Mark Twain once remarked, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” With teachers like these, it’s easy to see why that was necessary. Even though the people in the stories below are teachers, make no mistake—they definitely all have a thing or two to learn. Here are 42 stories about some of the most unprofessional teachers that students have ever encountered.
42. Educational Infallibility
My high school teacher once told me to go to hell after I corrected a typo he made on one of his tests.
Getty Images
41. Gender Roles
When I was about 15, my female math teacher went on a tangent during class about how all men were ugly and awful. Still cracks me up almost 20 years later. What a ridiculous moment.
40. Opening Up a Can of Worms
One teacher brought vodka to school in a Sprite can. She got caught being drunk three different times before finally being fired. Makes me wonder how many times she did it without getting caught...
39. Church and State
Back in fifth grade, this one teacher got mad at students regularly for “using the Lord’s name in vain.” She also had mandatory prayer sessions during class time. This was in public school.
38. Word of Mouth
One teacher got pissed at a student, so she decided to take off her shoe and put it in a kid's mouth. This was in fifth grade.
37. Fuzzy Navel et al.
For some inexplicable reason, my high school drama teacher told the class about "drinks that would make a girl blush." She then listed off an array of inappropriately named alcoholic drinks. Not class appropriate at all, or even related to anything we were learning about.
36. Bathroom Break
My kindergarten teacher had a really strict bathroom rule. If she thought you went too many times, she wouldn’t let you go anymore. Inevitably, some kid has an accident. So the kid goes to the nurse’s office and gets new clothes and all. When the girl gets back, the teacher starts calling her a “baby” for having an accident and starts trying to humiliate this five-year-old.
35. No Beating Around the Bush for This Guy
I had an anthropology professor in college who was always trying to impress students by acting cool. He would pass students if they gave him cigarettes or gin, and he would proudly brag to us about how he beats his daughter.
34. Poker Face
On a ninth grade choir trip, a group of guys got a poker game going in one of the hotel rooms. This was a quintessential 15-year-old boy poker game. Nudie playing cards. Cheap gas station cigars. Everything you would expect. The ninth-grade football coach (on the trip as a chaperone) was right in the thick of it. At some point, the choir director showed up with hotel management, because of course they did.
The coach ran to the bathroom and hid in the shower. The kids in the room got a 15-minute lecture. Once the coast was clear, the coach emerged and said: “Well, you boys are screwed.” We all ended up getting suspended for a few days. No one snitched on the coach though.
33. Unprofessional Meets Unstudious
My high school teacher: “Do you want to pick up some beers for the afternoon?”
Plot twist—I said yes and we had a legendary drinking session.
32. Not My Type
I was slouching in typing class. The teacher yelled at me and I tried to sit up. I didn’t do a good enough job I guess. He made me go out into the hall where he pushed me into the lockers several times while yelling about "If I give you an order, you follow it!"
Shutterstock
31. A Blessing in Disguise?
My teacher told me I wasn't smart enough to be in her English class. I have mild dyslexia and it wasn't diagnosed until I was older. I hate her, but am also thankful for having had her as a teacher. She sparked my passion to prove those who looked down on me wrong. You'll never be good at English, they said. I later graduated with an English scholarship and was an English teacher for five years.
30. Hellfire
I used to be really into reading about the paranormal and my school library actually had a lot of books on those very subjects. I had a teacher snatch a school library book out of my hands, scream at me that I was going to hell for reading it, and start tearing the pages out. She was almost fired for destroying school property, and caught a big dose of hell from both my mother and step-mother at the next parent-teacher conference meeting.
Never had another problem with her after that.
29. Where There’s Smoke, There’s Usually Fire
My math teacher decided to use sexual analogies to teach us the difference between horizontal and vertical lines—when we were in 8th grade. He was later arrested for assaulting some of the players from the high school girls’ softball team, for which he was the coach.
28. A Chemistry Lesson That Won’t Soon Be Forgotten
Back in the day, when a teacher showed a video because they didn't have a lesson plan prepared, they would have to wheel in a cart with a tube TV and VCR on it. So the teacher brings in a VHS from home that was supposed to show us some chemistry lesson on the formation of elements or something. Instead, the VHS tape starts blasting some very adult videos to a class of 13-year-olds.
