Did You Have Any Particularly Nutty/Memorable High School Teachers?

[Intelsucks]

We had a geometry/trig teacher with some hard and fast rules:



*If you got caught chewing gum, you had to wear it on the end of your nose until the end of the period.


*If you wanted to sign his paddle, you had to let him pop you with it once... And he didn't go easy on anyone! you could hear that sucker echo loudly, up and down the hallway.


*No humming or singing allowed. period. If you did, he would say:

"If you wanna sing tenor... Make it ten or twelve counties away from here."

OR

"If you wanna sing solo... Make it so low we can't hear you."

:D

[Loonman]

1. Field Biology Teacher

Elective course.


"hey Mr. ______, you want to toke up in the parking lot with us after school?

"No, but the day they make that stuff legal, I'll be right out there with you"




The Honors Chemistry teacher talked just like Elmer Fudd(Buwon!). I was in the moron Chem class, and the teacher there was pretty wacked, too.

[FunBobbyMucha]

2. Kent Washam looked exactly like Jack N. in The Shining...

crazy hair, crazy beard, demented smile...those of us on the edge loved the man.

He taught English and Lit. He was not above physical intimidation to make his point (he would be shitcanned in today's climate for the stuff he said and did). Used to recall drunken and crazy roommate stories from college to make points about character's motivations, etc.

When his wife died suddenly of a heart attack at 28, we all got the day off school and went to the funeral. He shambled past us looking awful, then noticed us, and rallied enough to smile and mutter "My kids. My kids..."

[grannylib]

3. History teacher also football coach; great coach, lousy teacher! He

did not change textbooks in 20 years and if you hid his notes he would give a study day; he could not teach without the same damn notes he'd been using for decades....sheesh. That's why I quit and got my GED instead. High school sucked.

[Lostmessage]

4. Sister Mary Pat

She broke a ruler on me during a beating one time and bitched me out over it.

[asjr]

5. I had a

very remarkable Home Economics teacher. HE was almost required back in those days. I wasn't very good at it but I tried. She did make an impression on me because she was strictly no nonsense. She and her sister were daughters of missionaries in China before WW11. They spent several years in a Japanese concentration camp and had stories to tell you would not believe. It had such an impact on them I can't remember either of them ever smiling. The were not unkind but expected you to do the work. I was so bad at HE, the skirt I was supposed to make in order for me to pass on to sophomore class, was hemmed and the zipper put in by this teacher. She finally realized I was all thumbs and admitted it. I will always be grateful to her because I really, really tried and she knew it. And it hacks the hell out of me that I can't remember her name.

[AlienGirl]

6. Physical Sciences/Physics teacher

Wack-job. Nice, but a wack-job. He gave extra credit to girls for wearing skirts, and once lectured about how, prior to Noah's Flood, all the water was in a layer above the Earth, so the Flood was the first time it had ever rained.

Tucker

[ironflange]

7. Chem teacher, Grade 10

He was a real nut, loved to burn stuff, do really smelly reactions, make explosions, etc. That class was a lot of fun.

[bamademo]

8. Junior High

Eighth grade. I was a little Alabama girl and we finally had our first African American teachers. Ms. Roberts was plagued by Kevin
who was sort of a little racist bastard and was forever flouting the rules. One day he kept popping people with rubber bands. Ms. Roberts kept telling him to stop. He wouldn't. Finally in exasperation she yelled, "Kevin XXXX, if you pop one more person with that rubber, I'm givin' you a F for the day!".

We all howled. "She said rubber!" <insert Beavis and Butthead sounds>

:-)

[Red State Rebel]

9. Earthquake Extra Credit!!

My Earth Science teacher had a map on the back wall with all of the fault lines on Earth drawn on it. If you predicted where the next Earth Quake would happen, you got extra credit points. I won on one in Italy, I believe.

[NightTrain]

10. My senior-year English teacher was great!

So great, in fact, that I kept in touch with him for about 14 years after I graduated. We took trips together, and he read just about every word I wrote between about 1984 and 1998.

It also was this teacher who ontroduced me to the liberal perspective on the various political and social issues of the day, which eventually made me realize that I was not a right-winger after all. And though you DUers may find this hard to believe, up until I was 22 years old, I actually did regard myself as a conservative! Talk about confused....

Unfortunately, as old friends are wont to do, we fell out of touch about six years ago. I really ought to look him up again!

[Draven]

11. My chem/physics/geology teacher in hs...

he was a goofy man, but smart. He'd let us do stupid stuff in chem class like burn potato chips and stuff.

He was talking about squids one time for some odd reason, and he asked the class "How many testicles does a squid have?" He meant to say tentacles. We laughed at him but he never caught on. Great stuff.

