Most unprofessional math teacher you'd ever had?

[Jurrasic]

And what were they like?

 

[turbo]

Asst. Prof who "taught" an 8am class in accelerated calculus for engineering students. He mumbled and stumbled through each class and made numerous mistakes at the chalkboard, and whenever someone pointed out an error, he'd hastily erase the problem and say something like "Just a mistake in the algebra" as if that excused his problem or negated the need to correct it properly so that all the class could see where he screwed up and avoid doing so themselves. So many students were slavishly copying his blackboard exercises... I wonder how many managed to find the source of his mistakes when he did his erasing act? That class was a MUST-ATTEND, and it was a total waste of time. I should have gone to breakfast, then back to my room to study the book for an hour.

BTW, the best way to get on a teacher's "most hated student" list is to ask them to re-do the problem correctly in class. I had already figured that I couldn't stand a whole semester that that guy, and had to drop the course to save my sanity, but he said if I dropped he'd fail me (death for a first-year engineering student), so I told him that I'd go see the dean and describe his execrable "teaching" methods and ask to transfer to another class. He immediately signed the dropped/passing order and handed it to me without another word. What a creep. I think that he thought teaching accelerated CalcI was beneath him, and that could excuse himself of his laziness and lack of precision that way.

 

[wuliheron]

An ex-nun who hated people, but for some reason decided she had to teach them. She literally threw tantrums in front of the class and berated individuals. At times she became so upset she couldn't teach and had to leave the room. I don't know if you'd call that unprofessional or just plain unsuited to the profession.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

My freshman algebra teacher in High School. I don't recall exactly why I couldn't understand algebra that year, but I remember complaining to my older brother about it. He asked me, does he still go to the supply cabinet several times during the class? Yes, it turns out he was drinking. I elected out of algebra II in my junior year because of him. Luckily, my parents reviewed my course selections and forced me to take it. Now I have a masters in math.

 

[GregJ]

My last year in high/secondary school. Our math "teacher" had just bought a new notebook and it was consuming nearly all his attention. Everyday, all he would do is say "work from page ___" and then start "work" on his notebook (while I could see from the reflection in the window that he was really playing either Doom I or Doom II).

This lasted throughout the whole year without fail.

 

[Jurrasic]

Asst. Prof who "taught" an 8am class in accelerated calculus for engineering students. He mumbled and stumbled through each class and made numerous mistakes at the chalkboard, and whenever someone pointed out an error, he'd hastily erase the problem and say something like "Just a mistake in the algebra" as if that excused his problem or negated the need to correct it properly so that all the class could see where he screwed up and avoid doing so themselves. So many students were slavishly copying his blackboard exercises... I wonder how many managed to find the source of his mistakes when he did his erasing act? That class was a MUST-ATTEND, and it was a total waste of time. I should have gone to breakfast, then back to my room to study the book for an hour.

BTW, the best way to get on a teacher's "most hated student" list is to ask them to re-do the problem correctly in class. I had already figured that I couldn't stand a whole semester that that guy, and had to drop the course to save my sanity, but he said if I dropped he'd fail me (death for a first-year engineering student), so I told him that I'd go see the dean and describe his execrable "teaching" methods and ask to transfer to another class. He immediately signed the dropped/passing order and handed it to me without another word. What a creep. I think that he thought teaching accelerated CalcI was beneath him, and that could excuse himself of his laziness and lack of precision that way.

Wow! thanks for sharing, that's unbelievable.

 

[flyingpig]

My high school math teacher, she wore shorts in winter...and often scratches her thigh next to me (I sat in the front), it was really annoying seeing those white stuff that comes off her skin. She also drinks in her class and asks us not to drink.

 

[QuarkCharmer]

Wow turbo, I think I had that guys wife for College Algebra Honors years ago. No joke, nearly 30% of the problems she did contained mistakes and she got mad when someone pointed them out and did the "well, from here it's just a little algebra to solve.." and erased it. She refused to use the smartboard or the white boards! What did she use you ask? She used one of those ELMO overhead cameras on a steno pad. I will never forget her. She had the most disguisting fingernails that I have ever seen, and most of the time you couldn't see her work (probably a good thing really) because her bee-hive hair-do was blocking the cam.

Attendance was mandatory, and it was a complete waste of time. I had a score of 101 in her course and she gave me a 98 on a test. I thought the problem was correct and verified it in the physics forum help section. I brought the test back to her the next day and she said "How do I know you didn't change the solution since yesterday?". Miserable.. I insisted that I was in the right and deserved those two extra points and she finally just told me to remind her the next day to add the points to the grade. The next day I reminded her and she said something like "I can't believe you are going to make a big deal out of two points.." and threw the paper on the table to me.

