The oldest Secret is on a multi-day field trip at the moment, and it’s going to be weird not having him making his enormous noise around here. In fact, the whole thing makes me mildly uneasy. He’s never been away from us for an extended period, except with my parents.
But I’m sure it’ll be fine. I mean, they’re in the hands of school teachers…. Level-headed, responsible school teachers…
Holy shit! We’ll never see him again!!
But seriously, folks. They’re not allowed to bring cell phones, and can’t have any outside contact whatsoever. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I can certainly understand it from the school’s perspective; they don’t want distractions and constant interruptions by overprotective parents. But at the same time… it feels a little like a hostage situation.
What do you think?
I went on a similar trip when I was in sixth grade, to Washington D.C., and had a great time. And I’m almost certain we didn’t have cell phones in 1975. That’s right, isn’t it? They never had rotary-dial mobile phones, did they? But I also can’t recall being under a strict communications lock-down. Ya know?
Coincidentally, a friend sent me this picture a few days ago. It was taken on that same D.C. trip, and as far as I can tell, I’m not in the shot. But who knows? It’s all distorted, like a 1968 album cover. I can’t recognize half the kids in it. In fact, I can’t even discern gender in a couple of cases.
But dig those crazy hats! I think we had to wear them so chaperones could keep track of us easier.
One of my most vivid memories from that trip has nothing to do with the incredible monuments, the sense of history, seeing the White House for the first time, or even the fact Stevie Wonder was staying at our hotel(!).
No, it was a large black woman at a cafeteria where we ate breakfast every morning. She had a tray completely filled with empty glasses, and poured a pitcher of orange juice across the whole thing, just moving from glass to glass with no interruption in flow. So the juice was going in between, as well as into the glasses. Every one of them was just as sticky as hell…
And that’s my most vivid memory from the trip.
I mentioned “level-headed” teachers a few minutes ago, and it was sort of a joke. But only sorta. I have an impression, and I could be wrong, that the teaching profession attracts an inordinately high percentage of kooks.
Am I mistaken about that? What are your thoughts? And if you agree, what do you believe are the reasons? Also, I’d like to know about other kook-heavy professions. We need to make a list. Use the comments section below.
And, just to be fair, I’d like to hear about your good teachers too. I had some really bad ones (Mrs. H.), and a few who blatantly hated me (Mrs. W.), but there were some good ones, as well. One, in particular, encouraged me to write, and was a positive influence. I was a sarcastic little shit, and probably difficult to take, but she went out of her way for me.
Her name is Mrs. Knighton, and she was very pregnant when I had her for English. And check it out, here’s the kid she was carrying. He’s the host of a TV show! Weird, man.
So, tell us about one really bad teacher you had, and one really good one. You know, if you’re so inclined.
And I’m going to link to today’s Mockable post, and call it a day here, folks.
Thanks for the continued support, I appreciate it sincerely.
See ya tomorrow!
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First, second, maybe? this is my beautiful reward for not being in Siberia anymore!!!
2?
Yeah, some teachers are a bit out there. I had one who slammed our classroom door so hard, the window broke. I think he was going through a divorce.
Teachers, hmmm
1. According to a recent poll, teachers are 60% more likely to believe in astrology than the general population.
2. Teachers are the only college graduates that specifically unionize.
3. Ask anyone at any college what the easiest major is.
Best teacher(s): JRB, who taught me chemistry, which I teach today. He made a difficult subject seem easy. And JPP, who showed me I could write, and again I do a lot of that today.
Worst: Mrs. G, in first grade. A mean old cow who pushed kids one tenth her size around in the hallway just for kicks, and she never, ever smiled. Told my parents she thought I was retarded. They went ballistic on her, and we moved to a different school the next year. I’m sure it cost my parents about 15 grand in 1968 dollars to make that move, and I’m also pretty sure Mrs. G was at least half the reason they did it.
If you read the news, there’s a teacher fondling a student every minute in this country and what’s weird is it is mostly female teachers groping male students. The thing that makes we wonder where they got edumacated is that they almost always get caught by sending dirty photos of themselves to each other via cell phone.
When our son went on a 6th grade field trip, his principal, a woman in her 40’s, slept in the same room with him and his class. I thought that was weird but they said without an adult in the room the kids don’t sleep at all on field trips. We insisted on him bringing his cell phone, though, and they relented.