Turns out the teacher's son had a previously secret hobby of recording these kinds of “home movies” on his dad’s VHS library.
27. Future Plans
I had a teacher tell the entire class that she hated teaching, didn't like any of us, and couldn't wait to retire and become a door-greeter at Walmart.
26. Holier Than Thou...Or Not
One teacher somehow heard that my family was atheist, so she forced my brother to sit alone in the hall during every school party doing extra worksheets. She told him it was because our family worshipped the Devil and said that maybe he could rejoin the class if we all accepted Jesus as our Lord & Savior. This was a public school, mind you, and she taught second grade.
She was eventually fired for buying illegal substances on school grounds.
25. Finishing Was the Real Test
One teacher presumably had big plans or something more important to get to after school, and started rushing us all through a test. She sarcastically said “It’s ok that you're slow, I eat my breakfast slow” to the five kids still working on it.
24. Vocabulary Lesson
My 11th-grade psychology teacher made us stand up in class on the first day and share an interesting fact about ourselves. The only thing I could think of to tell was that my family is Cajun and that my grandparents spoke Creole. The teacher responded with a racial slur I had never heard before. I decided to ask my dad what it meant, and he went freaking mental.
The school was called. That class became very awkward and I never got higher than a C on any of my papers despite having all As in my other classes and being an honors student.
23. Dress Code
My high school drama teacher made an appearance in the school musical wearing teeny tiny short shorts that would never have been allowed in school if a student had worn them.
22. Say What Now?
My high school teacher stole my girlfriend. Yup, beat that!
21. Batter Up!
My 10th-grade math teacher was also the baseball coach for our team. He threw a baseball bat at a student after they called him an "Italian Pepperoni." He was suspended with pay and came back around seven months later, acting like nothing ever happened. The school did not bother to find a replacement teacher, so we had a series of substitute teachers that gave us the same worksheet every day for seven months.
We all failed the exam that year and ended up in summer school.
20. Who Is the Socially Inept One Here Again?
My sixth-grade teacher screamed at my entire class, told us we were all "socially inept," and added a few choice inappropriate and offensive slurs in too for good measure.
19. Crescendo
I forgot to bring my sheet music to class one afternoon. My music teacher reacted by throwing a temper tantrum, knocking over a music stand, telling me I'd never amount to anything, and storming out of the room.
18. Brick and Mortar
One teacher at my school literally threw a kid against a brick wall. Unprofessional barely scratches the surface of what you can call this…
17. Socially Awkward
My eighth-grade social studies teacher rarely assigned homework. When she actually did choose to assign homework one night, almost no one turned it in the next day. She had a massive meltdown and yelled, “I bet you all did your math homework last night, didn’t you?! DIDN’T YOU?!?!” She proceeded to take the overhead projector and slam it onto the floor, breaking it in front of all of us.
Then, she just walked out of the room and didn’t come back for the rest of class.
16. Alex the Greatly Unfortunate
My history teacher was a piece of work. This was my junior year of high school and there was a guy in the class named Alex. Now, Alex did slack off and was the class clown. I found him annoying as hell and didn't like him one bit. But Mr. K would openly tell him in front of the entire class that he's going nowhere, that he might as well just drop the course, that he's going to get a zero on the exam, and that he'll be working at McDonald's for the rest of his life.
It was really awful. Multiple people in the class told administration about it, but nothing happened.
15. Subtlety is Not This Teacher’s Strength...
When returning tests and assignments, my fifth-grade teacher had a whole ritual he’d go through so that everyone could see how well or poorly each person did. If you did well, he'd place it nicely on your desk. If you did poorly, he'd call your name and throw it on the floor. You'd then have to get up from your desk to go pick it up.
