16 March 2016

I seldom answer polls or questions....

...but something about this one that showed up in my facebook just struck chord in me.  The question was this: Who was your worst teacher?

My answer:  Oooh, tough call. So many from which to choose. The nun who repeatedly rammed my head into a bible in grade two? The paedophile from grade eight? The idiot from grade five, just because? The entire grade school staff, who could not believe the lumbering, freakishly tall kid when he told them it was the little guys who were attacking him, and not the other way around, and who repeatedly punished him for the unforgiveable crime of being attacked by the little kids, and for being incorrigible in said crime? Or we could go into my university years, where there were whole new levels of terrible.  How about the creative writing professor at university who had never published anything, had never edited any creative writing that got published and who thought there was no point in writing if you didn't write like James Joyce? Who also beat his breast and bragged about his twenty some odd years experience, when in reality he had only one year's experience, twenty some odd times over? The fraud I taught under at university who read from yellowed notes more than thirty years old and who torpedoed the career of anyone who contradicted him by suggesting that it was possible the field had progressed somewhat over the decades since he had got his sheepskin? Who also beat his breast and bragged of his thirty some odd years of experience, when in fact he had only one year's experience, thirty some odd times over? Although not directed at me, how about the guy I worked under who torpedoed the dissertation defense of his ex lover's new lover after she ditched him and took up with the new guy, and who managed to wreck the new guy's dissertation even though the new guy's field wasn't remotely connected to his own? All of them, in their own way?


2 comments:

Larry Denninger said...

I'd have to go with my AP Calculus teacher from high school. Stank of whiskey...either that, he had the worst halitosis in the history of mankind.

I don't remember how competent he was, but that's not the memory I have.

Besides him, I don't have much recollection of any terrible teachers.

Bear said...

I had a few really, really bad teachers. I also had a few really, really good ones. Mostly I had what Pacino in Scent of a woman calls 'the great grey line of American manhood." Some were decent, some were not, but they were all varying shades of bland- most of them had been teaching for years and had gotten burned out by the time I showed up.