The Worst

It’s not often people write about their worst teacher. Who wants to remember him or her? Everyone writes about their favorite teacher. I’ve even written blogs about my favorite teacher (my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Fannett).

But my worst teacher was my seventh grade math teacher. She was so bad I don’t even remember her name. Let me just say, first off, that I was a bad math student. I never understood probabilities or percentages or parabolas. I didn’t like math, but that didn’t mean I didn’t like my math teachers. Many of them were very nice, and though they shook their head in frustration with my continual state of confusion, we got along okay.

But that seventh grade teacher was a different story. She didn’t have anything against me, she had something against all of us. Her first problem was she couldn’t control her class. I’ve been in a lot of English and history classrooms where the teachers had trouble with classroom management. But mostly the math and science teachers didn’t struggle in this area. Math classrooms were always silent as the grave.

But the kids in my 7th grade class talked. A lot. And our teacher would yell at us (I say us because I’m sure I was talking along with everyone else). She would threaten to stuff a rag down our throat, which kind of horrified me. I’d never heard a teacher threaten to do something like that before.

And then one day she threw an overhead marker at a student. Not me, but it definitely got my attention. It shut me up. After all, I didn’t need anyone throwing pens at me.

I don’t remember learning anything in that class. I just remember the day she threw that pen and that I hated that class.

Who was your worst teacher? Why?