On the first day of class my teacher pulled me aside and told me she looked at my schedule which was mostly honors and advanced level classes. She said that because I was clearly such a good student she would grade me on a much harsher scale, and would hear none of my objections that being book smart doesn't translate to artistic abilities. The poor marks I received in that class skewed my GPA.
That teacher was jealous of your capabilities. There's a few teachers like that about. Teachers should have to pass a pych evaluation and you know, maybe not hate kids, to enter the profession. Sadly it seems as though some are just people who did a degree, didn't know what to do next and liked the bursary from the government for becoming a teacher. They stay bitter through all their career.
I won a toy as a prize in some sort of class raffle, the teacher confiscated it off me forever for playing with it at lunch time in the playground. I was in grade 3.
"...confiscated it off me forever..." Stole it. You mean they stole it.
Threatened to hit me when, as a brand new mid-term transfer in Grade 3, I was too scared to speak to ask for her help, so I had tapped her on the arm instead to get her attention. Apparently, that warranted threatening to assault an 8 yo in the 90s.
I had been there less than 2 weeks and had just transferred from a school of 40 to a school of over 200.
The cut off point for getting an A was 80%, so my History teacher gave me 79.9%. He refused to back down, even when my mother put in a complaint to the school, asking what I had done wrong to miss out on 0.1%. He refused to give a reason. Still kind of burns me up when I think of it, because it was so petty.
Signed, a B++ History student.
She told me to get the hell out of her classroom because I forgot to get something signed by my mom. She then marked me as truant and played dumb when the principal got involved.
That teacher deserved to get publicly fired and endure the Walk if Shame in front of the whole school.
Never gave my art a higher grade than a B+. Even though she asked me every year if she could hold my art back, to show everyone how to correctly apply a technique or what she wanted from everyone else that next year. Not good enough for an A, but this is perfect and it's what I want everyone to do. Which is it then? B***h.
Had a teacher who repeatedly dress-coded me for things that weren't even in the rulebook. B***h had the audacity to call it "water under the bridge" when I confronted her years later as an adult. No, b***h, it's *not* water under the bridge. You don't get to mistreat someone and call it "water under the bridge." That phrase is reserved solely for victims who have decided to forgive their abusers, and I dont forgive grown adults who bully children. She actively disrupted my education by sending me out of the classroom multiple times just because she doesn't like goth kids or the clothes they wear. The only skin exposed was my face and hands - this was during my *Tripps and a hoodie even in summer* phase.
I wish that as an adult I could talk with the teachers and administrators who bullied me with the dress code, starting when I was 11 years old and developed breasts before the rest of my class. It was hot and there was no AC so I was taken out of class and had the straps of my shirt sleeves measured nearly daily, even though my mother never bought any tank or tee with less than two inch shoulder straps. All because some adults felt eleven-year-old me was “flaunting” my new breasts by wearing “skimpy” shirts. Fücking perverts
Math b***h decided to take me to one task, I had to solve it in front of my whole class. I did, I was pretty confident the answer was correct.
Then she checked it, went full crazy mode and made fun of me for about 5 minutes, called me silly words and rewarded with juicy bad grade.
Then she proceeded to show my class how it should be done.
She did it exactly the same, just like I did 5 minutes earlier.
Some of my classmates told her about it.
She was like “oh, y’all distracted me”.
She never spoke to me directly after that
I was about 9 years old and she wrote our language's word for "ceremony" on the blackboard. She spelled it with an S, like "seremoni", and I raised my hand and asked if the word should not in fact be spelled with a C. She argued that she was quite sure it actually was an S, and wouldn't back down, even though I was absolutely sure (I read a lot of books as a kid and had read the word in my native language multiple times). Of course I looked it up after the class, and it turned out I was right. Still haven't forgotten, 20 years later. I guess she didn't want to lose face in front of a bunch of kids.
Bruh. My year 5 teacher congratulated us when we corrected her mistakes
Math teacher asked the class a question, I confidently put my hand up and gave what I thought was the correct answer. Teacher looks at me and says “Not everything has to be a joke Mark”. That truly crushed my spirit and I never put my hand up to answer another question all year.
There were a few from this one teacher but two things stand the most.
1. Gave me a 0 on a test because my pencil broke. She wouldn't let me sharpen it, or use another pencil. "You should have been prepared" was her reasoning.
2. Would make fun of me for getting an answer wrong. Other students would get a simple "no" if they answered wrong, while I would get scolded and 'talked to' for 5 minutes about how I'm so dumb.
