Who was your strangest/oddest teacher in high school?

[gr8dane_daddy]

Or professor in college?

For me, we had a teacher by the name of Mr. Harrell. He was our world history teacher in my junior year. He was a folksy type who often blurted weird old folk talk to the class. For example, we all taking a test when Mr. Harrell blurted out that he was going to do something for his wife that night. Looking at this as an opportunity to avoid taking the class, we asked him what he was going to do. I quote "Class, I'm gonna take my wife out and eat her out!" Of course he meant he was going to take her out to eat at some restaurant but in weird old folk speak, it came out differently. You can imagine the giggles and snickering emanating from a group of innocent 17 yr olds. The next day, we asked how his evening with the misses went. He said...and I quote, "Yes class, I took her out and ate her real good." More giggles and snickering...ah yes, life in a small west texas town.

[Not_Giving_Up]

1. Mr. Allen...Ecomonics, Senior Year

First of all, he could have been Uncle Fester's twin, but that's not the weird part. The first day of class, he greeted everyone at the door and told us to pick a seat, it was where we were going to sit for the semester, no moving. Of course, those who were likely to cause trouble headed for the back of the room, and the nerds (including me) went for the front. He asked if we were happy with our seats, no one complained...then he told us that he taught from the back of the room. That class was a literal pain in my neck for weeks. I liked the class, and I did well, but I couldn't take craning around while he taught. So, I would complete the assignments in advance over the weekend, then when he was going over them in class, I'd be head-down on my desk, napping. He'd call on me, I'd pop up, give the correct answer and crash back out. He kept me after class one day to ask me how I could always give him the right answer from a dead sleep. I wasn't completely asleep, I heard what was going on, but it just amazed him. I told him that if he taught from the front of the class I'd stay awake. He didn't, so neither did I. (By the way, I made straight A's in his class!)

[mad-mommy]

2. a nun we called benny hill...

she was rude and nasty, and made comments about Archie Bunker, don't ask... When she started getting forgetful, we told her we forgot to say prayers, we landed up saying prayers every 5 minutes in class.

[WindRavenX]

3. My chem teacher

He loved blowing shit up in class.

And he had a glass eye-- never found out why, but I think I know why...

[idgiehkt]

4. my beloved physics teacher, Mr Loy

This man loved physics...he was so passionate about it. He taught us things in the weirdest way... about opposing forces by standing on one side of the room and running across it through the open classroom door, meeting no resistance, of course.
Then he closed the door, went to the other side of the room , got a running start and crashed headlong into the closed door.

He always had some stunt like that lined up to teach with...he was a hoot. Strange, but effective.

[bicentennial_baby]

5. Mr. Vandervliet, US History, High School

The BEST and FREAKIEST teacher ever!! Waxed his head, his wife left him 'cause he treated her like a maid/servant, but he taught me sooooo much! And, he used Zinn's People's History of The US as a textbook. :D

[Lady Effingbroke]

6. Dr. Dredge, junior year (86-87), consumer math.

Oh, how I wish I had a picture of this poor, tormented (by us) man!

Thick glasses, bad comb-over (is there a good one?), plaid sports coats, wide ties, polyester slacks - poor Doc was stuck in a time warp from 1975!

I think we drove him to an early retirement.

[Broken_Hero]

7. Mr. Runningwolf

math teacher, in college...

"Now, don't be getting all mystical on me!"....this was his favorite saying.

[wickerwoman]

8. Mr. Yeager, high school history

and Knowledge Bowl coach.

He was only a few years from retirement when I had him. He had travelled all over the world and basically just showed us slides from his trips every day. He lived in Afghanistan for years and his wife was from Pakistan I think and blind from birth. He showed us slides of the Khyber Pass and I decided I really, really wanted to live abroad. And he had this great 1960 VW van that he used to drive us around in when we had a Knowledge Bowl meet at another school. A lot of students thought he was boring and gave him a hard time but he was the first teacher I ever had that really knew their subject in and out and had a real passion for it. All of my other teachers were into fuzzy, touchy feely "group projects" which meant they could just sit at their desks grading presentations. Mr. Yeager lectured but his life was so interesting he could get away with it.

[LibDemAlways]

9. My high school...where do I start.....

Mrs. Reed (Drama) - Wore a dress with a big colorful turkey on the front. We called her "gobble, gobble Reed."

Mr. Owens - Economics teacher who never got around to teaching economics. His classes were bullshit sessions about everything but.