[trof]

12. Mith Thorenthon

The wath an Englith teacher with a pronounthed overbite and a lithp.
The thpat when the talked.
A fine thpray mithted down upon the firtht two rowths of deskth.

The clath clown that in the firtht row.
One day he brought an umbrella to clath and opened it when the began to thpeak. That wath very cruel, but we thought it wath funny then.
;-)

[alwynsw]

13. Lucinda Clements AKA Eagle Beak

A self described spinster, sister of two self described spinsters, all living at home with their mother; all born before 1910. She taught my advanced English in 1971/2.

She wore the same cotton print dress to school every day (I guess she washed it at least every other night, because by the end of the year it was faded almost white.) She also wore hose with old fashioned - we called 'em roll garters and orthopedic shoes that reminded you of cather's mitts.

When the high school was moved about 5 miles down the road in 1959, it took a letter from the school board superintendent to Ms. Clements' mother to get Mrs. Clements' permission for her then 51-year-old daughter to drive "so very far" to work each day. She drove the distance in a 1951 Cadillac at about 15 mph.

She sounded like an evil Aunt Bea.

The whoopee cushion under her chair pad was NOT a good idea. I still have nightmares.

[Loonman]

16. The whoopie cushion

In my Chem Lab, some joker had a whoopie cushion and squeezed it during lab lecture. Everything was fine until he said "excuse me", and we all broke up. Teacher came unglued, and he must have thought we were really upset, but they were tears of laughter.

I think he yelled at us for a solid 5 minutes, but boy was that ever worth it.

[Lindsay]

14. Bunches.

Students of Mr. Smith, junior AP English lit., back in the 60's can still, to this day, sing the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in middle English to the tune of "Ten Little Indians."

My senior English teacher was memorable only for referring to the class as "cherubs," and for making us take a big test the afternoon we learned Kennedy had been shot.

A music teacher whose name I no longer remember turned us on to The Weavers, which I think was extremely cool. (We got the political background from her, too.) Oh...that was junior high.

My AP chemistry teacher told us about LSD several years before it became popular. And made it sound verrrrrry interesting.

Most of my high school (and junior high school) teachers were slightly to considerably left, thank goodness. (I can only remember one classmate who was a Goldwater conservative, for that matter. The rest of us were a bunch of liberals. And still are.)

[CanuckAmok]

15. My English teacher's toupee...

He wore this fopish Liberace mullet thing....but he only wore it seasonally, for warmth. When April rolled around and the snow was all gone, he was bald-headed.

That always struck me as odd...

[CanuckAmok]

17. Sound Particles...

I had this physics teacher. His "schtick" was this lecture he delivered, year after year, to each 11th Grade class, about sound being made up of particles, not waves.

He's say that the reason you could shout yourself hoarse is because your body can't produce the sound particles as fast as you were using them.

Conversely, the reason you're ears produced wax was the build-up of sound particles they'd collect.


That's not so odd on its own, but you have to imagine that, even after decades of this same lecture, he found it endlessly hilarious, and could barely get through it without exploding in laughter. He was so pleased with himself.


Oh, also, a lovely, quiet English teacher who could be sent into a screaming, book throwing frenzy by the 'beep' of a Casio watch. It was the 80s, so everybody had one, and anyone who had his set so it would beep at the top of the hour was basically screwed for the whole year. She never forgave those people, and their marks suffered as a result. She actually had to take a semester off, for 'medical' reasons.

A chemistry teacher who was a Bergen-Belsen survivor. He wasn't nutty or anything, but he was memorable because he was a pretty together, jovial guy (even though he was married to the aforementioned English teacher). He never had a complaint or a frown for anyone. He was much-loved by everyone. And every year, when a new class of 10th Grade History students studied WW2, he came in as a guest speaker, and calmly and eloquently described the Camp, the guards, and the systematic murder of his entire family.

Most of the students at my high school were of German or Dutch ancestry, for what that's worth.

I'll never forget that.

[HEyHEY]

18. Mr. Dixon

Was a drama/english teacher, he pioneered a class called "Creative explorations."

It was all about doing wierd stuff basically, once we had to write an essay on the back of a postage stamp.

[BigDaddyLove]

19. Mr. Farber the science teacher..........

had a terribly deviated septum, so much so that you could barely understand anything he was saying.

One day in class we he we were doing an experiment of some sort, and I happened to notice an incubator with eggs in it, so I asked what kind of eggs they were and he replied "quail", which sounded very much like "where", so I said "right there", and he replied "quail". Not understanding, I then asked again and he screamed "quail", "quail", "quail", at which point the entire class was laughing hysterically.

Finally I understood.