That last part drives me bonkers. Any teacher who vocalizes “you’re so dumb” should be instantly fired. I once had an awful math teacher who would abuse my classmates like this. She fawned over the the straight A students like me, but would hit and yell at the struggling students who would answer incorrectly. Her favorite was “you are so stupid.” I’d never seen anything like it. Apparently neither had my parents. When I told them what was going on they forced the school to “retire” the abusive woman.
Art teacher tore up a painting of mine because he said I didn’t follow instructions. We were told to paint an underwater scene. I did, but used a lot of orange and red tones and explained that my underwater scene just wasn’t where water looks blue. He didn’t like my answer and tore it up.
She gave me detention for chewing gum. I didn’t even enter the classroom when she did this. She smelled mint from my mouth when I said good morning back to her
In grade 4 my teacher kept making me redo my printing sheets because my handwriting wasn't neat. Eventually I asked him why he didn't make any of the boys redo their sheets because they had messy handwriting too. I still remember the look of shock on his face but didn't understand the significance at the time because I was just genuinely asking. I don't remember what he said afterwards other than the fact that I didn't find his answer satisfying.
I had the same problem with cursive - all the teachers INSISTED on assignments being written in cursive, then whined they couldn't read it. These days, I would tell them straight up, "You want it in cursive, or you want it legible. Pick one."
The c**t made a point of belittling me every single day for a year because my interests were different from the mainstream in a small town. Nothing whacky either, I was into pop culture (like nina turtles and simpsons, etc) in a place where there was no culture outside football for boys or netball (or just being quiet) for girls. I'm over 40 now, and I still go back to that town a few times a year, and that old prick is lucky I haven't got my revenge now that the tables of relative strength have turned. Also, he used to wave his mushroom d**k around in the change rooms when we had swimming carivals. Like every time.
“Also, he used to wave his mushroom d**k around in the change rooms when we had swimming carivals.” huh?!
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I finally have a story for this type of question - two, in fact! 1 - my art teacher told me, and my parents, that I had absolutely no talent in art. I loved art, I loved being creative. She said this during a parent teacher interview, which she called to tell my parents exactly that. Then, she waxed poetic about how amazing my brother was at art. It’s been 15 years, but I still hear that every time I try to draw. I miss it, but it’s always in my mind. 2 - I was called to a meeting by the school guidance councillor to inform me that the school believed I was too stupid to go to uni. I didn’t have the best marks, true, but I tried my best, and being told that I was too dumb to do what I planned to do basically made me stop trying. Jokes on them, though - I ended up going to uni as a mature age student and I now have a bachelor of IT!
as a university instructor, i see the mental anguish my students experienced as children affect them as adults. before i became a teacher, i took quiet notes about how NOT to act with students. god these stories make me angry and sad.
I had a teacher that assigned us a family tree assignment. I didn't know anyone from my dad's family, he had walked out when I was 2, and my mom was in prison so I couldn't ask her. So after class I pulled her aside, and explained the situation. Told her if I did my family tree it would only be half done, but I would be more than happy to do my mother's family tree so I could complete the assignment. Her response? "No you have to do yours, and if it's only half done you only get 50% credit". I went to the principal over that. I was a mostly A student, and she was literally penalizing me for having messed up parents. The principal made her let me do my mom's. But she hated me the rest of the year.
I finally have a story for this type of question - two, in fact! 1 - my art teacher told me, and my parents, that I had absolutely no talent in art. I loved art, I loved being creative. She said this during a parent teacher interview, which she called to tell my parents exactly that. Then, she waxed poetic about how amazing my brother was at art. It’s been 15 years, but I still hear that every time I try to draw. I miss it, but it’s always in my mind. 2 - I was called to a meeting by the school guidance councillor to inform me that the school believed I was too stupid to go to uni. I didn’t have the best marks, true, but I tried my best, and being told that I was too dumb to do what I planned to do basically made me stop trying. Jokes on them, though - I ended up going to uni as a mature age student and I now have a bachelor of IT!
as a university instructor, i see the mental anguish my students experienced as children affect them as adults. before i became a teacher, i took quiet notes about how NOT to act with students. god these stories make me angry and sad.
I had a teacher that assigned us a family tree assignment. I didn't know anyone from my dad's family, he had walked out when I was 2, and my mom was in prison so I couldn't ask her. So after class I pulled her aside, and explained the situation. Told her if I did my family tree it would only be half done, but I would be more than happy to do my mother's family tree so I could complete the assignment. Her response? "No you have to do yours, and if it's only half done you only get 50% credit". I went to the principal over that. I was a mostly A student, and she was literally penalizing me for having messed up parents. The principal made her let me do my mom's. But she hated me the rest of the year.