I have fried too many brain cells to clearly remember teachers, but let me be the first to chime in on other occupations that are full of kooks.
-truckdrivers
-gynecologists
-apartment/university/hotel maintenance.
I could go on but those are the one’s that stand out the most in my mind.
In grade 3 I had a male gym teacher who was psycho. He had numerous issues but the one that stands out the worst was that he would always come into the girls change room – if we would try to hide in the washroom to change he would make us change in the hall. Also a girl once wore cut offs and he made her do somersaults so everyone could see her underwear. Once spent the whole class asking what we wanted to do and at the end told us we wasted a whole class. He was an extreme kook, Some of the antics he got away with woulda landed him in the pen today. He had a nasty temper and everyone was afraid of him.
Another memorable teacher was a music teacher in grade 7, she was very timid and everyone would come in to class and start playing instruments as loud as they could – it was pandamonium – she only lasted 2 weeks.
His name was Bill Bass, he was the head of the class and if you gave him sass, he would kick your ass!
Damn good teacher though and fooball coach.
Teachers want to “make change” or control the agenda as they are taught in the socialist indoctrination centers (College), this is where most of the kooks are manufactured.
There are however genuine great people that become great teachers…just not as many as are kooks.
I work in libraries and it’s definitely a hideaway for outcasts, crazies, and people that couldn’t do anything with their liberal arts degree. No offense to other library workers, since I’m one myself, but I’ve found it is full of kooks aplenty, from people talking to themselves and not to others, shitting their pants at work, which comes under hygiene issues, dorks and nerds personified (essays written on “why I love the card catalog”), dudes who wear dresses to work (must have had a nancy mother) to just general human rubbish.
Oh, and I went on a boy-patrol trip back in ’75 to DC also. Can’t remember any of the sights we saw but remember one dude spent every single cent he had at the very first souvenir shop we went to, trio of WV boys coming in to direct contact with our first Moonie (man, that poor dude took some major abuse), and staying up late on Saturday night to watch Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to my nightmare.”
Good: Mrs. Neely, Pre-AP English for both my freshman and sophomore year. She was “old” by our teenager standards but also hip (but not in that “you really don’t realize how old your are” way). I guess the word for that is cool. Mrs. Neely was encouraging and seemed to actually care about the students’ well-being. She organized the prom every year, which is held in the nearest big-city in a club at the top of a skyscraper. No stupid crepe-paper-in-the-gym prom for us!
Bad: Ah, Ms. Crutchfield. French teacher. Crazy. (Why is it always the foreign language teachers!?). Had two cats (Sirky and Spocky), talked to crickets, and was just plain off her rocker. I had her for my freshman and sophomore year. Halfway through the sophomore year, she took a little extended “vacation.” Her very first day back, in our period, we were all out of control (which was common for us, she had no control). There was a ramp-up, we were all complaining loudly about something, and one of the kids (Bruno) can just *see* it on her face and yells “FERME LA BOUCHE!”
Silence, because now we all see it. She’s snapped. She starts gathering up belongings, muttering to herself for a few minutes. Finally looks up at us and yells “go to lunch!” It was our lunch period yet, but we all *jet* out of that room. We go through three lunch periods before someone finally rats it to the principal, who leads us back to the room (which is locked). We had a long-term sub (who knew no French but did a fantastic job at keeping us under control and actually studying a tiny minute amount of the language on our own).
The story is legend in our school, and I’m pleased that I was part of it, the final kaboom. She never came back, though her sister did come to claim whatever she had left.
The next French teacher to come along was baffled as to why we knew so little French and were completely uncontrollable.
I’m going to have to agree with Drug Delivery Guy. Libraries are full of kooks. My degree is in Library Science, but I have found I just don’t fit in with the crowd. I find it important to jive with the work-place culture if you’re do be successful.
So that’s why I’m going into Mortuary Sciences. I’ll let y’all know if the funeral world is full of kooks.
Best and worst were both at DJHS:
Best teacher (by far) was Mr. Yerrid, whom JK has spoken about before in the WVSR. He wouldn’t put up with ANY shit, but taught you in a way that made you want to learn.
