When I was in fourth grade I had a teacher who was the size of Larry Csonka. Her name was Mrs. Hill. She looked like she should’ve been in a ladies’ prison, and called “Big Maude.” It was just a wall of humanity, large but surprisingly fleet of foot. A couple of times during the year she roared at Tammy, a messy little girl, to stand up. Then she grabbed Tammy’s desk and began shaking it violently, like King Kong. All the papers and notebooks and clackers and four-color pens came raining down. Then she bellowed, “Now, clean it up! And be neat about it this time!!” It was fairly terrifying.
I remember seeing Mrs. Hill out of context a few times, and it was also disturbing. At that point in my life I never considered that teachers were real people, who lived out… you know, in the actual world, like everybody else. But I saw Mrs. Hill coming out of a grocery store once, with a cig dangling. Smoking like a goddamn longshoreman. Another time, a few years later, I was out wandering the streets, lookin’ for trouble, and noticed her walking down an alley carrying a 12-pack of beer. She stepped on a rock, rolled an ankle, muttered some profanities, and continued on. She was a hard woman.
But, as amazing as it might seem, she was the fourth grade voice of reason at our school. ‘Cause the other woman who taught that grade was completely out of her mind.
They were trying to prepare us for Jr. High, I think, and made us change classes for reading that year. So, at a certain point every day most of us would go over to the other teacher’s class, and some of her students would come to ours. And she was completely wacked-out.
She would often start the sessions by making each one of us say something nice about another person in the room, in front of everyone. I remember a kid named Billy saying, “Jeff, I like your belt.” Ha! Weird. And after the praising was completed, we’d settle in and listen to her tell us about the high-end dinners she and her husband had at fancy restaurants in Charleston. This segment often took up the remainder of the time.
And how weird is that? She’d go into detail about the food, how it was prepared, the impossible tenderness of the meat, etc. She told us we need to insist on “the finer things,” so it was ostensibly a lesson of some sort. But we were 9 year old hicklet children. We just ate baloney sandwiches, and shit like that. It all felt wildly out of place.
I remember her talking, at length, about cherries jubilee. And when she’d say the words, she’d lapse into some super-affected old money accent, like something out of a movie. Cherries jubilee?! I still don’t know what that is. I’m more of an Oreo Blizzard guy.
And when she wasn’t going on and on about her gourmet meals, she was talking about pinworms. That was another of her favorite subjects. It would usually start with her yelling at someone, “Sit still and quit squirming! What’s the matter with you, do you have pinworms?” WTF??
She told us that almost every kid has pinworms living in their intestines, and they look like pieces of white thread. They come out at night, she said, and our parents could check us by shining a flashlight up our asses. I can’t remember the exact words she used, but that was the gist of it. Or, we were told, if (for some reason) that prospect made us feel uncomfortable, we could put a strip of black electrical tape across our buttholes before bed. When we woke up the next morning, we could check the tape and see if there were any pinworms stuck to it. And if you think I’m making any of this up, you’d be wildly mistaken.
She was crazy, straight up. In fact, I believe she was eventually committed to a wacky shack somewhere. It was long after I was out of school, but I remember hearing about it and not being at all surprised.
I need to go now. It’s super-late, and I need to hit the Devil’s Parkway.
If you have anything on crazy-ass teachers, please share. Also, what are your thoughts on teachers out of context? Did that make you feel weird, too? Please use the comments to bring us up to date on it.
And I’ll see you guys again soon.
Have a great day!
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Not a crazy teacher, but on our first day of 8th grade we had a new teacher, probably her first job. She taught literature, and had a nice body. She wore a brown leotard with a long skirt. Imagine Suzanne Sommer in Threes Company ( minus the face). All we saw were her nipples popping out of the thin fabric. Her bra did nothing to neuter her nubs. Don’t remember her ever wearing that again, but my friends and I will always cherish that first day of school.
You reading Gunga Din in that class is one of the funniest moments I’ve ever experienced. I could NOT stop laughing.
DIN, DIN, DIN!
I had an art teacher like that, but it wasn’t a one off occurrence, it was short skirts and tight shirts all the time. With adult hindsight she knew exactly what she was doing!
