Context: European IB Private High School in Istanbul, where I grew up.
In high school I had this maths teacher, he was Austrian, and the maths class was in German. He gave really good tips about how to approach the problems, how not to rush the calculation steps to avoid simple mistakes. He had an excellent sense of humor. We always had a good time in his classes.
Then one day I see him walking on a busy street, I say hello, he turns around and answers: "Ich red' mit Kanaken nur wenn Ich dafuer bezahlt bin, geh weg!"
This translates to "I only talk to Kanaken if I'm paid for it, go away"
Kanake (Kanaken in plural) is the word Germans and Austrian use for Turkish people who live in Germany. It is about as friendly as "nigger".
This was my first encounter with real open racism.
I lived in Germany for 3 years and my girlfriend is German. I'm Hawaiian and a word for a person who is native to Hawaii is Kanaka. My girlfriend told me what that word sounds like and means in German. I was like...well shit. OH WELL.
But that is pretty messed up with that teacher. Is German pretty common in Turkey? I know of course a lot of Turkish live in Germany.
The worst teacher I had was at university, an older fellow from Philadelphia with a nasally voice and a complete inability to produce a coherent sentence. Every sentence from him started with a drawn-out vowel as he struggled to compose his thoughts into words, but then he'd get distracted by a tangent and go off on that. I spent two weeks in his class and never once managed to figure out how his statements connected to each other. I dropped the class pretty quickly.
In the last two years of high school, I had a terrible math teacher. She would not teach, or barely, telling us to read the book instead. Then, when someone had a question because, obviously, how are you supposed to learn by yourself in high school, she would ask one of her favorite students to help out the one who had the question. Even the other teachers said she was terrible.
Were you in my math class? Now seriously, I came here to write the exact same story, except I only had this teacher for only year (thankfully). My next teacher wouldn't believe us until he saw our first test results but he wouldn't speak ill of his coworker. He was so amazing we ended up learning everything in that single year, and I went from about to fail to an almost perfect score.
Haha! I don't know, but I hope so, it would mean there was only one such terrible teacher known. ;-) Mine's name was Fernande. It happened in French Canada.
Third grade teacher tried to force me to be right handed by keeping me inside during recess and drawing big circles on the chalk board the entire time.
I told my mother,she came to the school and took care of the problem. I hated her as much as she hated me.
Next year,my brother (also a lefty) got her and I know she hated it cause she knew my mother would have done the same thing if she messed with him. She didn't.
Still a lefty.
The worst teacher I ever had was a football coach who was too dumb to teach. He had absolutely no idea what any of his history curriculum meant, so most of our learning was done in the computer lab via Wikipedia and long-answer worksheets he barely graded. At the beginning of every unit, we'd have to color in a map for an entire class period and turn it in. As long as the water was blue, you got 100%. It was a complete waste of time and even lazy high school me couldn't take it.
Nicest guy ever. I go up and talk to him every time I'm around the old high school.
We had to buy a book for class, it was sold out at the school's book store and I couldn't find it anywhere else. I was punished and had to stand on a desk at the back of the class till I could get one.
Worst teacher I ever had was an english teacher (living in Germany, for reference). I had to live through seventh to ninth grade with the hellish woman. She always had her eye on me, I don't even know how or why she singled me out. Others could talk and laugh and dick around but the moment I did something other than just sit around and work she would be on my ass. Others would just get verbal warnings, I had to copy whole pages from the english book in handwriting as a punishment. When handing in homework and other assignments I'd always get the harshest grading, losing points for errors others would get away with. I was bullied by the other kids in my class and she would always argue that I probably did something to provoke them. It was never the others, always me. Talking to my parents and other teachers did nothing, who knows what lies she told them about me. Before her I always got grades A and B in english, during her reign I dropped to a D. When she was gone I bounced back to straight A. What kind of sick and twisted individual goes into teaching to torture little children like that? Fucking psychopath.
My high school Latin teacher was going senile too. But we just took advantage of it until she retired my Junior year. When the new teacher came in, she realized half of us didn't know enough to be in Latin 3 and told us that if we planned on taking Latin 4, we should actually try to learn for the rest of the year. I miss Latin Bingo.