Really nasty, mean school librarian, (can't remember her name), but everyone was scared shitless of her (including the teachers) and no one ever went into the library as a result.

The all time weird-o, however, was a college prof (whose name escapes me) who was obsessed with sex and would even discuss, in vivid detail, his sexual escapades with his wife.

Another very elderly English prof in college would repeat the same lecture two or three times and would wander in with his fly unzipped. I felt sorry for him.

[Hardrada]

10. Wolfgang Weilgart

Professor of Psychology. Viennese originally, knew 18 languages and invented one of his own called Aoui (which he said he had been taught by beings who came to Earth in a flying saucer.). Eventually his courses were all entirely about Aoui. He would make interesting comments too like, "Sex is not loffly if you are vith a toad or a Frankenshtein's Monster!" He once travelled across the country in his pajamas seeking to return a spoon to someone who also believed in UFO's. (Another instructor in my college!).

[TheMightyFavog]

11. Mr S, History.

He kept a set of pillories in his classroom. (I think he still does to this day, IIRC.) If you got caught insulting someone in his classroom, you had a choice of 20 minutes detention or 2 minutes in the pillories. He also had a habit of keeping a thermos full of water on hand to dump on people he caught sleeping in class.

[achtung_circus]

12. One stands out

but there are a few honourable mentions.

Mr. Yamaguchi had lost the 2 middle fingers of his right hand as a child. He had grown up in an internment camp during WW II.

What he told classes, was that Kamikaze pilots "gave" those fingers to the Emperor prior to their final mission. He had had those fingers amputated but the war had ended before he was able to crash his plane into the fleet of the US Navy.

Mr. Fitch kept a bottle of vodka in his desk that he pretended was mouthwash. 'Nuff said.

Mr. Sood, a nice man, had taught medical school in India but high school science was the best he could get in Canada.

At the beginning of grade 9 he was on and off for a while for medical reasons and ended up teaching us measurement (AKA mayurement) 3 times. Boy, did we know the metric system.

Mrs. Greenburg, supply teacher. We could wind her up, and did. One day we had her so distraught she was attempting to contact the principal via what she thought was the intercom. Thing was, she was yelling "Mr Hampton, Mr. Hampton" into the thermostat.

AND THE WINNER IS:

Mr. Silk. A slimy creep, who got caught molesting young girls. He would wander around the classroom gazing down cleavages and making comments. Apparently he took it farther, too. He got caught.

[ForrestGump]

13. Possibly the high-strung mathematics teacher who, among other things,

pulled a knife on a student. :D

What a doofus he was.

We had a few odd ones, though.

[1gobluedem]

14. Mr. Devlin, Latin teacher

He called everyone 'birds' and showed endless slides of that Manneken Pis statue in Belgium wearing costumes from different countries.

[NewJeffCT]

15. Mr. Lazar, high school English

Actually a good teacher, but had a hairstyle almost reminiscent of Alfalfa from "Little Rascals"

He would continually tell us that we were all going to fail college English, and he would harangue me, in particular, because I did so well on the verbal piece of my SATs that he felt I was underperforming in his class. (which was true)

And, his high school English class was tougher than any of the 4 English classes I took in college (I was only required to take 2, but I took extras as electives, which was odd for an accounting major!)

[MrCoffee]

16. That would be my German teacher....she threw the book at me once

literally. she threw a textbook at me. she dressed like a gypsy, you could hear her a mile away from all the jangly bracelets and necklaces and bling. She would play these really bizarre German industrial songs during the exams to get us in the mood. She's actually the only HS teacher I remember.

[NewWaveChick1981]

17. Mr. Nixon, my 10th-grade English teacher.

He looked like John Lennon (glasses and all) but with short hair. Our class projects centered around analyzing rock song lyrics. :yoiks: He resigned his teaching job at the end of that year, and about six months later, I had to pick up my mother at the airport. (This was back when you could actually go to the gates and wait for people.) Mom's flight was late, so I went over to the snack bar and got a Coke. I sat down, and who was playing pinball at the machine about 20 ft away? Mr. Nixon. :yoiks: He sat and talked to me for a long time, and apparently he was "finding himself." He quit teaching to just take time off and enjoy himself, and he was trying to decide if he wanted to get a master's degree or not. I was 16 at the time, and he was probably mid-20s, and I think he'd had a crush on me before---and he certainly had one at the airport, too. It made me uncomfortable at that age that a teacher would have had a crush on me and have it be that obvious, so I told him it was good to see him again and wished him luck. I waited the rest of the time at the gate where Mom's plane was coming in. I've never seen him since then.