Oh, the absolute joy I feel when I read some of your finer posts, Jeff. This one brought back memories of elementary school and my mother looking at my butthole, checking for pin worms. Seems like we had to take some medicine for a few days and wear cotton panties (I’m not sure what the cotton had to do with anything). I only remember this happening one time, thankfully. My mother wasn’t the “kinky” type that enjoyed this sort of thing. I think you should have covered head lice also. That is one thing I never had to deal with but was told that a couple of the lesser fortunate kids on our bus suffered the malady. Makes me shiver to think about it.
I did have a couple of psycho teachers. The one I remember the most is the one that the entire class, for some reason, decided to “gang up” on and really give her a hard time. We were real assholes for 5th graders. I remember discovering her in the girls bathroom several times, crying her eyes out. I would imagine that was the end of her teaching career. The sad part is that it was her first year to teach. I can still remember how she looked with her tightly permed blond curls. Her name was Miss Conway. I can’t believe I remember her name from that far back.
Cant remember a teacher out of context story but I did see my gynecologist at the neighbors Christmas party. Hoo boy that was weird.
My high school biology teacher informed us about all the mites living on our bodies, particularly the nose mites.
I had a Jr. high music teacher who was a hippie type, and one day he went away. I was told he was suspended after throwing vitamins at the students.
When we accompanied the youngest kid to high school orientation, they had us go to each of her classrooms, and listen to an introductory talk by the teachers. Every one of them had some sort of psychological personality disorder. Some used intimidation, some used lines from movie sports coaches, some revealed too much, and they all acted like this was the most important moment of these kids’ lives.
I went to a Catholic grammar school so my teacher experiences grades 1-8 were with nuns. Most of them were very nice, like having your grandma teaching class. Our 5th grade teacher stands out as an sadistic exception. Her prior teaching service was in urban St. Louis, …even in the ’50s this was not a gold mark on your CV. Her favorite trick was to sneak up behind you, grab your ear and slam your forehead onto the desktop…a World Wide Wrestling, Vin Diesel kind of move. One of my buddies had some serious wingnut ears, easy mark for a treacherous teacher. After one of her tuneups, he came back to school with ear and nose bandages like 10 year old after a botched facelift. We were scared shitless. Folks in our area at the time knew nothing of lawyers. Most probably had similar experiences when they were in school. No big deal. Our teacher never smiled…more of a bony Gestapo officer giving a tooth grinding grimace. After about 5 more cage matches, she was sent packing. It was rumored that she didn’t like having boys in her class.
Think her sibling taught me in the seventh grade – Sister Blandina. Hit the boys, but only shook us girls. My brain still rattles a bit from that.
When I was a kid we lived in an Italian Catholic neighborhood. We were neither Italian nor Catholic, but all the other kids were both. I remember one summer, some kids were playing school. One little girl played the teacher / nun. Her take on the the role was to angrily shout “God loves you!” while whacking the other kids with a ruler. Method or character? I’m still not sure.
Jeff,
I had a middle school teacher whose name I will not mention out of respect for his surviving family, who was absolutely NUTS! The guy operated under the delusion that he was a golf pro whose talent had never been recognized and teaching was just an annoyance that kept him off the golf course.
Anyhow, this guy’s face would turn a shade of red / purple that I had never seen before or since in any human when angry. Needless to say, middle school boys had a certain talent to get under his skin pretty rapidly. When provoked, this guy would grab the offender’s desk, rock it up and down, spin it in a circle, and sling the desk across the floor, out the door, and into the metal lockers across the hall! These became known as “Bronco Rides.” Anyone student who attended North Middle School in Martinsburg, WV knows about this!
I grew up in a town of 400 people, so everyone knew everyone else;teachers out of context was a normal occurence. The high school coach/driver ed teacher and the principal’s assistant/English substitute teacher(married couple) lived next door to us for a time and I baby-sat their 3 little kids sometimes. We had a few teachers who were a little off, but none were totally out there as far as I can remember.
The only wacky teacher would have been an art teacher in high school. We always said it was too much paint fumes. OCD, and in hindsight, probably suffered a nervous breakdown. She’d get mad about something, and stomp her foot like a little brat would and go off on a shreik fest about it for a minute or so and then regain her composure.
