30 People Share Their Childhood Teacher Horror Stories

1. This teacher should definitely be in jail.

I’m deaf and wear two hearing aids. As punishment, my grade 3 teacher used to take off my hearing aids and make me sit in the hallway alone.

This happened in 1988. This was just 1 of many sadistic “punishment” techniques she used.

She did this several times, I don’t really remember how long it lasted since it was…26 years ago but my best friend told my mom. I didn’t know it was even wrong. I trusted the authority of teachers.
I can’t even remember what I did but I know it didn’t take much to set her off and she also absolutely loved singling kids out in class and embarrassing them.

She would dump the contents of your desk out in front of the class and make you clean it up while everyone watched if you took too long getting out a book or pencil.

Once we had swimming lessons and afterwards I couldn’t find my underwear but I was so afraid of being late that I just went commando and later tried to whisper to her that I couldn’t find my underwear, she yells out, in front of the entire class “you’re not wearing your underwear!!??”

Her name was Mrs. Baron and in the 5th grade I won a writing contest about the evil Red Baron who got shot down in the skies by Ace, a top dog fighter. I got my revenge through the pen. Oh, and my bulldog of a mother. :)

2. A highly discouraging teacher.

Year 12 English teacher. Had a bit of a grudge against me for reasons unknown, accused me of plagiarizing coursework because it was “too good” to be my work. Ignoring the fact I’d been getting straight A’s up until that point and the coursework itself only got a B.

Oh and on our practice university applications she saw that I wanted to study computer science and wrote something along the lines of “would communicate better with computers than human beings” as part of her reference. Well the joke’s on her because…well, shit.

3. This teacher clearly had it out for her.

Her name was Mrs. Disachio. She was my first grade teacher. Absolutely nothing but awful and rude to me and made me sit by myself everyday, make fun of me and have other kids make fun of me with her for answering a question wrong.

She tried to get my mother to put me on ADHD medication. This was absolutely out-freaking-ragious because I was an extremely docile and well-behaved quiet little girl. She just had it out for me.
So, I had just moved to this school, and started with no friends because she estranged me from everyone. I had no confidence.

My mother stepped in and tried to have me removed from her class. When bitchsachio asked why, my mother responded with: “I think she would do better with someone a little more… Maternal.. than you are.” This made bitchsachio mad.

I couldn’t be removed from her class because it was too late on the year and from that point on she made my life a living hell. I don’t think I had recess after that. I didn’t have any free time after that and on party days, she put me last so I had the last choice of the cake and juices and stuff. I dreaded going to school. I did absolutely nothing to deserve that bitch.

4. In America, we call this abuse.

When I lived in South Africa, we had corporal punishment in school.

I had a math teacher who had it out for me. He’d cane me for offences like ‘bad handwriting’. One time I got 98% on a test, beat everyone in the class, including his favorite(s).

Result? He gave me two licks anyway. Why? So next time i wouldn’t miss the remaining 2%.

5. Sounds like a pretty great teacher to me.

I had a math teacher who literally didn’t teach math at all.

He just wrote the numbers on the board for the problems we had to do in the textbook.

All class long he would just sit at his desk on his office chair and stare at his computer. And every time he had to move around the classroom he would just roll around in his office chair waddling his feet against the ground.

Every time I turned in work he would just stare at the paper for literally 3 seconds, make a huge check mark on it with his pen, and write down 100% in his grade book.

He never checked the answers. I tested it one day. A friend and I wrote “penis” for a few answers on our work, and made it him check our work. Did he notice? Nope. Did we get an ‘A’? Yup.

He had the counselors make me skip Pre-Algebra and go straight into an Algebra I class. Had no clue what I was doing.

6. A pretty creepy teacher.

I had a teacher in freshman English who would give the girls bonus points and extra credit for wearing short skirts to class. He also was guilty of some pretty consistent touchy, caressing, grabby personal space violations with them too. It wasn’t until I was older and he was out of the school that I realized how wrong it was.

7. It’s always nice when a teacher tells you you’re going to end up in prison for no reason.

My 3rd grade teacher hated me, told me on more than one occasion “You are poor white trash, you will just end up in prison, I wish I didn’t have to waste my time on you” and “I am not wasting my time teaching poor white prison trash, figure it out your self.”

I told my mom, the principals, the counselors, no one believed me at all…

8. A teacher that really tests the limits of “teaching.”

My Pre-modern History teacher at Sixth-Form was a bit of a tyrant but also shocking at teaching. At the start of the year he dumped a 4cm thick pack of handouts on everyone’s desk. The instructions every lesson were “continue to read and highlight.” The guy would go mental any time someone spoke, moved or even looked up from the booklet. He threw a dictionary at a guy’s head when he asked for a definition. Thankfully, he was sacked after the incident.