[idgiehkt]

24. please don't stand so

close to me...

"and he certainly had one at the airport, too." :rofl:

[NewWaveChick1981]

28. LOL!

:rofl: Yeah, it was kind of weird. I mean, I was 15 when he was my teacher and 16 when I saw him at the airport. :yoiks:

[formerrepuke]

18. "Mr T"..Jr H.S. science teacher, circa 1977. Spent a whole year

teaching "metric conversion".. because "the whole country is going to be using metrics by 1985." It would have been easier just to teach metrics, instead of that moronic conversion.

[martymar64]

19. Mr. Wendle - High School Biology

He was a geeky looking fellow but would always be able to keep your attention in class. He use to have a dance to explain the different phases of cell division. One year we surgically neutered a cat to explain anatomy (Don't worry . . . we took all precautions for the cat and used anesthesia. The cat recovered wonderfully and lived for many more years.)

[judaspriestess]

20. I can't remember his name oddly

but it was the asshole who asked me if I would let him perform oral sex on me. I was 14 in the ninth grade and he was in his late 30's early 40's and my history teacher. Disgusting.

[kwassa]

21. a couple come to mind ....

They both seem to be French teachers, which is why I did so poorly in French ...

One was from North Carolina, and would speak French with an accent from the Deep South, always interesting. She was a genius at spotting kids who weren't paying attention, who would be the first ones she called on, of course, while looking in the other direction. We thought she had eyes in the back of her head.

The other one didn't want to teach at all. She tested us on a multiple choice test, and used the wrong key in grading the tests. We all failed, of course. She refused to admit her mistake and re-correct the tests.

Similar to the OP, we had a long term sub who talked about wearing rubbers in the rain, something that we in our juvenile humor thought was hilarious. She couldn't understand why we were laughing.

[LibertyLover]

22. My geometry teacher - Mr. Gabriel

The man was weird - he spent the first 3 days of class going over his rules for the classroom. Not just 'no talking in class' or 'no turning around', but things like you had to have 2 sharpened pencils in the pencil holder on the desk with their points facing the window, math book in the right upper corner, homework on the left upper corner and notebook, unopened, in the center. He walked around each day collecting the homework and checking the placement of stuff. If you were coming into class and the bell rang indicating the period had begun (we had 3 minutes' hall passing time and I had gym right before his class so we never got out on time) you had to stop so he could measure how far into the room and how far out of the room (a decorative tile strip ran across the place where the door sill would have been, and that was the centerline, so to speak) your feet were. More than 50% you were on time, less and you were late and got detention. Of course everyone behind you was now late and got detention. He bullied kids in the class, calling one girl a clown and another Jesus Christ because her initials were JC.

His bullying is what finally got him fired. In another class he started claiming that one of the girls was pregnant because she was gaining weight. It was actually water retention from cortisone she was taking. Her boyfriend taped the abuse over the course of a several weeks and her father presented it to the Board of Education, saying that either they fired the guy or he would take the matter to court. Even though Mr. G. had tenure, the BoE decided enough was enough and terminated his contract.

I got him one day - if we were having a pop quiz we had to sit in our desks, heads forward, hands on the desk and not move until he had handed us the quiz and told us to start. One day he was handing out a quiz and I had a nosebleed. It was just a torrent. I tried to find my pocketbook which had tissue in it but couldn't without turning around and looking. I made the decision to do it and just as I had found it Mr. G turned around, saw me not sitting and staring straight ahead and squealed like a stuck pig (Mr. G. had had polio as a child and had a peculiar twist to his walk that was somewhat effeminate as well as a high pitched voice - an unfortunate combination). I popped up, blood pouring from between my fingers which were clamped to the nose. He squealed again, ran to his cabinet and threw a box of tissue at me. I was not allowed to go to the nurse because we had the quiz to take. The quiz did not last the entire class and Mr. Gabriel spent the rest of the class lecturing me on how my breaking pre-quiz posture had been understandable but neither I nor anyone else was to think they could get away with it under any other circumstances. I never did learn much in the way of geometry.

A few years later the father of a good friend of mine stopped in at the tavern after work with friends to have a beer. He saw an acquaintance at the bar visibly distraught and obviously drinking, something he normally did not do. Mr. Elwell asked what was wrong to which the guy replied that his daughter, a girl who had been a grade or two ahead of me in school, had called that morning to tell her parents that she and Mr. Gabriel had gotten married. Mr. Elwell, who had had one or two run-ins with Mr. Gabriel during the years his son and daughter were in school, understood the drinking completely, as did all of us who heard the news.

