I rarely think of titles before blogs but I thought it would be interesting to talk about the weirdest teachers I've ever known. I come from a long line of teachers, and I have great respect for them, but sometimes they can be more detrimental to learning than they realize.
My first grade teacher was a petite, trim woman with short dark hair, and she always wore plain, conservative shirtwaist dresses, and simple jewelry. It was 1968 and she looked like 1958. She was very no-nonsense. She was well-groomed. What made her weird, you're thinking?
She had a large mole on her chin, with three inch-long black hairs sticking out of it. When she talked, I couldn't stop staring at that mole as it bobbed up and down, the hairs catching the sunlight and waving gently, like friendly antennae.
Needless to say, every report card that year said something like "Dee needs to pay better attention in class, and really listen."
How could I listen when the bobbing mole was so fascinating?
I had a Biology teacher in high school who was nicknamed The Wizard. He had two leisure suits, one green and the other one blue, and he alternated wearing them. He was very thin, and had a receding hairline and a scraggly beard. He often forgot to wear deoderant, so nobody wanted to get close enough to ask him anything after class.
He HATED teaching Biology. He wanted to teach only physics, and considered 10th grade Biology students to be the most lazy, idiotic, boring humans on earth. We reciprocated by being exactly what he expected us to be. So he hated teaching us and we hated being there.
He would explain biology through gritted teeth, and sharply rebuke anyone who dared utter a sound. Most students simply put their heads down and slept quietly.
I actually like Biology. I find it fascinating. The Wizard managed to make it boring. He made human reproduction sound as scintillating as watching grass grow. Maybe that was on purpose, since he was addressing a bunch of hormonal teens. Most of the sleepers didn't even wake up for the lectures on how babies are made, which tells you how boring it was.
His exams consisted of him coming into the room and writing a sentence on the board, something like: Explain and draw what happens when you eat a bite of bread, from chewing to digestion, to elimination. Drawings should be labeled correctly.
There was no multiple choice, no fill-in-the-blanks. Needless to say, a lot of folks made low grades in his class.
The only time anyone woke up and we had a lively discussion was the day he decided to talk about Evolution, and refute Creationism. Most of the students were from fairly conservative Christian homes, and there was a lot of debate. Perhaps he just did that to ensure that the principal would never again make him teach Biology...
As a college freshman, I got stuck into a basic English class taught by a man who looked exactly like Humpty Dumpty. He was as round as he was short. He always wore a suit and tie. He was bald as an egg. He spoke in a very high-pitched effeminate voice, similar to Truman Capote.
I remember thinking the first day that if I ever wrote a character based on him, nobody would believe me. He was that weird.
I should have been exempt from Freshman English but my AP scores were not high enough. So even though I had been an editor for the school newspaper for three years and had articles published in the Knoxville Journal, I had to endure lectures like "How to Use a Comma."
This teacher had a zero tolerance for anyone missing his 8 a.m. class. When he called roll and someone was missing, he would often have one of us leave class and run over to the dorm to get the skipper out of bed and there in class, asap. Needless to say, it was a small school and the dorms were 5 minutes' walk from the English building.
I never skipped class, but I was able to awaken at 7:30, shower, eat a granola bar, and run across the street and be in my assigned seat by 7:59 every morning.
One day, the professor said since it was a private Christian school, nobody should wear tee shirts advertising liquor. I found a shirt I'd bought in Florida that advertised Big Mother's Liquor Store, and wore it as often as possible.
I didn't really drink but I enjoyed small acts of rebellion.
The next year I had transferred to UGA.
I was talking to a friend not long ago and we both agreed that it would be great if we could go back to college and just take classes that interested us, and be perpetual students. Of course, the internet makes that easier, but you don't get the same experience if you can't smell the chalk dust and sneak coffee into the class...