My sixth grade art teacher used to waltz through the classroom and sing during class, then spend her lunch break spacing out at her desk.
One lunch break, the QUARTERBACK jumped onto one of the art tables, dropped his pants (and underwear) to his ankles, flashing the class nerd (me) as a joke.
The teacher was sitting six feet away, and didn’t notice.
Her arrest (the following summer) for marijuana growth and distribution came as no surprise whatsoever.
Had a 6th grade math teacher who never mentally returned from Vietnam and was screaming and yelling at kids for not memorizing the multiplication tables. He slung a little oriental girl across the room in her desk for a wrong answer. Life was good back then. I think his name was Mr. Tribers ELWMS
This is more of a reverse on the premise, but still a good story. I spent my 8th grade year in a blue-collar suburb of far east Houston. The school district had multiple oil refineries within its boundaries, and when they paid taxes, the school facilities were top notch, and the teachers were well compensated.
As a result, some teachers believed themselves to be superior, especially my AP English teacher Mrs. Horne. She was so smug and condescending, even when addressing other teachers. She had it in for me for some reason, my best guess was that my Dad was a coach at the high school. She was a real stickler about everything with me…conduct. grades, I never got A’s on anything written, only grammar and non-subjective tests and assignments.
At one point, we had to write a short story. So I followed the outline she provided and wrote a comedy in short order, about teenage friends in a John Hughes sort of vein. We had 3 class days, and I handed mine in at the beginning of the second day. It was pretty funny, irreverent, but a pretty half-asset effort. She immediately snatched it out of the basket, and started carving it up with a red pen.
Instead of just giving me a lousy grade, she used it as an example to the class of how NOT to do the assignment, read the entire story to the class with full disclosure of what was wrong with it, then ripped it to shreds and threw it in trash. Mrs. Horne then informed me that I had until the original deadline to submit another, just as smug and satisfied as she could be. I was pissed.
So I got out my notebook, and started furiously crafting a story about a teacher at a school in the frontier during the 1800s named Ms. Bugle. She was the only teacher at the schoolhouse, and was an insufferable bitch to everyone. All of the students hated her, and so did all of the townsfolk. One day everyone got fed up with her, bound her, and burned her at the stake in the town square. It was a cause for great celebration and rejoicing, and there was a square dance, while children played tag, her ghastly screams as a soundtrack to it all.
I handed it in at the end of the 3rd day when everyone else did. As soon as I arrived at school the next day, the principal pulled me into his office. Mr. Hurst knew Mrs. Horne was a bitch, and when I told him my side of the story…I sensed that he was rather amused. I got 3 licks, was demoted to a regular English class, and had to go over to the high school to the guidance counselor a few times. I never spoke to Mrs Horne again, so everything worked out splendidly.
I recall a teacher who use to put dead birds in the freezer and claimed he was going to bring them back from the dead.
Larry Csonka was one of my early childhood heroes. I think I read a book about him when I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade.
No crazy teachers that I can recall, but there was one psycho principal: Pastor Walker of St. Stephen’s Lutheran elementary school in Brooklyn. My parents pulled me out of there right quick.
There were of course the de rigueur strict teachers of whom all of us kids were terrified, but that’s more or less normal. They weren’t evil or abusive, just strict. I’ll name Miss Hartney and Mrs. O’Donnell, because I’m pretty sure they are both long dead. Although Miss Hartney seemed to be about 200 years old when I was in third grade in 1966, so who knows.
Had one high school Physics teacher (man) who, on the first day of each semester, would move all of the attractive young girls in skirts up to the front row, where they were obligated to stay for the rest of the semester. Even us guys felt bad for them. Had another teacher in middle school who kept a flask in his desk drawer and made it known to the entire class that it was impossible to fail his class unless you bothered him (you know, with school stuff). Even tho the entire school knew all of this, it took several years for him to get canned (gotta love tenure). And had another middle school teacher who was one of the first to get into the recycling thing in the seventies. He had all of the used styrofoam trays from the cafeteria being shredded and used for mulch. Needless to say, every windy day blew that crap all over the entire school grounds. So much easier to remember those teachers than all the good, conventional ones…