[warrens]

23. My math teacher ran off with a senior the day school ended

Both male. That blew minds in a small NH town. He was about 55 or so.

[gmoney]

25. Marvin...

Had a civics teacher I'll just call Marvin, who was a real nerd and the class didn't give him any respect. One day the bell rang and everyone was sitting and chatting because he uncharacteristically was not in the classroom. This goes on for about 5 minutes when the door to the phone booth sized supply closet at the front of the room opens and he steps out. Apparently, he'd been hiding in there to listen in on the conversations that he presumed were about him. That's my best (and least disgusting) guess at what he was up to in there...

[Sanity Claws]

26. Sister Mary Immaculate

She taught music appreciation in my high school. She fell asleep in class twice while music was playing. All of us looked around at each other and wondered what we should do. We giggled a lot and used the time to pass notes to each other.
Our nickname for her was "Big Mac"

[ZombieNixon]

27. Ms. Delahunty - World Geography 9th grade and World History 11th grade

She's an immigrant from Ireland with a very thick accent which we made fun of her for a lot (she took it all in stride). She was a great teacher, very enthusiastic, but kind of crazy, in a good way. We still keep in touch occasionally. She's a great friend of my mother, too. :D

[noonwitch]

29. Too many weird ones to name in a heading

There was Mr. Skar, the middle school science teacher who would make girls rub his neck during class. Really, though, he only made the girls do it whose parents couldn't afford a lawyer to sue. He asked me, I told him he must really want to meet my dad's lawyer.

There was Mr. Begerow, the middle school history teacher, who got fired about 10 years ago for sleeping with 8th graders. I was lucky enough to get the other teacher and only deal with him once in a while.

There was Mrs. Miller, an excellent teacher, but strange woman. She wore so much perfume, you could smell her coming a mile away. She hated the textbooks that the school provided and had an on-going memo she was writing to MacMillan listing every single grammatical mistake in their 8th grade grammar textbook.

There was my german teacher, who will remain nameless, who spent a good part of her summers in the loony bin.

There was the high school english teacher who taught me how to write a very good paper, but was also known for going to rock concerts with students and smoking weed with them.

Mr. Young, the teacher I had for AP English my senior year, was quite a character. He was also a great teacher. He would give us a reading assignment, then open class the next day with "So, what did you think?". He hated taking attendance, claiming that "they told me I was teaching a college-level class. College instructors don't take attendance". I credit him for my learning to read poetry and Shakespeare from an analytical viewpoint.

I had some other very good teachers who weren't characters, like my orchestra teacher.

[L A Woman]

30. my 9th grade math teacher with the electric car

Mr. Ames - he was this little, highly effeminate gay man who drove an eeny weenie electric car and plugged it in at a little old lady's house when he was in class. He SWORE that soon there would be no more cars that ran on gas and he was way ahead of his time. This was 1981. he was more ahead of his time than he thought. :-)

[LadyoftheRabbits]

31. Mr. Geckeler

Math, sophomore year. He'd stand on his desk to prove a point as well as spray water from a spray bottle at students who were talking. I got a big kick out of him :P

[driver8]

32. In 7th grade I had an English teacher who used to practice her yoga at the

front of the class while she was teaching. A friend of mine and I sat in desks in the front of the room and she would often sit on our desks while she talked. We were treated to a few "crotch shots" throughout the year. She was an older woman but in very good shape.

[China_cat]

33. Mr. Bobbin

My art teacher. As a child he had escaped from Russia with his family when Stalin took over. He told us horrifying tales of going over mountains in winter and leaving several members of the family dead in the snow.

He was also an absolute horror until you caught on to his methods. He'd go around to everybody's work and you'd hear 'uh huh', 'uh, um' and the like and then he'd come to one that he'd go into fits over. Mixing Russian and English epithets, he'd pull the work off the easel and tear it up telling you what a piece of shit it was and how you were a talentless hack. Then he'd throw the confetti of your drawing all over you. It took quite a while to figure out that he only did this with the students he felt really had talent and he wanted to see if they had the passion to be true artists.

[u4ic]

34. Mr Monroe

Had a lot of addiction problems, went to Africa for a couple of years as a missionary (not the odd part); came back and loved to tell us in graphic detail about all the maladies that he succumbed to there.

I've never heard anyone that thrilled to talk about the runs...:shrug:

[sendero]

35. A bunch..

.... but my favorite would be Mr. Cox, a black Distributed Education (where you get to get a job and only go to school half time) teacher in an almost all white school.