9. The requisite crazy French teacher (we all had one).

My eighth grade French teacher. I’m not even sure she spoke French. She usually just put on a movie, usually in French with English subtitles, sometimes not if she couldn’t figure out how to change the language, and it was almost always Finding Nemo. I learned nothing in her class except that there is a limit to the number of times someone can watch Finding Nemo before going insane.

10. For all intents and purposes, this guy didn’t teach a lick of business.

We had a business teacher who said he was a big fan of ”group learning,” so he would put us in groups and make us correct our own homework and teach each other while he spent the class time gambling online. We all failed business.

11. This technology class teacher sounds like a horror.

I had a teacher in 7th grade technology class, which was essentially a bullshit class made so we would have some basic idea of how basic things like an engine and a battery worked. Anyways, the teacher for that class legitimately didn’t do anything all day, would openly hit on this one kid and one day just cussed out the entire class about how terrible we were and how we should all go fuck ourselves. She was almost immediately let go. On the plus side, we got a really chill long term sub who let us watch movies for the 2 remaining months of school.

Edit: One of my friends came over and reminded me of this gem of a detail. She came back the next day and tried to continue teaching the class despite her termination the day before. They had to call security to get her out of the building.

12. A teacher who punishes for good grades.

I remember getting in shit with a teacher because I got 100% in a test.
Apparently, I embarrassed the other kids.

If only I was that smart now, I wouldn’t be playing on Reddit instead of work.

13. This teacher clearly had it out for him

Grade 8 English teacher. You know how every kid says to their parents “my teacher just hates me” when they get a bad mark? This actually, I swear to this day, was really true. This teacher really just truly hated me, and I have no idea why. I wasn’t a troublemaker, I didn’t talk in class or make smart ass comments, he just didn’t like me for no reason that I’ll ever know.

Anyways, we had these journals that we had to turn in every week. One week I didn’t get mine back and he said I got no marks for my journal because I didn’t turn it in, except…um yes I did. He called me a liar and said I would have to purchase another journal and just turn in next week’s assignment (oh, we couldn’t just use regular journals, we had to have these special stupid ones that he insisted on for some reason, because I tried to hand in the next assignment on paper and he refused to accept it).

For a few weeks I kept asking him to return my journal and he kept telling me that I was a liar and getting 0’s for my journal entries. I was afraid to ask my mom to buy me a new journal because my parents used to be fairly…cheap, and I thought I was going to get in shit for supposedly losing it. So one day when my teacher left the classroom to go to the bathroom, in front of the entire class, I marched over to his bag, rifled through it and FOUND MY GOD DAMNED JOURNAL. I turned it in the next week with a journal entry, and he never said a fucking word about it.

But that wasn’t even the end of it, shortly after that we had an essay assignment. I poured my heart into this and on the day we got our marks on it he came into class and loudly proclaimed in front of everyone “Another F ChaosCat!! I don’t know how you can turn in work like that to me, you are now failing the class”. I was beyond mortified, I literally ran out of the class crying. It still upsets me to this day.

14. This teacher had clearly never taught students of other races.

I had a teacher that seriously thought that since we were a mostly black and brown class it would be like one of those dreadful “White teacher comes in and teaches everyone the value of learning” movies.

It went about as well as you’d expect.

15. Not just a teacher, but a murderer too!

My 4th grade math teacher murdered his mother. So there’s that.

16. A teacher with a thing for literal, physical abuse.

One teacher grabbed one student and was holding him out of the window for 20 seconds and shouting at him. It was on the third floor and we were 7 years old. Later that year he was arrested. He even put someone into the cupboard for solid 2 hours.

Edit: No, this is not from Matilda. We were all crying and telling him he would kill the boy who was in the cupboard.

17. A vehemently feminist English teacher.

She was a 2nd year Modern Lit prof I had. We studied 12 novels, and 10 of them had female protagonists who killed themselves at the end of the book. We had to write two term papers, and she didn’t accept my second one because I wrote them both on the two novels that didn’t involve women committing suicide. I appealed to the department and got an A in the course over her objections. She wanted everyone to “take the course seriously”, and I wasn’t doing that according to her. Fuck you and your weird fetish crazy old professor lady. (At a party, I got into a friendly argument with a girl over who had the worst prof, and it took us 15 minutes to realize we were arguing about the same prof.)

18. Nothing is worse than an insecure teacher.

American history in college. This guy was built like Danny Devito and had the worst Napoleon Complex I’d ever seen. He’s insult the guys that would ask questions during lecture while letting the pretty girls skate buy for 5 minutes of their time after class.

A year after I worked my ass off for a C in his class I was walking home (close to campus) and I passed him trying to start his car. He had a dead battery and I was a block away from my house, with my jeep, with my jumper cables. Even when we made eye contact I just kept walking. It was the most rewarding petty revenge of my life.