Worst was that old hag Miss Lynch, whom JK has also spoken about here. She was very timid, had no personality and was not able to motivate anyone to do classwork, other than just saying “do it”. I walked all over her ass, when in reality, should have gotten clobbered with the aerated paddle.
BTW, I did not get to attend the 6th grade patrol trip with Jeff and the others because I got fired from my post for thowing a kid’s lunch onto the roof of the school. Ah, that trip was for pussies anyway.
I just remembered on that DC trip, another dude had one of those little styrofoam packaging things, which were probably new at the time. He drew eyes on it and said it was his pet sperm. On the last day it jumped off the Capitol steps and committed suicide. The sperm, not the dude.
Eerily similar to a hostage situation, yes!
Mrs Sibberson (grade 5 music teacher) made us learn the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner and we had to spell everything right. Still admire her for that.
I see Jiffy Pop hair waaaay in the back.
I think that Dunbar gal at the front of the picture straddling the railing is experiencing her first orgasm.
Jeff – There were cell phones back in 1975 but they weighed over 2lbs and the coverage was awful. The only people who had them where very rich executives and government officials who traveled by car. The car phone technology was invented back in 1947 and the unit took up most of the trunk so the traveling person didn’t have much room for luggage. Thats why you only saw them in limos. As a matter of fact, the first publisized use of a car phone was in the movie “Sabrina”. Cellular technology would not take off until around 1983.
http://inventors.about.com/cs/inventorsalphabet/a/martin_cooper.htm
My worst teachers were from my brief stint in Catholic school (grades 3-5), the worst being Mrs. G–5th grade–who told us, among other things, that our prayers wouldn’t go to heaven unless our fingers were in the skyward position (guess where the alternate, clasped finger position directs your prayers, kids?). She also frequently had so called “bad eggs” stand in front of the class and would taunt them and their physical attributes until they cried. Mercifully (an answer to one of my skyward prayers?) she had a nervous breakdown early in the Spring and was replaced with a geriatric sub who spent at least two months trying to get us to memorize the Apostle’s (or Nicene?) Creed, and who said “and what have you” at the end of every other statement. Mrs. G is probably in her late sixties now, but I swear if I ever run into her I might give her a karate chop to the neck.
One of my my best teachers, among many, was a high school math teacher who had us write descriptions of all of our class members (he was the only keeper of the author’s name) and compiled all the comments about you from your peers onto one page. This had nothing to do with math, but it was a great way to get us out of our little punk mind fortresses for a few minutes and have us behold the admiration/hatred/apathy that others felt about us. Big ups Mr. K!
I have had several excellent teachers, but the best was Ms. Collison, I had her in 7th and 9th grade for social studies and can’t even remember what the other class was-in MI- She was kind of a tree hugger for most of our tastes, but she opened up a lot of different ways of thinking for a lot of us, a very special individual-she had a lot of confidence in some of us that didn’t exactly deserve it at the time.
The worst-I have two specific ones. Mrs. Jackson, Lake Jackson, TX in early eighties elementary. I always swore if I ever saw her when I became an adult I would tell her to her face what a horrible experience having her as a “teacher” was. The nose-picking hag is probably dead by now. The other wasn’t so bad for ME, but about 10 years after I graduated, he was convicted of having sex with a minor or some such charge. Of course the victim was from one of his classes. I highly doubt it was consensual in any way because he was a highly unpleasant and unnattractive middle aged man….
Wow, I feel like I just had therapy.
As the child of teachers, I was always a little reluctant to be critical of my teachers when I was a kid; I was always encouraged to look at their side of things. Some of them actually knew my Dad, too, and there was always the possibility that we might encounter one or more of my teachers (or potential future teachers) socially. So I usually kept my mouth shut.
Now, thirty years on, I realize just how bad some of them were. Including:
–The drunk music teacher who one day showed us random slides of European Cathedrals and lectured us about ressurrection and the rapture (in a public school!) without even trying to connect it to music in any way. He rarely opened the piano lid in the three years we had him, in fact.
–The woman in second grade who used to confiscate the shoes of anyone who didn’t have them properly tied, and would then encourage other students to mock and tease those who had had their shoes taken.