He was a treasure. He would infuse us with such homilies as "if your boss wants you to get dirty, get in there and get dirty - it'll all come out in the wash". Or the time he complained of being a little under the weather but then added "it ain't nothing Johnny Walker won't take care of".

Everyone liked this guy, he was great!

[Iris]

36. I once had this philosophy professor who used Whitney Houston as an

example in every point he was trying to illustrate. I was never sure if he had a thing for her or if he somehow thought he was getting on our level by referring to a pop start in his examples!

[Jamastiene]

37. Mr. Jones was my Radio/TV teacher.

He suggested we put rocks in our mouth. He told us to stuff them in there like hamsters. He was trying to teach us not to talk "lazy" and to speak clearly. I don't believe any of us used rocks, but I did use grapes and practiced that way. I just couldn't get over his suggestion to do that. I thought it was hilarious at the time. It wouldn't have happened with me even if I had wanted to try it. My mother said the rocks would scrape the enamel off my teeth and open them up to decay easier. She was probably right too.

[tinfoil tiaras]

38. Hmm..school story time!

Okay, well Mrs. Stupka for 7th grade english was strange in a bad way. She smelled like cigarette smoke covered up with perfume. :puke:

Also, Mrs. Hollis for 7th grade science. It's CORE-AL, not KAH-RLLL. And TORNADO, not TORNADER.

And, Mrs. Chapman for 8th grade science. She was really ADD. She talked about California alot.

Don't really have many strange teachers this year, or at least it seems that way. All I've got to say is that Journalism is SUPER intimidating & Mr. Albright is ADORABLE (imho).

Once again, i REALLY hope none of my teachers read DU.... :looks around suspiciously:

[catbert836]

39. So far? Dr. Jamie Borowicz, Art Appreciation

He's one of the most intelligent men I've met, and is a high school art teacher (well, okay, he teaches at the college too) despite having a Ph.D. in Anthropology. He's very liberal, but has some unique mannerisms: he rides his mountain bike to school everyday, teaches in a paint-covered smock, and is disdaining of social conventions such as religion (despite being at a Catholic school) and romantic love (he thinks we invented it to make sex less disgusting in our minds). I'm taking Art History from him this year, my first class is on Thursday.

[Gatchaman]

40. Shop Teacher

Made guns as a side business. Hand bore barrels, the works. Spent most of his time at school working on guns. Cursed like a sailor. Told the principal to go fuck his grandmother. His daily mantra was "I want to leave here and never come back."

In retrospect, he was probably the best teacher that shithole school had.

[GRLMGC]

41. Drama teacher

We had lots of reject teachers at my high school but this guy took the cake. He'd waste 3/4 of the period telling pointless stories and we hardly did any work. He has terribly ill-tempered as well. Once, he knocked over a podium over a student in anger. He was also inappropriate with the girls in the class.

[spacelady]

43. Sounds like my Drama teacher except he was inappropriate with

boys in the class. Messed with the wrong one & was fired.

[graywarrior]

42. Art teacher. We'd lock him in the coat room til he cried.

[yellowdogintexas]

44. without doubt my Latin teacher, who unfortunately had some

sort of neuromuscular disability which made him very swaybacked, and he walked rather like Big Bird. Also he would appear to be looking in an entirely different direction than he was actually so it was very disconcerting. Needless to say we were fairly cruel in that sadistic high school way. It was a fun class, sometimes

[Ouabache]

45. Well first there was the biology teacher named Homer Niflis, and

of course we all called him Homer Syphlis.

Then there was the English teacher whose first name was Hobart who beat off in the urinals in the boys room, so when the basketball team went to the state finals, the Spirit Committee hung a banner outside his room that read, "Hobart says: BEAT 'EM !!"

And then there was the Health teacher my freshman year, an older gentlemen from an older day who encouraged the guys to be sure to inspect the teeth of any girl we might want to marry because if she had bad teeth and gums we were going to end up spending a lot for dental care for her in the future, and we might want to reconsider and pick a wife with better dental health. He was dead serious too, his wife was the latin teacher and she DID have bad teeth...

I had a math professor in college who brought snacks to class and always had a tupperware container filled with some ungodly concoction of honey mustard and garlic that he dipped the snacks into. I'm sure vampires never got him.

My English Comp teaching assistant in college had, by far, the biggest knockers I EVER saw before or since on any woman and I'll be honest, I've been on the lookout for a long time.