14. The Modern Day Dunce Cap
I mistakenly answered a question with a rather stupid guess. My teacher took his finger, jabbed full force into my forehead, and called me dumb. He caught me by surprise, so the jab had the effect of flinging my head back. I wasn't injured obviously, just surprised and embarrassed. I'm not the brightest bulb in the box but I did try my best to answer the question.
13. I Do Mean to Pry, But...
My teacher had us go around the room and guess whether each student was a virgin or not based on just looking at each other. One girl that most said wasn't a virgin started bawling because she’d been sexually assaulted. Nice going, teacher!
12. Cry Me a River
One year, I was crying in class because I couldn’t stop thinking about a serious family issue I was going through at the time. The teacher screamed at me for crying at my desk and then proceeded to march me to the front of the class and yell at me to stop crying. Needless to say, screaming at me just made me cry more. By the end, I was sobbing in the hallway.
Happy ending though—this incident led to her eventual firing at the end of the year!
11. Late Bloomer
We had a teacher in his 50s start telling us about how he was a virgin because he was waiting for the right woman to come along. As unprofessional as that was, he was actually a very good teacher and I hope he found someone.
10. Unprofessional Professional Training
My brother used to teach science at a high school in a bad area. He had a lot of kids with discipline problems and the school wasn’t giving him any support. It was really quite tragic, because the students who did want to learn and move up in life were unable to get the instruction they needed as a result. So one day, he decided to start sending the disruptive students to shadow the janitor.
His rationale was that they clearly weren’t interested in learning, so why not give them some on the job training? The janitor was on board, so it seemed pretty win-win. The school board did not agree.
9. Blood, Sweat & Teachers
My high school teacher didn't let girls in their junior year of high school go to the restroom during class more than twice a semester because he thought they would be skipping class. Multiple people ended up bleeding onto their chairs because he didn't let anyone leave.
8. All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Teacher
After appearing to get bored of reciting facts and figures from a textbook, my teacher suddenly slams his book shut, presses the power button on the computer, and says “Let’s go play some football”.
What a beautiful time I lived in then.
7. Having a Blast
I had a science teacher who almost blew up a chemistry lab because she carelessly left the gas on. She then sued the school for alleged discrimination when they tried to fire her as a result of this.
6. Teacher’s Pet
My teacher got impregnated by an 18-year-old senior student and then married him after the school year. I mean, it was technically legal—but still!
5. A Poet Who Didn’t Know It
I wrote a term paper about violence in schools. I got an A on the assignment and then pretty much forgot about it. Sometime later, another teacher congratulated me for getting published. Huh???? Published? What are you talking about? I was then shown my own work published in a magazine—under my teacher’s name. She had never asked my permission to use my work, nor had she even informed me of these intentions.
She was forced to write me an apology letter.
4. No Comment
For two years, I went to a local community college. In my first semester, I took English Composition. I've always been strong at reading and writing, so I looked forward to the class. My classmates were awesome. The instructor was another story. She was young and fresh out of her graduate program. She did lots of things that were super unprofessional, but this one definitely stood out as the worst.
She had a personal blog where she wrote about her life and how woke she was. She gave us an assignment that we had to comment on three of her blog posts weekly. That was bad enough, but it gets worse. We had to turn in a paper for something else and many people did poorly on it. So, she blogs about how awful we all are on the blog that she knew we would all see!!
My classmates respond by going off in the comments section about her bad teaching and her ridiculous assignments. It was incredible to watch. The rest of the semester was very awkward, but at least I made some good friends.
3. Doing Everything but Her Job
Our senior math teacher was a very nice lady, but the only time she ever actually taught was when the principals would inspect her class. She let everyone cheat on tests, didn’t care if we were on our phones, ate during class, watched movies, played charades, left class whenever she wanted, joked around with everyone, cursed a lot, and just let everyone pass at the end of the year.
2. The Sandman
My primary school headmaster wanted to show how rough sandpaper was, so he ran it down a student's face.
It took about a year for the damage to heal.
1. Jumping for Joy
My French teacher threatened to throw herself down the stairs if we didn't shut up. She actually ran out of the room and climbed over the railing, but another teacher stopped her from actually jumping.
Sources: Reddit, ,