–The sixth grade teacher who told us during a purported creative writing exercise that she wasn’t interested in anything we had to say, and wished she didn’t have to teach the lesson.
North of the Border our Teachers are all card carrying members of a union so militant they make the UAW look like pussies! They have the wealthiest pension plan in the Country, 3months paid vacation a year, bitch & moan 24/7 about how overworked & underappreciated they are and yet I cant hire a summer student who knows how to spell He is however most aware of his entitlements! Gee I wonder why!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now thatmy rant is over ! We had an English teacher who if you chewed gum in class made you spit it into a box & then take a random piece out of the same box & chew it for the rest of the class! just thinking about it after all these years still make me gag!!!!
@ Swami Bologna – I know I sure was…
@ pagan – you should move to NC, no teacher unions here.
All my teachers were bad, they made learn crap I would never need in life. The best teacher I had was the one who told me that I should find a skill more suited to my race like being a porter or a sanitation engineer instead of being a nuclear engineer. At least she was honestly racist. I never became a Nuclear Engineer but I make more money than they do as a rapper/pimp/mack daddy/drug kingpin. She should be prard ahma repraysentin ma race.
Best and worst teachers are toss-ups. Worst teacher could be my HS drama teacher, Mr. W, who was married to the HS dance teacher. Mr. W had a thing for one student in particular, and they would go into his office, lock the door and get busy. All of us knew about his behavior (hard to ignore), and I have to assume Mrs. W did as well. A few years later, Mr. and Mrs. W were divorced, and Mr. W and his special student were living together in San Francisco. If all this had happened today, Mr. W would be incarcerated and a registered sex offender.
The other candidate for worst teacher was my junior high PE teacher, Ms. B, who ignored my doctor’s note excusing me from the gymnastics segment of the class because I had an illness that affected bone growth and made bending my knees very painful and nearly impossible. Despite all my pleas and protests, Ms. B physically pushed me forward onto the mat when I said I couldn’t do what she was demanding. I ended up flat on my back, the wind knocked out of me, gasping for breath, because as it turns out I really couldn’t do it without the full use of my legs. That day, Ms. B sent a progress report home telling my mother that I was essentially fat and lazy and would be failing. My mother was livid and went to the principal, who was so shocked by the progress report as well as what Ms. B had done to me in the gym, that Ms. B was reprimanded right there in front of us. I immediately got transferred out of that class. If this had happened today, there would have certainly been a lawsuit, but alas, it was 1980.
For best teacher, it’s either Mrs. L, my 9th grade English teacher who was kinda kooky, danced and pliéd around the room while 9 months pregnant, got us into Lord of the Flies and The Odyssey, and had us act out scenes from Romeo and Juliet complete with costumes. Or it could be Mr. R, AP English teacher my senior year, who with his sarcasm and very dark humor got through to me, the quiet misfit in a room full of overachievers, and gave me a little self-confidence. I didn’t realize how spectacular of a teacher he was until I went off to university and found that all the other freshman were just learning all the stuff that Mr. R had taught us. Unfortunately, a year after I graduated, he died while trying to save someone from drowning off the coast of Spain. Truly a loss.
I had a teacher in Junior High Ms. Aagard…eIn the eyes of me and my hormone-filled, I-would-cut-off-my-left-hand-to-see-a-boob friends she was smokin’. She always whore button-up blouses and tight mid-thigh-length skirts with nylons. She always seemed to leave her blouse just unbuttoned enough to drive us up the wall. By third period word would spread through the school of what color of bra she was wearing that day. She also sat on a stool in front of the class while teaching and cross her legs in a way that had us all on the edge of our seats. She was evil… Now if you’ll excuse me…
When I was in college, I was friends with a girl whose mother was a teacher for the students majoring in “Gifted Education” meaning, these people were getting degrees to teach the brightest students. My friend told me that the papers she helped her mother with were chock full of terrible grammar and misspellings. And this was the bunch aiming to teach the “gifted” kids!
@ Brynhildr – Oh I could have had a field day with the EEO folks back then too!
@ Evil Twin’s Wife – Who said you had to be gifted to teach the gifted. Now to teach SPED, you have to be “gifted”.
Rotary dial cell-phone you say? Here’s a link to a page showing you how to build one:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorial_info.php?tutorials_id=51
Along with a link where you can buy a completed version:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=286
Enjoy!
