<p>
</p>
<p>Having someone fired for a stupid comment? The entire nation would be unemployed!</p>
<p>I make plenty of errors… I’m human. The key is admitting the mistake. But sometimes I just tell them “I wanted to see if you were paying attention!”</p>
<p>1:</p>
<p>In fifth grade the teacher gave us a spelling test on the names of the states and pronounced Arkansas “ar-KAN-zuss”. After school I told her, “I think that’s pronounced ARK-an-saw.”</p>
<p>She replied, “It is, but the other kids find the silent ‘s’ confusing.” Thus missing the whole point of a spelling test.</p>
<p>2:</p>
<p>When my son was about to enter kindergarten in a rural Midwest town, we visited the school and asked what they could do to stimulate our son, who had been reading since age three. The teacher said that he would be allowed to visit the higher grades and read to them. She seemed to think this idea represented the pinnacle of forward thinking in gifted education. We moved to the suburbs of a large city within months, primarily for the schools.</p>
<p>My health teacher warned us against become obeast.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That reminds me. When DS was in kindergarten he was already a fluent reader, pretty much the only one in the class, so all the reading material was super-basic and uninteresting. I asked the teacher if she could provide books for him that were at his level from the school library – I was not asking her to go out and buy books for him. She told me, “if you want him to be challenged, take him to the library.” I took him to another school the following year.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ah, health teachers. Mine told us that we shouldn’t smoke marijuana because it is sometimes “laced with STP…motor oil!!!”</p>
<p>STP is actually street slang for certain hallucinogens.</p>
<p>How about updating curriculum? My son took health and Career Planning at the local adult school on independent study to meet the district requirement. The health curriculum was okay but the Career Planning one was mind-boggling. All the material had been put together long before the Internet so nothing at all was mentioned about using the Internet or e-mail in job searches. It was very old-fashioned. Then there were stories to be read about various careers and my son was stunned by the story of a teacher in the early part of the 20th century that was completely laden with racist comments about kids from various ethnic groups. At the end of the course, in the evaluation, he mentioned how offensive he found the material and that they might want to consider actually updating it into this century. Because it was so dated, he learned almost nothing of any practical use.</p>
<p>Chinese math teacher at my daughter’s math/science high school for juniors/seniors</p>
<ol>
<li><p>To my daughter (previously always considered pretty intelligent by her teachers - 32 ACT, straight A student until she went to this school) in a calculus class
You too stupid to be in my class. </p></li>
<li><p>To the class in general
American students stupid. 5th grader in China can do this math.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Her husband - also a math teacher with a very thick accent - to a more advanced class a friend was in</p>
<p>“What is the volume of a perimida”</p>
<p>Confused looks all round from students.</p>
<p>Repeats question several times to increasingly confused students who did not think a perimeter had a volume. Finally drew a picture to explain what he was asking - of a pyramid. (try saying it with an accent).</p>
<p>They were brilliant mathematicians but a nightmare for students that weren’t also brilliant mathematicians. My daughter once went for homework help to another calc teacher and he spent half an hour on a particular problem before admitting he had no clue how to solve it. She struggled to pass the classes and put off taking math classes in college for her first 3 semesters then took some and discovered she is back to As in college math classes.</p>
<p>They were actually the sweetest people outside of class and my daughter became quite fond of them. Just hated having them as teachers.</p>
<p>What about the teacher in a gifted program my kids attended (who thankfully never had him) who used to look around the room and say that only a very few of the kids would succeed in life and the rest would be failures. That’s the spirit!</p>
<p>mimk6, that reminds me of the youth-choir conductor who told the hard-working singers at a dress rehearsal “I’m so frustrated. I dreamed last night that the concert was a failure. It was just a total disaster.”</p>
<p>I was present as an alumna, and I had to bite my tongue when she broke out that gem. Might as well just tell the kids, “Deep down, I have no faith in your abilities, and I expect you to fail.” That’ll motivate them!</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Excellent advice! I’m not sure what obeast is, but I’m certain I don’t want to become that.</p>
<p>Not wrong, but obnoxious, of a teacher. </p>
<p>In fifth grade we had a two hour class every day and the music teacher was subbing for our normal teacher. Two hours is a lot for a 10-year-old to sit through anyways, and I had to use the bathroom terribly. I raised my hand and asked politely and got a firm ‘no’. I tried again about ten minutes later, got yelled at, sat there until I started peeing myself, and ran to the bathroom. </p>
