Not The Substitute Physics Teacher You Want Teaching Your Students

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This guy is described as a "recurrent substitute teacher", so I bet he doesn't know any physics, or at least not enough to teach it. He's probably part of a pool of substitutes that the school calls on when one of the regular teachers gets sick, and each class he does might be in a different subject. His job is basically to keep the kids occupied until the next class, so they're not wandering the halls getting into trouble.
 
He reminds me quite a lot of a substitute I would frequently get in high school. He, too, had weird theories, like humans descended from lizards (hey, at least he believed in evolution, haha). He would sometimes have very, very bloodshot eyes...not that that means anything :biggrin:.
 
Teachers are not the problem. Standardized testing and the loss of teacher autonomy are the problem.
At least that is what I always hear. Hopefully he loses his autonomy even if it is just as a sub.
 
Somehow, the image of Mr. Garrison from South Park kept popping into my mind.

EDIT: He's also a Tool fan? Damn. But I believe it. Tool's philosophies are way out there in the fringe, with a heavy Jungian bent. I enjoy their music, their videos and their dedication to weirdness. But who would be credulous enough to actually buy that stuff?
 
I thought this was going to be about a religious nut, but sadly they don't get anywhere near the criticism they deserve.

Good on the student for exposing him, but I had plenty of idiot teachers in high school.
 
ZapperZ said:
Where do they find these people and why are they being set free on our kids?

http://news.yahoo.com/substitute-te...zarre-conspiracy-theories-high-135248463.html

We ban crackpot like this in this forum.

Zz.

Breaking your question into its relevant parts:

1) Where do they find substitute physics teachers? Answer: they probably don't.

2) Who do they find instead of a physics teacher? Answer: someone willing to be on-call 5 days a week without knowing what subject they're going to be teaching from one day to the next.

When I was in high school, once in a while, the substitute would actually try to talk a bit about the lesson planned for that day and sometimes they actually knew what they were talking about. That requires a teacher that plans for the possibility of being absent, plus enough luck to get a substitute that knows the subject they're filling in for that day.

Most of the time a substitute teacher meant a film (always a popular option for both the substitute and the students), reading, or doing homework.

Oh, how I miss the days of real film projectors where the sprockets never quite grabbed the holes in the film quite right, creating that great audio affect for the narrator. It would have been so cool to be able to talk like that in real life.

They should have made a special Academy Award category for best school film narrator.
 
BobG said:
When I was in high school, once in a while, the substitute would actually try to talk a bit about the lesson planned for that day and sometimes they actually knew what they were talking about.

From my experience, if they know what they're talking about, they know what they're talking about very well. In a high school calulus course, we had a sub teacher that taught us topology after the lesson for fun. In another math course, the sub teacher probably knew the material better than the teacher themself. We were trying to do proofs. He would simply look at the problem and hint us at what identities to use without even trying to prove it on paper.

I wonder where they got those people. They were all old. Possibly retired teachers?

Slightly relevant: I had a friend take a night course of high school Calculus because the day course was too hard. The teacher was teaching crap like the horizontal asymptotes of a function is the same thing as the slope. He failed and dropped out of college because of that.