My grade 10 math teacher, he would grade papers in class and then publicly shame those who didn't do well on the tests. I still shiver when I think about his classes.
My fourth grade teacher, she was the personification of a bitch on wheels. We had to learn cursive in second grade, and I sucked at it, and due to her failing eye sight she had issues grading my papers. I asked if I could just switch back to print(which was more legible and easy to write) but shes wouldn't hear of it. While this may seem like more my fault that hers due to her handicap, what puts her over the edge was when she would take my assignments and show them off the the class as an example of how not to write your cursive as a way to shame me publicly, having my mother come in every time she picked me up just to let her know how badly I had been doing on my assignments due to legibility and overall just being an absolute 2868. She killed any pride I had in my schoolwork and she made sure to go next English teacher(5th grade we began moving around like middle and high school students do) just to warn her about my handwriting and managed to poison my fifth grade year with that crap as well. What a punch in the face it was when in 6th grade we were told cursive was no longer required, and they wanted typed pages. I actually started using cursive in college again because it was easier to take notes with and still use it to this day. I maintain I owe that bitch nothing though.
I had a high school algebra teacher who didn't speak English, and would simply give credit to any paper that got handed in. I didn't learn algebra at all, but then went on to algebra II thinking I knew it. Flunk time.
Had a Geology teacher at a community college that was incredibly sexist. I'm a guy and I typically don't notice this kind of stuff, but it was overt and very inappropriate. He would stare at the girls wearing lower cut shirts (while lecturing), and treat them much nicer than the guys (I don't think he remembered a single male student's name, but he knew every single female student's name...).
Worse than that, he put sexist jokes in the exams! One I remember specifically: What is the law of superposition? One of the (multiple choice) answers included was "When the man is on top of a woman"! WTF. Totally inappropriate.
3rd Grade Teacher just didn't want to deal with kids, I was fairly over-active at the time and the teacher suggested my parents put me on Ritalin for my ADHD, which I didn't/don't have, I was just a kid, well...needless to say I was turned into a zombie for a week till my parents decided it wasn't right. She was an older teacher and honestly couldn't control her class and she wanted a class full of zombies, I wasn't the only one she did this to. I went back a few years back during High School to see 2 of my other teachers and she was still there teaching, probably still pushing zombies, no telling how many kids she poisoned.
Mr H, head of year and my science teacher. Decided to 'teach us' about diabetes by injecting himself with insulin in front of the whole class. Used to make us run around the playground four times if you yawned in his class and made you wear your blazer in the red hot lab all the way through summer. Arsehole. Found out in later years he was a massive stoner with a whisky problem.
The worst teacher I ever had was at university. He was a physics professor that made it abundantly clear that he didn't want to be there and would rather be in his lab doing research. The lectures he spent mumbling into the podium. Then days before the final he announced that no one in the class would be getting above a 3.0. The class was out of sequence from the typical physics course offerings, so because we were out of sync with the typical physics major track we were obviously bad students and should be graded accordingly. A lot of complaints were made to the department that day, let me tell you.
A computer science lecturer from last year. They are a doctor according to their name, but they couldn't even explain jquery in a useful way. I think they were a perfect example of how difficult it can be for someone who is so deep in to a subject to discuss basic matters when they have gone so far beyond such things. In fact my second and third worst teachers were also teaching CS modules last year. It was a fucking awful year.
My 10th grade Algebra 1 teacher was probably the worst teacher I ever had. She probably meant well when she spouted off on a train of stories about her life and her different careers before becoming a math teacher, instead of teaching us 15 year olds the math skills we needed for those end of school year finals. Most of us weren't very motivated to learn the math ourselves, so that's why most of us did so badly with our grades.
He would talk extremely quietly in a medium sized lecture hall, sitting in the back was not an option if you wanted to hear him. He also had an extremely thick accent which made it incredibly difficult to understand him, though that wasn't much of a problem since his lectures were pretty much him just reading word for word from his Powerpoint slides.
Join the Discussion
Context: European IB Private High School in Istanbul, where I grew up.