<p>My dad called the teacher that night-I didn’t hear the conversation but she was VERY apologetic to me the next day.</p>
<p>I only have 4 joints in my right hand, and as a result, my handwriting is pretty awful. Legible, but barely. My French teacher complained about it one time, admitting she could read everything i wrote, but that it didn’t look neat. She said I’d do poorly on the (then) new SAT writing section where they grade your handwriting in the Essay. I politely, but confidently explained that they don’t care about your handwriting, and she assured me otherwise. The next year, I got an 800 on the SAT writing section, but I wasn’t in her class. I thought about stopping by to tell her the good news, but then decided it would be too petulant.</p>
<p>This is the same teacher who made a moral case against homosexuality on the basis that “there are no gay animals. Just look at the barnyard for proof that homosexuality goes against nature”, and who claimed that French people used different pronunciations for animal sounds. When the class voiced their skepticism, she brought this French exchange student into the room, and giving him no context, simply said “Bruno, what sound does a dog make!?”. He sheepishly “uhhhhh, ruff ruff” with no accent, and the class laughed for 5 minutes straight.</p>
<p>^^Actually, animal sounds are often expressed differently in different languages. I once made a small collection of some of them.</p>
<p>For example dogs
English: Bow-wow
Spanish: Wow-wow (not sure of the spelling)
Finnish: Hau-hau (pronounced “How how”)
Japanese: Wuh-wuh</p>
<p>Roosters
English: cocc-a-doodle-do
Japanese Ko-kay-ko-ko</p>
<p>…and so on.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sort of. It’s more like wan-wan, but in Japanese the ‘n’ is soft, so it can be hard to hear for a non-speaker.</p>
<p>I think ‘bark’ and ‘ruff’ sound a heck of a lot more like a dog than ‘wan-wan’, for what it’s worth.</p>
<p>So, I feel bad for criticizing one bad teacher who I met a dozen years ago. </p>
<p>Many, many smart and helpful teachers out there.</p>
<p>eggmom: Thanks for pointing out that there ARE many smart teachers! </p>
<p>I am often appalled at the ignorance shown by my colleagues. (I am a middle school teacher.) Even worse are the colleagues who assume that, since I teach kids with learning disabilities, I must be a little slow or a little dumb. Oh, wait – the ones who REALLY kill me are the ones who call my students slow or dumb, to other teachers, my students and even their PARENTS. In the 70’s or 80’s, I might have understood that a professional educator would understand that learning DIFFERENTLY does NOT imply a deficit in overall intelligence (except that, by definition, a person with a learning disability must have average or above average intelligence in the first place – that’s why the learning difficulty is a disability!)</p>
<p>Oh, my. I’ve just hijacked this thread… sorry! Anyway… thanks for the reminder, eggmom… and thanks to all other posters – there are some incredibly heinous stories here that renew my resolve to try my hardest not to say dumb things.</p>
<p>(Now, if someone would just help me renew my resolve to avoid hijacking threads?) :)</p>
<p>Cool story bro</p>
<p>OK, a personal experience.</p>
<p>Teacher: So, how many times older than you is your mother?</p>
<p>Sorghum (aged 7) after long and deep thought and having the feeling I’m onto something): My mother is 5 times older than me now, but in 20 years she will be twice as old as me.</p>
<p>Teacher: Don’t be silly Sorghum, if your mother is 5 times as old as you now she will ALWAYS be 5 times as old as you!</p>
<p>Gee, let’s open up a thread mocking obnoxious, rude, and extremely stupid doctors, lawyers, nurses, accountants, journalists, editors, financial advisors, psychologists, or business consultants & owners. …Because I’ve met some of each of those categories who qualify as obnoxious, rude, and extremely stupid and/or insufficiently literate (yes, sometimes in their own fields), yet they’re ‘advising’ others or are authority figures over others. And I, who have spent most of my life in education, am hands-down smarter than any of those in those categories that I have personally met.</p>
<p>I’m more educated on some particular medical issues than many of my own several-degreed doctors (because nobody can be an expert on everything or has the time to delve into new technical info about a minor medical point that may be more important to the patient than the doctor). I’ve been told by many a lawyer that I’m way smarter than most lawyers they know, but I also wouldn’t open a thread entitled, “Are you smarter than a lawyer?”</p>
<p>This is truly one of the most offensive threads every opened on this forum, but the title of the thread is especially offensive and arrogant.</p>
<p>Epiphany – I remember a while back there was a thread about horror stories having to do with doctor’s behaviors. Also, I was part of a thread where people shared some horror stories about people in my field. If we opened a thread on “bad hairdressers I have encountered”, people would respond even if they have also had great hairdressers. It’s human nature. I can see how you would take offense, but I think it’s been pointed out – and I’ll point it out again – that there are lots of fabulous teachers out there – and lots of very smart ones.</p>