 

[Jurrasic]

My last year in high/secondary school. Our math "teacher" had just bought a new notebook and it was consuming nearly all his attention. Everyday, all he would do is say "work from page ___" and then start "work" on his notebook (while I could see from the reflection in the window that he was really playing either Doom I or Doom II).

This lasted throughout the whole year without fail.

you equally had unprofessional teachers in different ways it seems , echhh

 

[Jurrasic]

An ex-nun who hated people, but for some reason decided she had to teach them. She literally threw tantrums in front of the class and berated individuals. At times she became so upset she couldn't teach and had to leave the room. I don't know if you'd call that unprofessional or just plain unsuited to the profession.

Ex nun?

 

[Jurrasic]

My high school math teacher, she wore shorts in winter...and often scratches her thigh next to me (I sat in the front), it was really annoying seeing those white stuff that comes off her skin. She also drinks in her class and asks us not to drink.

not fair.

 

[wukunlin]

never had one of those, I was lucky enough to be in the class of better lecturers in uni, and in high school I had the highest math grads out of the year level granted me the privillage of choosing to be in the class of my favourite math teachers

 

[chaoseverlasting]

I had the most chilled out, relaxed informal yet brilliant teacher while I was preparing for engineering entrance exams. That guy changed my life. He made me see math in a whole new light; the impression he's had on me is unbelievable. I owe a lot to that guy.

 

[wuliheron]

Ex nun?

Catholic nun. Some people join monasteries or whatever to escape society, but wherever you go, there you are.

 

[Lacy33]

7th grade math teacher who would slam a piece of 2x4 on his desk at will and scare us all. I hated him..

The most elegant math teacher was a topology professor who allowed me to audit at wonderful university.
My husband (who followed the work) and I thought he was as beautiful as an orchestral conductor. His teaching style is like listening to classical music.

 

[206PiruBlood]

I once had a math teacher whose daily lecture literally consisted of transcribing the textbook's example problems onto the board. He could have at least chose problems for which we didn't already have the solution...

 

[DoggerDan]

7th grade math teacher who would slam a piece of 2x4 on his desk at will and scare us all. I hated him..

Really? Same here! It worked very well in quieting down the class, though, and I think he used the technique just three times towards the beginning of the school year. Didn't need to use it afterwards.

I had a calculus professor who would fill the blackboards with equations. Yes, they were related to what we were studying. However, they were totally unnecessary in learning the material. It was pure fluff, just him showing off.

 

[TylerH]

My high school Algebra I teacher would try to teach until he got tired of people talking over him or noticed that no one was listening, then he would quit, tell us to work in our workbooks, and play on the computer.

Although I he did have an unprofessional teaching style, I really do owe him for all that free time, in which I learned how to program a TI-83, which sparked my now intense interest in programming. I even made an awesome tic-tac-toe program to play with my friends when we were left with nothing to do in class. (It's not like we were actually going to work in the workbooks; he wouldn't make us, and we were freshmen. What do you expect?

I did end up learning all the material, though. He was a good teacher when I would find a problem in my workbook that I didn't know how to solve. I scored in the 94th percentile on the end of course test (which is slightly low for me, compared to other EOCs I've taken), but most of the rest of the class failed...

 

[Chi Meson]

Tell me when the thread becomes "the most unprofessional Spanish Teacher." All my Math teachers were pretty good.

 

[mathal]

Can't remember her name but not only was she incompetent as a teacher but blatently bigoted towards a chinese girl in the class. This was in an era when no one protested openly about such behavior. Neither the teacher nor the student were there the next year.
The 'head' of the math department at our high school who just read from our textbook and assigned questions for homework. That, quite literally, is all he did. Admitedly I was in with the students expected to go into the 'trades', but lame is lame.

The best was Mr.Henry-English. Long before that movie with Robin Williams Mr. Henry was inspiring his students to think outside the box. It was a conservative school, that was his one and only year there.
mathal

 

[Evo]

Had to be my 8th Grade Math Teacher. He'd stare up at the ceiling tiles that were full of holes for 15-20 minutes and not say anything, so we would all start staring at the ceiling. Then he tell us to open our book to a certain page and call on someone to start reading, unfortunately it was a blank page. After accusing all of of conspiring against him, we'd finally get it through to him that he had the wrong book for a different course.

And then he'd go to the chalk board and start saying numbers and then smash his chalk into the board, destroying it. He did this all of the time, and of course kids would laugh, they'd get sent to the priciple, by then, class was over.

Worst teacher ever was my history teacher.

Best teacher ever was English grammar.

 

[mcknia07]

Tell me when the thread becomes "the most unprofessional Spanish Teacher." All my Math teachers were pretty good.

I second that!