@Shiny Rod – funny thing is that horrible Ms. B was a lesbian and butch, which back then was quite scandalous in such a small town. No one really talked about it, other than in the context of Ms. B moving in with Ms. L, my algebra teacher. All the young girls had some serious misconceptions about lesbians and hated changing in the locker room while Ms. B was up in her office. At some point, I finally figured out that being lesbian didn’t mean she was a pedophile as well, but try explaining that to a bunch of pubescent small town girls, especially when “lesbian” and “pedophile” were not used in polite conversation but rather whispered.
Oh and congratulations on representing your race. Glad to see you’ve done so well for yourself. I’m off to watch Blazing Saddles.
My best teacher had to be Mrs. Royer, who taught home-ec. Even though I didn’t take home-ec classes. She was a so-called pedophile and several of us 17 year old boys had our pipes cleaned by her. She took the Clinton position, that it wasn’t sex if it was oral, so all I ever got was a blowjob. We were in a very small school (only 35 in my graduating class) and everyone seemed to know about it. My second best teacher (Coach Wyatt) would make jokes about to us. She was a looker. Kinda like Nicole Kidman. We were thrilled to have a hot woman like that. Different times, I guess.
My cousin and I spent several school days drinking beer and fishing with Coach Wyatt. So he’s right up there with the BJ whore.
Kook Jobs = DMV, postal service, carnival ride operators, and porn shop clerks.
I am a teacher.
I am a kook, but in a funny way. I just try to have a good time when I am teaching. I also do the Washington DC trip. The kooky stuff I do is to make the class more fun for those that don’t want to sit and read a book and/or take notes for 50 min. I act out scenes, tell stories, make jokes, and things like that.
However, I do see kooks that are kooky 24/7. Lots of them. These are the leftovers from the 60’s and they are thankfully retiring in droves.
I do not belong to the Union, for political and moral reasons. The Union is the thing that lets the kooks keep their jobs.
I hold three college degrees In order of easiest to hardest it goes like this.
1) Business
2) Education
3) History
Finally, most of the complaints I read about teachers are actually traced to the parents. I have plenty of kids that can not read or write. They need help OUTSIDE the classroom. I call parents, try to arrange for free help outside the class, and many other things. What do I get for my effort? This week it was a parent that threatened me with a restraining order because I bother them about how “Billy” needs to come to school and get help with his inability to write.
Our kids are home-schooled, always have been.
Both hubby & I had some BAD teachers. No way were we taking the chance of some psyco screwing them up, we can do that just fine on our own, thank you!
No slam on teachers, I believe most truely want to be there, they are just bound by the “rules & regulations” to be very effective.
Had a 9th grade history teacher, Mr Trotter, (tehe) he was awsome. One of a small few that wanted kids to ask why. And be willing to argue your p.o.v.
Worst; just to many to name.
I’m an elementary teacher in VA. No phone cells on field trips? Here may be the reason….
A former student made arrangements to meet some guy that she had met on the Internet. When? On the field trip to D.C.
On the other hand…parents are a real pain in the tush. One grade level from the middle school when to the Baltimore Aquarium for a day of fun, food and fish. Everyone had a good time except one group who had a much better time than everyone else. Why? Their chaperone took them to Hooters for the day.
I made the same trip in 1970. We got to D.C only to find there was a huge peace rally that weekend, and hippies, flower children and protestors everywhere. It was a lot like the D.C. scenes in “Forrest Gump. Several of the best tourist sights were closed for security reasons, so I had to wait another ten years to see the Smithsonian and get in the Washington Monument.
Best memory…everywhere we went the hippies were reaching wine botas to us, offering us some wine. Darned chaperones nailed them every time.
The best teacher I can recall was Mr. Beacco, who taught History (or did they call it Social Studies?) my sophomore year of high school in the early 1970s. He wasn’t much of a joker, but had a way of making you think. Sounds boring, but I got a lot out of that class. Senior year in the same HS, Mr. Van Lund made his math class goofy and corny in a good way – “on the other hand… you have a thumb!”
There was also the guy in college who taught Mechanics II; unfortunately I can’t recall his name. But anybody who can explain tensors to my math-challenged ass must have *some* kind of teaching ability.