In high school I had this maths teacher, he was Austrian, and the maths class was in German. He gave really good tips about how to approach the problems, how not to rush the calculation steps to avoid simple mistakes. He had an excellent sense of humor. We always had a good time in his classes.
Then one day I see him walking on a busy street, I say hello, he turns around and answers: "Ich red' mit Kanaken nur wenn Ich dafuer bezahlt bin, geh weg!"
This translates to "I only talk to Kanaken if I'm paid for it, go away"
Kanake (Kanaken in plural) is the word Germans and Austrian use for Turkish people who live in Germany. It is about as friendly as "nigger".
This was my first encounter with real open racism.
I lived in Germany for 3 years and my girlfriend is German. I'm Hawaiian and a word for a person who is native to Hawaii is Kanaka. My girlfriend told me what that word sounds like and means in German. I was like...well shit. OH WELL.
But that is pretty messed up with that teacher. Is German pretty common in Turkey? I know of course a lot of Turkish live in Germany.
Most popular foreign language in Turkey is English, followed by French.
But a lot of people have friends and relatives who live in Germany, so their word for us is widely known in Turkey.
The worst teacher I had was at university, an older fellow from Philadelphia with a nasally voice and a complete inability to produce a coherent sentence. Every sentence from him started with a drawn-out vowel as he struggled to compose his thoughts into words, but then he'd get distracted by a tangent and go off on that. I spent two weeks in his class and never once managed to figure out how his statements connected to each other. I dropped the class pretty quickly.
In the last two years of high school, I had a terrible math teacher. She would not teach, or barely, telling us to read the book instead. Then, when someone had a question because, obviously, how are you supposed to learn by yourself in high school, she would ask one of her favorite students to help out the one who had the question. Even the other teachers said she was terrible.
Were you in my math class? Now seriously, I came here to write the exact same story, except I only had this teacher for only year (thankfully). My next teacher wouldn't believe us until he saw our first test results but he wouldn't speak ill of his coworker. He was so amazing we ended up learning everything in that single year, and I went from about to fail to an almost perfect score.
Haha! I don't know, but I hope so, it would mean there was only one such terrible teacher known. ;-) Mine's name was Fernande. It happened in French Canada.
Third grade teacher tried to force me to be right handed by keeping me inside during recess and drawing big circles on the chalk board the entire time. I told my mother,she came to the school and took care of the problem. I hated her as much as she hated me. Next year,my brother (also a lefty) got her and I know she hated it cause she knew my mother would have done the same thing if she messed with him. She didn't. Still a lefty.
The worst teacher I ever had was a football coach who was too dumb to teach. He had absolutely no idea what any of his history curriculum meant, so most of our learning was done in the computer lab via Wikipedia and long-answer worksheets he barely graded. At the beginning of every unit, we'd have to color in a map for an entire class period and turn it in. As long as the water was blue, you got 100%. It was a complete waste of time and even lazy high school me couldn't take it.
Nicest guy ever. I go up and talk to him every time I'm around the old high school.
We had to buy a book for class, it was sold out at the school's book store and I couldn't find it anywhere else. I was punished and had to stand on a desk at the back of the class till I could get one.
Worst teacher I ever had was an english teacher (living in Germany, for reference). I had to live through seventh to ninth grade with the hellish woman. She always had her eye on me, I don't even know how or why she singled me out. Others could talk and laugh and dick around but the moment I did something other than just sit around and work she would be on my ass. Others would just get verbal warnings, I had to copy whole pages from the english book in handwriting as a punishment. When handing in homework and other assignments I'd always get the harshest grading, losing points for errors others would get away with. I was bullied by the other kids in my class and she would always argue that I probably did something to provoke them. It was never the others, always me. Talking to my parents and other teachers did nothing, who knows what lies she told them about me. Before her I always got grades A and B in english, during her reign I dropped to a D. When she was gone I bounced back to straight A. What kind of sick and twisted individual goes into teaching to torture little children like that? Fucking psychopath.
[This comment was removed]
My grade 10 math teacher, he would grade papers in class and then publicly shame those who didn't do well on the tests. I still shiver when I think about his classes.