 

[phoenix:\\]

I was embarrassed by my math teacher telling every student I got all the problems wrong and then the students began laughing. I was sitting in the back of the class that day as well, so to not look like I was being laughed at, I started to laugh as well even though one could make the argument I was still being laughed at, during that time I needed something to mitigate the obvious emotional scarring that was taking place. Even in spite, I made an effort to get the rest of the problems wrong on assignments, and that persisted throughout the year. While I did well on the tests, I still ended up with a D in the class even though I should have gotten a B because the tests were weighted more than the assignments.

I dislike that man, and he is still teaching! Unethical bastard. (6th grade at the time)

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

Had to be my 8th Grade Math Teacher. He'd stare up at the ceiling tiles that were full of holes for 15-20 minutes and not say anything, so we would all start staring at the ceiling. Then he tell us to open our book to a certain page and call on someone to start reading, unfortunately it was a blank page. After accusing all of of conspiring against him, we'd finally get it through to him that he had the wrong book for a different course.

And then he'd go to the chalk board and start saying numbers and then smash his chalk into the board, destroying it. He did this all of the time, and of course kids would laugh, they'd get sent to the priciple, by then, class was over.

Worst teacher ever was my history teacher.

Best teacher ever was English grammar.

Haha good story.
I "love" those crazy teachers.

My worst was some guy in high school that instead of teaching math spent all the time talking about why capitalism was bad and why he was a member of the workers party.
To this day I can't stand leftists.

 

[mege]

Tell me when the thread becomes "the most unprofessional Spanish Teacher." All my Math teachers were pretty good.

Same! I consider myself lucky that I've always had very good math teachers (or at least ones that honestly tried).

My first semester of college I had the same Calc II Prof that my father had ~20 years prior (he was on a 'wind down' class schedule, and was 1 semester from total retirement when I had him). Not a particularly good or bad instructor, but memorable for that.

 

[BobG]

7th grade math teacher who would slam a piece of 2x4 on his desk at will and scare us all. I hated him..

I had a math teacher that did that, but with the classroom yardsticks. Eventually, he would break it doing that. Then he'd toss it in a closet in the corner of the room with the rest of his broken yardsticks.

He was kind of unprofessional, or at least had a lot of personality. Supposedly, he'd invested in Xerox or something, because he always dressed nicer than the other teachers and drove a Cadillac to school - and he really just didn't care what the school staff said to him.

But, he was also very good - which was kind of rare. Every single math teacher I had had something wrong with them. One was actually good, but he also had a hearing problem and wore a hearing aid. When the class was becoming too unbearable for majority of the class, they'd start asking him questions in lower and lower voices until they could get him to adjust his hearing aid. Another was okay, but kind of like Mr Rogers. One was actually really smart, but seemed to be a fan of Pierre LaPlace - he'd jump past the 7 'easy' steps and wonder why the class didn't see how it was obvious how he got from one step to the next. One was surprisingly good - she had a reputation for being a real witch, but ours was a little more advanced math class than the others and we actually had a blast in that class.

 

[BobG]

One of the stranger duos were my English teacher and my Physics teacher. They were married to each other and you wondered how in the world that happened. They were probably both in their 50's, but he'd aged a lot better than her. She was a heavy smoker and looked like she was over 60, while he looked like he might be in his late 40's at most. She was always immaculate in her appearance and bearing and he was a slob - I wondered if they fought a lot and he wound up spending a lot of nights sleeping in his car, in the suit he wore to class; especially on the days he forgot to shave. Her classes were always calm and controlled with the students treating her with the respect she deserved and she treating the students with respect that adult students, even if young almost adults, deserved. He treated his students like crap and I hated him!

Part of that hate was just because we got off on the wrong foot. After our first test, he went on a long rant, accusing me and two other students that sat at my table of cheating. He didn't actually name us, but he may as well have. Everyone knew who he was talking about. I don't know who was bothered more - us or the senior that also sat at our table. The senior was obviously going to have trouble with Physics, and he seemed even more depressed than us. The Physics teacher was accusing everyone sitting at our table of cheating except for him - because it must have been so blatantly obvious that he didn't cheat.

I had mixed emotions about the rant. I was mad that he was accusing us of cheating, but that also meant we must have done unusually well. In fact, I could literally feel my grade rising each additional minute his rant went on. So we were obviously crushed when we finally got our tests back and found out all three of us had gotten D's, while the senior had struggled to a C!

Flash back to the morning of the test: All three of us juniors, the ones accused of cheating, shared the same homeroom. This wasn't as strange a coincidence as one might think, since the Physics teacher assigned tables alphabetically and homerooms were assigned alphabetically. With a first period Physics class, we had the perfect opportunity to help each other prepare for our upcoming test. Two of us were pretty smart, while Dave was probably going to have some trouble - in fact, it was his idea that we should study together. Hopefully, studying with me and the other Bob would help his grade.