As for worst, there were plenty. The only one who springs to mind right away was my HS French teacher – she had a tenuous grasp of the subject matter, poor control of the classroom and that nervous-breakdown-waiting-to-happen quality. I was hoping to remember her name while typing, but no dice.
@CBS – On your list of easiest-to-hardest degrees, where do you think “Management” would fall? Or “Engineering”? Just wondering, as a former CBS myself :^)
Best Teacher: I had lots of good ones, but one that stood out was Mrs Forrester, my 3rd grade teacher at Tinker Elementary School in OK City, OK. I just recall her being pretty and nice and she didn’t get upset one day when she had to stand on my desk to get something hanging from the ceiling, and she busted me looking up her dress.
My worst teacher was in High School (Brandon High in FL if you must know). I don’t even remember her name, but she reminds me of Nancy a bit. She was one of these communications teachers that wanted everybody to learn to understand one another and be peaceful and such. She was Dr. Phil before there was a Dr. Phil, but she was a lot prettier than him. Anyway, I just remember rolling my eyes every time she wanted the class to do some goofy exercise like holding hands – guys with other guys. Hey, if I wanna hold other guys hands, I’ll join the wrestling team.
Anyway, the woman was full of herself and I suspect if we had cable TV back in those days, she would have been on one of those Infomercials at 2 am selling Leo Buscalia tapes.
All my teachers took sedatives.
I have no complaints.
Di’int read any of the comments thus far, and so will say a quick sorry if someone else has said this before….
“I was a teacher.”
‘nuf said re: the whole ‘kooks’ thing?
lea…..
wow.
@ Brynhildr – I laugh everytime I think of how closed minded she was to have even said that and she said it with a straight face. Your watching my favorite movie in the world next to Hogan’s Heros series.
@ Jason – If I hadn’t worked for the US Postal Service and DMV (actually DOT), I would have disagreed with you. Definitely some crazy folks there. No I think WalMart tilts the weird folks working meter.
@ CBS — I agree that many, many problems stem from eff’d -up parents who take little interest in helping their children. Makes even the best teachers ineffective, and that in turn gives parents an easy scapegoat. I feel old to say it, but things are truly different from when I was a kid. My mother is a foreigner who barely finished school herself, yet I made it to college and to grad school. Mom wasn’t much help with homework, but the one thing she did do for me academically was force me to speak (proper) English so that I would assimilate and succeed in school. English didn’t come easy for her, and she was a single mom to boot. There were, however, no excuses. I used to be an ESL teacher and it irked me to no end to see how detrimental parents’ actions (or rather, inaction) could be to their offspring. I always say that just because you can have children, it doesn’t mean you should.
My brother had a teacher in the same high school that I went to later on, but was already gone by the time I got there, who stood out for occasionally brushing her teeth between periods at the water fountain in the hallway, watered her fake flowers in her room, and told her class that she was asked by Pres. Kennedy for her consultation during the October missile crisis.
this was on local news last night…….
http://www.wtvq.com/news/4699-teacher-accused-of-making-threats.html
Kook!……Nuff said……
@CBS – you have my sympathies. I quit teaching not because I don’t like to teach, but because I couldn’t take the parents/kids’ attitude/administration’s heavy handedness.
Maybe because I’m kooky? Who knows. 😉
I think teaching can turn an ordinary person into a kook. Imagine dealing with 7 graders all day, every day…
My girlfriend does that from time to time, and she’s always pissed at the end of those days. luckily for me, she’s studying for a different career.
The best teacher I had is a three-way tie:
1. Mr. Beach, my senior English teacher. A gay feller who taught me how to write with style.
2. Ms. Redmon, my typing teacher. Best class ever. The only practical class I had in 12 years of public education.
3. Mrs. Cole, my Latin teacher. I learned more about the English language from her than I did in all of my other English classes (except for Mr. Beach’s class).
The worst, by far:
Mr. Can’t Zip Up My Fly, my geometry teacher. Monotone. “Okay. Understand? Are you following me?” I can’t remember the dude’s name. I really hope he likes the taste of Hitler’s semen, because that’s what I wished for him to have for all eternity in hell. Rinse, repeat. Bon appetit!