19. A teacher who asked basically the impossible of her students.

My first grade teacher. She forced me to write with my right hand even though I’m a lefty. She changed the entire course of my life. I hate her.

20. This teacher liked to insult the mothers of her students.

We had a history teacher that would insult peoples’ mothers a lot. For example, he’d pick on a small, unpopular kid and say shit like: “Barry’s mum is coming into class tomorrow to tell us what it was like during the reign of Henry VIII”.

He’d also watch porn in class sometimes: “Hey lads, look where he’s putting them mints!”

21. Think before you decide to confide in your teacher.

You’re supposed to trust your teachers right? I told my fifth grade teacher my Mom beats the shit out of me all the time for no reason. I had bruises on my back, nail marks where she had dug into my upper arms and a patch of hair that was torn out when she grabbed ahold of me by my hair. The prick called my Mom and told her everything. I got the shit beaten out of me again. So yeah, worst teacher ever.

22. An utterly useless French teacher.

We had a French teacher that would always tell us in the beginning of class that she has a sore throat so we all need to be quiet cause she cant speak loud. She also yelled at students that forgot their textbooks and in the next sentence asked another student to borrow a textbook because she forgot hers. The only good thing was that we regularly had afternoons free because she didn’t feel like teaching on afternoons. And the worst thing was she was my teacher for four years straight.

23. This teacher is historically awful.

College professor, Abnormal Psychology. Not only was he overtly homophobic, but his English was extremely hard to understand, he literally taught straight out of the textbook (“let’s look at the third paragraph on page 35”), his tests had been Xeroxed so many times that they were covered with little black spots and you could get the answers from people who already took the class, and he repeated “Is that so?” so many times that I finally started counting them. 168 in a three-hour period.

There was a break halfway through the class, and most of the people would just leave but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

At the end of the semester we received the evaluation forms where you’re supposed to provide feedback on the class. Usually people just go through the motions, but EVERYONE turned it over and started writing furiously on the back, complaining that this guy should not be teaching.

This was in 1998 … guess what? He’s still there!

A recent quote from Rate My Professor: “From 2010: I have never disliked a class this much in my life. Not only is his accent completely incomprehensible, he doesn’t even teach- he just throws out the same anecdotes every session, which usually make no sense anyway, or waxes poetic about Piaget. Would probably rather eat fire ants than take another class with him.”

24. Teachers: LET YOUR STUDENTS GO TO THE BATHROOM.

My first grade teacher. A friend of mine, not a trouble making student by any means, mind you, had asked politely to go to the bathroom several times for two hours until she couldn’t hold it any longer and peed herself. Then instead of calling a janitor, the teacher shamed her by making my friend clean up the puddle herself, on her hands and knees with paper towels.

25. It’s always good to have teachers who believe in you…

I am dyslexic but back in the day there was no dyslexia just stupid, the unfortunate thing was when it came to maths I was pretty good. My primary 5 teacher (I was 9) set us an arithmetic test, which I completed before everyone else, took it to the teachers desk and was then told I must have cheated (I got all the questions correct). So she locked me in a cupboard with a new set of questions guess what? Yup got them all right. My reward? I was belted for cheating. Ah the good old days, funny I don’t like teachers that much.

26. Sometimes it’s best for a teacher to keep her mouth shut.

In junior-high my teacher announced in front of the class “So & so, you are the most un-American person I have ever seen” in response to me arguing that invading Iraq would be a bad idea, back in 2003.

I’m training to become a US Marine Officer.

27. Aaaaannnd another teacher with abusive tendencies.

This was in the 1950’s. I was 8 and recovering from an appendix operation. The class was being punished for some infraction or other by being made to walk up and down a flight of stairs for half an hour. I asked to be excused as I wasn’t completely healed and she said, “Aren’t you mommy’s little baby?” I spent the next week in the hospital because the staples had burst open.

She wasn’t sorry and made me suffer for the next two years that i had her including putting dry mustard in my mouth and taping my hands behind my back.

28. An accusatory teacher.

8th grade science teacher called the police on myself and another student for “stealing” a microscope from the classroom.

Told the police she witnessed us remove it from the class. Thing was we never took it and the reason she couldn’t find it was because another teacher had borrowed it shortly after our class had ended.
Refused to apologize. Was gone within a month.

29. This kindergarten teacher sounds purely evil.

Ms. Griffin, my kindergarten teacher. She was old and mean. Paddled me for rolling a grape on the cafeteria floor. She also got a bunch of new toys early in the year and put them where the class could see them, then told us they were for next year’s class because we were such horrible children. Despite having a bathroom in the classroom, she wouldn’t let us go unless it was a designated bathroom break time. Kept us in from recess multiple times a week. A horrible witch of a kindergarten teacher.

30. It’s best if teachers learn when to stay out of their student’s business.

My second grade teacher told me I was adopted. I was and did not know it up until then.