The morning of the test, it was naturally Dave that questioned whether we were really doing these vector problems right. Then, incredibly, he explained why he thought we might be doing them wrong. If the x component were equal to the magnitude of the vector times the cosine squared of the angle and the y component were the magnitude times the sine squared of the angle, then the sum of the components would always equal the magnitude. This was incredible! And who would have ever thought that Dave would have figured this out! Suddenly, vectors made more sense than ever before!

And it truly was incredible what Dave did! And when asked how he came up with this idea, he just shrugged and replied, "I just thought I'd try squaring them and see what happened." We'd clearly underestimated Dave! He was a lot more intelligent than we'd ever suspected! More than that, he was a truly creative and innovative thinker!

Of course, none of us really understood the significance of what Dave had done - which was to discover on his own, with no outside help, the Pythagorean Identity Theorem (never mind that someone else had discovered the same thing hundreds of years before - Dave still discovered this on his own with no outside help)! But we did know it had to mean something and it really made sense!

Fast forward to the grading of the test: "What the hell?! What a moron! Why in the world is he squaring the cosines and sines?! On every single vector problem, no less! Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!" "What the hell?! How in the world could two people so stupid be in the same class?! This idiot did the exact same thing!" "No way! There is no way three people so stupid could possibly wind up in the same class! Where in the world are these guys getting this crap?!" "Wow! All three of these guys sit at the same table! These guys were copying off each other! I can't believe it! These POS kids think they can cheat in my Physics class! You three are so dead you'll wish you were dead, you mark my word!"

Every single test was like this! Maybe it wasn't Dave that came up with the incredibly innovative insight, but one of us would! It was like studying together inspired us! And every single one of our incredibly creative insights were wrong for the problem we were supposed to be solving!

And none of these ideas were outright dumb - except when Dave brought up the equal opposite reaction idea when trying to figure out how fast a bowling ball would hit the ground if Alex dropped it from a 10-story building. He brought up a good question. If you have an equal and opposite reaction, why does the bowling ball move at all? And how we got from that to figuring out how long it would take Alex to get sucked into the thumb hole of the bowling ball is beyond me. And when the Earth seemed to take forever to move towards the bowling ball, we simply made the realization that the increased mass of the Earth also increased the force and realized the Earth and Alex were sucked into the bowling ball at the same rate of acceleration. Except Alex should get sucked into one of the finger holes and the Earth into the thumb hole, since the thumb hole is bigger and the Earth is bigger.

I have to admit that was stupid - and the moment we realized we needed to stop studying together! Studying together seemed to actually be lowering our IQs! Heck, even a third grader would realize ... well, actually, if he were in home room with us, he probably would have believed us. And then spent the rest of his life terrified of bowling. Which would have been really sad. After all, this was Akron, OH. Akron, Ohio, the capital of West Virginia, the town of bowling, no less, and of country music, and of the smell of burning rubber as you held your girlfriend close, and the smell of burning rubber as you ate dinner, and the smell of burning rubber as you walked the dog, and the smell of burning rubber as you changed the cat litter... well, you get the picture - that town really stunk! No wonder we all loved bowling alleys!

But we did finally stop studying together and all wound up doing fairly well in the class after that. But we still always hated that teacher for accusing us of cheating in that rant in front of the whole class!

 

[Reshma]

I had one weird mathematics professor in college. We would wonder whether he was teaching us or the blackboard, because his back was always facing the classroom. He would do a lengthy calculus proof without ever looking around once to speak to the class. He was of course always in deep conversation with the blackboard

 

[Dembadon]

I had a high-school math teacher who would often call students "morons, imbeciles, retards/retarded" whenever they asked for clarification. He was also incredibly sexist, making comments such as, "Of course you don't get it; you're a girl." I think he's still teaching.

 

[S_Happens]

My Calculus 1 teacher in my first semester of college was by far the worst teacher I've ever had. Period.

He was a PhD who just went off the deep end and worked his way down to community college. I talked to the dean and he assured me that at one time this man had been quite a good teacher. I don't know how many, but a few years before I took him, his drop rate grew to 100% (and stayed there until he left). I don't know if that was an actual goal of his, but he certainly achieved it.

His lectures were imperceptible. Even though I had slept my way through Calc 1 in high school and was retaking it, I had no idea what he was talking about (and neither did anyone else). One of the students was returning to school to work on his Masters in Math and just taking this class as a refresher. Even he was failing the exams and homework.

Basically this guy was a perfectionist. If your equals sign in an equation was perceptibly unparallel, then you lost credit for the entire problem. If he didn't like the way you wrote a delta or epsilon (or any other variable), he would mark the problem wrong. If you made a sign mistake, you lost credit for the entire problem. There was no such thing as partial credit.

 

[Jurrasic]

Tell me when the thread becomes "the most unprofessional Spanish Teacher." All my Math teachers were pretty good.

Go for it, yes do tell us about that?