My fourth grade teacher, she was the personification of a bitch on wheels. We had to learn cursive in second grade, and I sucked at it, and due to her failing eye sight she had issues grading my papers. I asked if I could just switch back to print(which was more legible and easy to write) but shes wouldn't hear of it. While this may seem like more my fault that hers due to her handicap, what puts her over the edge was when she would take my assignments and show them off the the class as an example of how not to write your cursive as a way to shame me publicly, having my mother come in every time she picked me up just to let her know how badly I had been doing on my assignments due to legibility and overall just being an absolute 2868. She killed any pride I had in my schoolwork and she made sure to go next English teacher(5th grade we began moving around like middle and high school students do) just to warn her about my handwriting and managed to poison my fifth grade year with that crap as well. What a punch in the face it was when in 6th grade we were told cursive was no longer required, and they wanted typed pages. I actually started using cursive in college again because it was easier to take notes with and still use it to this day. I maintain I owe that bitch nothing though.
Singling out pupils is such a shitty thing to do. Shame and fear are no healthy motivations for anyone.
I had a high school algebra teacher who didn't speak English, and would simply give credit to any paper that got handed in. I didn't learn algebra at all, but then went on to algebra II thinking I knew it. Flunk time.
Had a Geology teacher at a community college that was incredibly sexist. I'm a guy and I typically don't notice this kind of stuff, but it was overt and very inappropriate. He would stare at the girls wearing lower cut shirts (while lecturing), and treat them much nicer than the guys (I don't think he remembered a single male student's name, but he knew every single female student's name...).
Worse than that, he put sexist jokes in the exams! One I remember specifically: What is the law of superposition? One of the (multiple choice) answers included was "When the man is on top of a woman"! WTF. Totally inappropriate.
3rd Grade Teacher just didn't want to deal with kids, I was fairly over-active at the time and the teacher suggested my parents put me on Ritalin for my ADHD, which I didn't/don't have, I was just a kid, well...needless to say I was turned into a zombie for a week till my parents decided it wasn't right. She was an older teacher and honestly couldn't control her class and she wanted a class full of zombies, I wasn't the only one she did this to. I went back a few years back during High School to see 2 of my other teachers and she was still there teaching, probably still pushing zombies, no telling how many kids she poisoned.
Mr H, head of year and my science teacher. Decided to 'teach us' about diabetes by injecting himself with insulin in front of the whole class. Used to make us run around the playground four times if you yawned in his class and made you wear your blazer in the red hot lab all the way through summer. Arsehole. Found out in later years he was a massive stoner with a whisky problem.
The worst teacher I ever had was at university. He was a physics professor that made it abundantly clear that he didn't want to be there and would rather be in his lab doing research. The lectures he spent mumbling into the podium. Then days before the final he announced that no one in the class would be getting above a 3.0. The class was out of sequence from the typical physics course offerings, so because we were out of sync with the typical physics major track we were obviously bad students and should be graded accordingly. A lot of complaints were made to the department that day, let me tell you.
A computer science lecturer from last year. They are a doctor according to their name, but they couldn't even explain jquery in a useful way. I think they were a perfect example of how difficult it can be for someone who is so deep in to a subject to discuss basic matters when they have gone so far beyond such things. In fact my second and third worst teachers were also teaching CS modules last year. It was a fucking awful year.
My 10th grade Algebra 1 teacher was probably the worst teacher I ever had. She probably meant well when she spouted off on a train of stories about her life and her different careers before becoming a math teacher, instead of teaching us 15 year olds the math skills we needed for those end of school year finals. Most of us weren't very motivated to learn the math ourselves, so that's why most of us did so badly with our grades.
My history teacher my sophomore/junior year of high school. He was a conspiratard and shit up his lessons with his theories.
~300 level Information Security class.
He would talk extremely quietly in a medium sized lecture hall, sitting in the back was not an option if you wanted to hear him. He also had an extremely thick accent which made it incredibly difficult to understand him, though that wasn't much of a problem since his lectures were pretty much him just reading word for word from his Powerpoint slides.